Page 64 of Scarred By Sin

Gwenyth lingered just inside the foyer, tears shimmering on her cheeks as she held her cardigan tightly. Her red-rimmed eyes bore into Brook with a focused intensity that suggested deliberation rather than confusion. She was strategizing, momentarily stalling to plan her next step.

Brook could sense the split-second assessment behind the performance. The rapid inventory of options running through Gwenyth’s mind while her body maintained the façade of a woman too fragile to understand what had just been announced to her. It lasted no more than two or three seconds, but it was enough.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gwenyth whispered. Her voice cracked on the last word, and she brought one hand to her mouth in a gesture that Brook had witnessed her use three times this week. Always the same hand. Always the same angle. And rehearsed to the point of reflex. “I don’t…”

“Your father kept a journal, Gwenyth.” Brook gestured toward the closed notebooks. She kept her voice level. “Not about his research. Not about the women he was treating. About you.”

The flicker was small. A contraction of the muscles around Gwenyth’s eyes, the briefest tightening of the skin at her temples, gone before it would have registered to a casual observer. But Brook wasn’t in that type of situation, and the reaction told her everything she needed to know.

If Gwenyth had known about the private journal, the material would have been destroyed long ago. She’d kept her father’s lab as it was this entire time, just in case she needed proof she didn’t murder those women.

“He documented the change in your behavior in the months before he died. The arguments, the accusations, the way you stood outside the library door at night. He wrote about your jealousy. He wrote about your anger.” Brook paused, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. “He wrote that he was afraid of you, Gwenyth.”

Her chin dipped forward, and though her tears continued to fall, Brook noticed that her breathing hadn’t changed in the least. The rhythm was the same steady cadence it had been since she’d appeared in the doorway.

“I’ve contacted Sheriff Gentry,” Brook shared almost casually. “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“I need my medication.” Gwenyth’s voice had lowered to a whisper again, and she took a half step backward into the foyer. “Please. I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know what you’re saying to me. I need Owen. Can you call Owen?”

“You can drop the act, Gwenyth.”

For one suspended moment, Brook believed Gwenyth would continue her ruse.

Then the mask came off.

It didn’t fall away gradually. It was removed. Deliberately, completely, the way a person removed a coat they no longer needed. The trembling stopped, and the tears continued to track down her face, but they were no longer accompanied by the crumpled expression of distress that had given them context. Without the performance surrounding them, the tears were just moisture on skin, residue from a mechanism that had been switched off.

Gwenyth’s posture straightened. Her shoulders drew back. Her chin lifted, and her eyes that had spent the better part of a week cycling between vacancy and grief were suddenly, terrifyingly present. The woman standing in the doorway was not the Gwenyth that Dale had tried to institutionalize, or the Gwenyth that Cal had devoted his life to protecting, or the Gwenyth that Porter had died believing he was caring for.

This was the woman who had been underneath all of them.

The real one.

“He chose them over me.”

The voice was different…deeper. Stripped of the breathy fragility that had characterized every word Gwenyth had spoken since the team’s arrival. This tone was clear and hard, carrying the compressed fury of three decades spent swallowing rage before converting it into theater.

“Every single one of them. Strangers. Dying women who showed up at our door because they’d heard he could save them, and he let them in. He let them into our home, into his lab, into the hours that were supposed to be mine.” Gwenyth’s lip curled in disgust. “My mother died of cancer, and instead of grieving with me, instead of being my father, he turned our house into a clinic for women he’d never met. He sat with them. He held their hands. He documented their symptoms with more care than he ever documented a single thing about my life.”

She took a step into the dining room.

“I was his daughter. I was right there. And he couldn’t see me.”

Brook’s hand moved to her hip. Her fingers closed around the grip of her firearm, and she drew it from the holster in a single, practiced motion. She didn’t raise it to center mass. She held it at her side, the barrel pointed at the floor, her index finger straight along the frame.

“That’s close enough, Gwenyth.”

The woman stopped her advance. Her gaze dropped to the weapon and then returned to Brook’s face. The contempt in her expression didn’t waver. If anything, it deepened, settling into the lines of her face in a way that made her seem like a completely different person.

Beyond Gwenyth’s right shoulder, Brook caught a shape near the base of the staircase. Bit was standing at the edge of the foyer, pressed against the wall beside the newel post. His body was coiled in a way that suggested he’d been there for longer than a few seconds. He’d heard everything and was waiting, positioning himself between Gwenyth and the staircase in case she tried to retreat upstairs.

Gwenyth followed Brook’s gaze, peering over her shoulder.

The woman laughed, and the sound was nothing like the Gwenyth they had come to know over the past week. It was low and sharp and carried a cruelty that made the hair on Brook's arms rise. Gwenyth regarded Bit with the detached curiosity of someone assessing whether an obstacle was even worth acknowledging.

She turned back to Brook.

“You can’t prove it.” Gwenyth shrugged with indifference. “Any of it. A dead man’s journal isn’t evidence. It’s the ramblings of a father who was clearly losing his grip on reality. The same father who buried seven women in his greenhouse. Who will the courts believe? The brilliant researcher who conducted illegal experiments on dying patients, or his mentally ill daughter who has spent thirty years being cared for by others?”