Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
He blinked at me. “I... uh... Damn, that’s a good point. Shit, maybe we are doorknobs.”
“You are! And instead of owning up to it and accepting the consequences for being thoughtless idiots, you guys killed my mom to cover it up.”
“Again, we didn’t kill your mom. If we wanted her death, why wouldn’t we have smothered her with a pillow or slipped something in her morning tea? Here’s a newsflash, baby girl, people don’t ask that many questions when an old lady dies of seemingly natural causes. They just assume it was natural,” he said. “Truth is we could’ve gotten her out of the way whenever we wanted, but that’s not what we wanted.”
“We, we, we,” I hissed. “So you admit you were in this together.”
“I admit that it was Rhodes’s job to find the password and delete the email, and my job to find the backup evidence on the flash drive,” he said. “Micah was supposed to stay downstairs and make sure you didn’t feel the urge to check on your mom sooner, but then he saw one of the officers sneaking Mrs. Finley into the downstairs pantry.” He beamed at me. “Obviously, she wasn’t there to steal jars of our imported marmalade. Micah figured her presence might come in handy, so he popped upstairs at one point just so people would believe it when he said he saw Mrs. Finley upstairs.
“But no part of the plan involved killing Omma, because, as I said, she was already dead when I went in there.”
My mind spun. Was any of that true? Was he lying to me again? Was he trying to get me to let my guard down, so he could do whatever he followed me here in the middle of the night to do?
“Why?” I rasped. “If you’re telling me the truth, explain why? Why was it so important for you to get this drive, that you stepped over my mother’s body to do it? You truly did something so cold and inhumane just to save yourself from some charges over the creation of a business you sold over ten years ago! This”—I shook the drive—“matters to you so much!?”
Hard eyes met mine. “It matters more than anything. It’s all that matters,” he growled. “You don’t know this. I mean, you literally don’t know this since you haven’t actually been here for the last seven years, but I have nothing—fucking nothing—except for Lily.”
I reeled back. Lily?
“And your mother wanted to take her from me too.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “How could my mother possibly take Lily from you?”
Alex scoffed. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he leaned back against the doorframe—raking me up and down like he pitied me.
Or envied me.
“You have no idea,” he repeated. “Your sister has always seen us as trophies—billionaire trophies—except the billionaire part didn’t work out so well for her. We all wanted to break up with her after that video of her throwing coffee on the waitress went viral, but Rhodes didn’t even get the sentence out before she blurted that she was pregnant.”
I sunk down to the floor. I could already tell I wouldn’t like this story.
“We couldn’t leave our baby alone with that woman,” Alex stated, blunt as a truck, “so we agreed to the wedding and commitment ceremonies. All done very quickly, because Sue claimed she didn’t want a big belly in the wedding photos.
“But while we were on our honeymoon, we caught her drinking.” His fists balled even then. “We confronted her, and she confessed that she wasn’t pregnant. She never was. She only said that because she was afraid to lose us and what we had was too special to end. But because we were still fucking pissed, she turned it around on us and said we were the jerks who only wanted to marry her for the baby. We were assholes. We lied about loving her. We only wanted to use her for her uterus. On and fucking on she went—blaming it all on us.
“She even went so far as to say it didn’t matter that she lied. If we wanted to break up with her, we should’ve just done it. It wasn’t like there was a real shotgun forcing us down the aisle. We made our own choices.” He scoffed. “Can you believe we actually walked away thinking we were the jerks?”
“Yes.” I didn’t know I spoke until his face changed, flickering with surprise. “Sue... Sue was...” I swallowed hard. “Sue was always very good at making a person feel worthless for her mistakes.”
“Was?”
I realized too late what I said... but I wasn’t going to lie—not anymore. “Was,” I said, voice flat. “She’s dead.”
Alex nodded slow. “How?”
“In the car accident.” I couldn’t believe we were doing this—talking normally like I wasn’t holding the proof and the evidence of my mother’s murderer in my hands. “She tracked me down to bring me home to see Omma before it was too late. I hit a deer, crashed the car, and she died. I came here thinking I could just hide out with my mother, send her off peacefully, and then start over in a new life.