A vein bulges near the kid’s temple. “I swear! My dad was here, but he left! He thinks you’re dead.”
I should be dead. It’s a miracle I’m not. “Your dad is Officer Gunn, I assume?”
He gives me a weak bobble-head of a nod. “Yes.”
“What’s his real name?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Zane Jenson.”
“And who does that make you?”
“Sean.”
“Okay, Sean, last chance. Who else is in on this? Because I know there are more than two of you.”
“There aren’t. I promise. Fuck, man, you have to help me. I’m dying here!”
He is. The blood bubbling through his fingers is a dark crimson that almost looks black in the fading light. The color likely means the bullet hit an internal organ. Maybe his liver.
“Answer my questions, and I might call an ambulance. If there were only two of you, who was driving the van at the quarry?”
“I was. We … we parked it back in the trees before we brought you there. We had to circle back to get it after you drove to the meet-up point. It took me longer to get there than …” He screws his eyes shut with a grimace and then opens them. “Than I thought it would. It’s why we were late to the exchange.”
I let his explanation simmer in my brain. What he’s saying could feasibly make sense. They would have had to change out of their cop uniforms first. And theywerelate. Besides, the kid is seriously wounded, and he’s scared. If he’s lying to me, he’s one hell of a good actor. Still, there’s something bothering me—something that doesn’t add up.
I lean forward and position myself directly over him. “Do you think I’m stupid? You must, because your father has brown eyes. The man who took Avery had blue eyes.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head rapidly. “He does that. He’s really good at changing his appearance. And changing other people’s. All those pictures of her looking hurt … it was all makeup.”
His words settle like stones in the pit of my stomach. All of my worry for Avery, all of my fear about what was happening to her, myabsolute panic over what they weredoingto her—all of it was fornothing.
I realize Sean is still speaking, his lips turning blue. “When he abducted her, he was wearing colored contacts. It was him. I fucking swear it was!” He blinks again. He’s shaking now, going into shock. I tear off my hoodie, crouch next to him, and press the shirt against the wound.
“Here, use this.”
He winces and takes it.
I wipe a fresh ribbon of blood from my forehead. “Why did you try to kill me, Sean?”
His lips quiver. “We—we needed your money.”
“You alreadyhavemy money!”
He blanches. “No, we don’t. Bailey does. My sister, Cora, she’s—she’s sick. We need the money for a procedure … or she’ll die. The account you transferred the funds to belongs to Bailey, and she won’t give it to us. She’s the one who did this to you. All of it. You know her as—”
“Avery,” I finish.
He gives me a weak nod, and my heart plummets. Avery did this. Avery who is Bailey. Bailey who set this in motion the day I met her on the side of the road nearly a year ago. The realization rolls over me like a tide. She studied me. Manipulated me. Used me. Convinced me to pool our money and invest in crypto so she could steal it all.
The staged abduction.
Her pregnancy, which I realize now—Jesus—was as fake as her name.
The mad scavenger hunt designed to take me on a tour of the dark corners of my past. Like the Walmart parking lot, which was a reminder of the insurance scam I ran with my father when I was a kid. He’d station me behind cars as they backed out of spaces and then sue whoever was driving when I was hit.
And the abortion clinic, which was a nod to the day Taylor killed our baby and burned our future together. Even the place where I’m standing now—Taylor’sproperty—is a reminder of the life I had before everything went to shit. Every moment from the last two days was engineered to inflict as much pain on me as possible.
I look at Sean. “You still haven’t answered my question. Why did you shoot me? Did Avery tell you to do that, too?”
