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But from the grave look in his eyes, I think the answers I’m so desperate for are coming soon. So I tell him what he wants to know, starting at the beginning.
“Nothing happened for a long time after you left. I watched movies. Cooked meals. Took a couple baths.”
A flash of something warm and possessive sparks in Marcus’s eyes, like he’s enjoying the image of me making myself at home in his house, but he doesn’t interrupt me as I continue.
“I’d actually just gotten out of the bath when Natalie texted me. She told me our building was on fire, and I thought she was just fucking with me at first, but then she showed me. It was burning.” My stomach clenches as I wonder if any part of the structure was saved. With everything that’s happened, I’ve barely even spared a thought for it until now, but I very well may be homeless. All my possessions may be gone.
“What the fuck?” Theo mutters.
I nod, trying to think about all of this as if it happened to someone else. It’s easier to think logically if I pretend it’s not my life we’re talking about.
“I…” My gaze catches Ryland’s as he leans forward a little on the couch, listening intently. “My whole life is in that apartment. Every possession I own. I don’t know what I thought I could do, but I wanted to be there. I wanted to help. So I drove over.”
Marcus nods. “And?”
“And when I got there, Natalie was there too. Of course she was. Her apartments were already burning, and she told me we were supposed to wait across the street.” I lick my lips, feeling an echo of the sharp zing of pain at my neck. “Someone injected me with something. Carson, I think. Natalie lured me right to him.”
All three men are focused entirely on me, and there’s so much fury in their features that I rush to continue, wanting to get everything out before one of them explodes.
“I woke up in the room you found me in. Carson was there, and a guy he called Dom.”
“Dominic Roth,” Marcus growls. “That slimy little fucker.”
I’m not surprised the men know him. The way he talked to Carson about them, it’s clear Dominic knows them too.
“I was taped to a chair,” I add. “They were talking about setting you up. About using me as bait, and how you’d come for me.”
Ryland makes a noise deep in his chest, like the angry warning a bull gives right before it gores someone. Given what he just said to me in the bedroom, I can only imagine how much rage he’s feeling—toward Carson and probably toward himself and his two friends. What happened to me today is exactly what he was trying to avoid by pressuring Marcus to stay away from me.
But none of them did.
And now we’re all facing the fallout of that.
I don’t know anymore whether to be angry at these men for bringing utter chaos into my life or grateful to them for all the times they’ve saved my life, so I push past the churning emotions in my chest and keep reporting the events as dispassionately as I can.
Except, as soon as I open my mouth, the next words catch in my throat. The picture Carson held up less than a foot in front of my face feels like it’s been scalded into my retinas. Like I could draw the photograph from memory and not miss a single detail.
The young man’s partially obscured face, half of it hidden by shadows.
The limbs bent at odd angles.
The gray shirt soaked in blood.
“He showed me a picture,” I say slowly, my voice hoarse. “Of a dead man. He told me you killed him. Devin Brooks.”
My gaze flashes up to meet Marcus’s as I speak.
I expect him to deny it. Whether it’s true or not, I’m sure he’ll tell me he’s innocent.
But he doesn’t.
He holds my gaze steadily for several long beats, and the silence has already given me my answer long before he finally speaks. “Yeah. I did.”
My chest tightens, my stomach clenching. Well, didn’t Carson tell me I was wrong? That I’d trusted the wrong people?
“He told me I saved a murderer,” I murmur roughly. “That you killed him in cold blood.”
“Fuck. Tell her, man.” Theo shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. “We have to tell her. Everything.”
