Page 161 of Lured By Shadows

What I felt instead was something dangerously close to understanding. Like justice had been carried out with blood-soaked hands. Like some awful pressure buried deep inside my chest had finally loosened.

Across the room, Culver’s gaze never left me. There was something deeply dangerous in the way he looked at me then, something ancient and starving barely contained beneath the surface of his calm expression. It felt like violence itself stood obediently at his back, waiting for the slightest excuse to tear the world apart again if it meant keeping me untouched.

Some broken part of me felt safer because of it.

I wrapped my arms around Sienna again, pulling her close as her sobs softened into something quieter and shakier. I let her grief bleed into me even though it wasn’t mine to carry, even though my own emotions had become such a tangled mess I could barely stand to examine them.

“I’m so sorry, Sie,” I murmured into her hair, my hand moving slowly up and down her spine. “How close were you two?”

“Not very,” she sniffled, struggling to steady herself. “But he’d been in my brother’s life for so long. I don’t know… I think I considered him more of a friend than just some bloke I knew.”

I nodded slowly, my thumb brushing gently over her tear-streaked cheek, careful not to rush her through the grief clawing its way out of her.

“What actually happened?” I asked quietly, even though every instinct inside me recoiled from whatever answer was coming next.

Sienna’s gaze dropped to the ground, like the words themselves were too heavy to speak while looking another person in the eye.

“They found the bodies at the front steps of the nick,” she whispered. “Just… strewn across them like a message. Like they were meant to be seen.” Her breathing hitched sharply. “And there were words carved into all of their skin.”

“What words?” I asked, though something deep inside me already knew the answer before she even opened her mouth.

“‘Filthy rapists,’” she said, her voice splintering apart around the words. “That’s what it said. But Carter wasn’t a rapist. He wasn’t, Ira. I know he wasn’t.”

The guilt hadn’t fully reached me yet.

Maybe it would later; maybe it would hit me all at once in some quieter moment. But right then, standing there with the scent of her tears lingering in the air and a thick horror pressing down over all of us, what I felt instead was something quieter and far more dangerous settling inside my chest.

Acceptance.

The awful understanding that some things demanded a reckoning so violent it stained everyone around it, even if admitting that terrified me.

My heart stuttered painfully inside my ribs, a slow aching pause that echoed far too loudly in my ears. There was no way I could tell her. No way I could look Sienna in the eye and place the truth into her trembling hands. I couldn’t destroy her like that. Couldn’t peel back the surface of the nightmare and expose the thing lurking beneath it.

But the guilt was already there anyway.

Quiet. Patient. Coiled deep inside me like something alive.

It would come for me eventually. I could already feel it waiting with slow, careful teeth.

“So who were the others?” I asked, even though part of me didn’t want to know. Didn’t want their names tied forever to the knowledge that they were dead because of me.

“I don’t know,” Sienna whispered, shaking her head while wiping at her face with the sleeve of her hoodie. Her voice sounded hollow now, drained clean of anything sharp. “It was Carter, three boys… and one girl. I think I met her once. She came to our house with Carter awhile back.”

Breeanna. Of course it was her.

The realization didn’t explode through me with rage or shock. It slipped quietly into place with a horrible sense of inevitability, like something that had been waiting patiently for me to notice it all along. And as it settled there, I could suddenly see the entire thing so clearly: the manipulation, the jealousy, the poison she’d layered beneath fake smiles and casual comments until everything looked harmless on the surface. All of it built around dragging me down and making me feel small because of Carter’s bruised ego and her need to play puppet master from the sidelines.

I wanted to feel nothing.

I wanted to shut the door on her existence entirely and pretend she had never mattered.

But the truth was uglier than that.

Breeanna had been cruel, yes. Twisted and wrong in ways that poisoned everyone around her. But she had also loved in the only warped way she knew how.

And now she was gone. Gone alongside all the rest of them.

The realization didn’t strike like some dramatic revelation. It tolled slowly through my mind like a distant bell, echoing over and over with the terrible feeling that I would hear it forever.