My ankle rolls, and I almost fall down but manage to right myself. He doesn’t offer me any support, instead his eyes sheen with something dark and twisted.
“You fucking happy now?”
Everything around us ceases to exist. It’s like I’m inside a vacuum, blood rushing in my ears, heart pounding against my ribs, my breath punched from my lungs.
“You’re lying. Tell me what really happened. Slade… please?” I beg.
“What really happened? Jude, I just fucking told you. I killed her!”
“I don’t?—”
“Don’t what? Believe me? Because you don’t want it to be true? Well, it is. It is fucking true!”
His grip on the rail intensifies as though he’s about to rip it out of its bolts.
“I swear on my life, your life, Declan’s life, Nandi’s life, everyone’s goddamn life, okay? I killed her. I killed her with my own bare hands. I saw the life drain from her eyes as she stared at me. As she fuckingclawedat me, fighting to live.”
“No,” I choke.
“Yes. Fucking believe it!” he yells. “I’m not this man who you want me to be. I’m a murderer you fucked to get over your ex. Now accept it.”
I burst into heaving sobs. This isn’t him. He’s lying. He must be.
It can’t be true.
“You’re lying.”
His eyes take on a deadly calm. “I had my hands around her throat, Jude. I saw the light fade from her eyes. Because of me.”
“No.”
“You need to walk away, Jude,” he says in a low voice. “Walk away and don’t fucking look back.”
Bile surges up to my throat and it takes everything in me not to vomit. I tear my eyes away, no longer able to look into his eyes.
Because when I do, there’s nothing there anymore.
No warmth. No tenderness.
Just coldness.
And truth.
“Go on! Fuck off!” he roars.
I stumble backward, hot tears coursing down my cheeks. I turn and race across the boat’s deck and jump clumsily onto the jetty, narrowly avoiding falling through the gap and into the water.
Slade bites out a sharp curse behind me, but his voice hasn’t moved closer. He isn’t following me.
I run all the way out of the marina, tears blurring my vision.
And I don’t look back.
25
SLADE
THREE YEARS EARLIER
