A new unease coils low in my stomach.
“What?” I ask.
Maverick exhales, almost thoughtful. “Bennett,” he says slowly, “knows more than you think.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The air inside the fishing shack hangs heavy with salt, mildew, and everything none of us wants to say out loud. I stare at my brother, trying to reconcile the man standing in front of me with the one I thought I knew. Whitney is alive. Phillip is dead. Chrissy is about to be sacrificed for a crime she didn’t commit. And now there is Bennett, hovering at the edge of all of it like another shadow I never thought to fear.
“What do you mean Bennett knows more?” I ask, my voice unsteady. “What did he do?”
Maverick looks at me with a kind of grim reluctance, like he hates what comes next but hates leaving me in the dark even more. He has never been a man who shies away from ugly truths, but now he seems to be measuring each word before he lets it leave his mouth. Finally he drags a hand over the back of his neck and exhales.
“Bennett called me after the club did the ride-through in Tigertail.”
My heart jolts. “What did he say?”
Maverick glances at Whitney before answering, and the look they exchange is enough to make my stomach knot. “Notmuch,” he says at last. “That’s the problem. He didn’t need to say much.”
I feel the tension in the room tighten another notch. “Maverick, please.”
He closes his eyes briefly, then opens them and pins me with a look so direct it makes my breath catch.
“He told me he was afraid you were going to kill Phillip. Or that Phillip was going to kill you. He said you weren’t sleeping, that you were distraught, that you were waking up from nightmares and spiraling. He said you were one bad moment away from taking matters into your own hands.” Maverick pauses, jaw set. “Then he said if a tragedy happened, the timing would line up perfectly. That it would solve a lot of problems, including the financial mess Phillip had made with the club.”
For a second I can only stare at him.
“He said that?”
Maverick nods once. “That was enough. After that, the thing was basically in motion.”
The floor seems to tilt beneath me. “So that’s it?” My voice comes out thin and breathless. “Bennett just… suggested it, and you decided to kill him?”
Maverick’s expression hardens, though there is pain in it too. “He figured it was better if I did it than if you snapped and did it yourself. Or if Phillip got to you first. It was the cleanest option anybody had.” His gaze doesn’t leave mine. “A case like this only works if it stays simple. One victim. One suspect. One story the police can package and move on from. Clean. Contained. Easy.”
His words settle over me with awful clarity. I have watched enough true crime and read enough murder cases to know he is right. Cases with too many moving parts unravel. Too many motives. Too many accomplices. Too much reasonable doubt.The truth becomes too expensive, too messy, too difficult to prove. And in the middle of that mess, people walk free.
“The perfect crime,” Maverick says quietly, almost to himself. “No one person knows enough to tell the whole story. And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. There are too many hands on it now. Too many motives, all razor-thin and just believable enough. If they pin it on Chrissy, it becomes what investigators like best. A crime of passion. Neat. Familiar. Female. Easy to sell.”
Whitney shifts beside him, her face pale, her eyes rimmed with tears. She has been through hell and come out the other side somehow still standing, but even she looks frayed by the weight of what we are saying.
“So you’re telling me,” I whisper, “that all of this was built around making Chrissy look guilty.”
Maverick does not flinch. “It’s the only version that protects everyone else.”
My stomach turns. “But she’s innocent.”
His face softens for half a beat, but it does not change the answer. “Innocence doesn’t matter here, Mac. What matters is what can be proven, and what keeps the rest of us out of prison.”
Whitney’s hand tightens around his arm, and when she looks at me her face crumples. “I didn’t want this,” she says, her voice breaking. “I never wanted any of this.”
“But you let it happen.” The words scrape on the way out. “You both let it happen.”
Her tears spill then, quick and helpless. “What choice did we have? If this goes to trial, if the real story gets dragged into the light, none of us survive it. Not me. Not Maverick. Not you.”
The room seems to shrink around us. I think of Chrissy’s laugh at brunch, of the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was nervous, of how young she looked kneeling inPhillip’s blood. She never understood the game she walked into. She was never even close to the center of it, only close enough to be useful when the time came.
“I don’t know if I can live with that,” I whisper.
