AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Santiago, too, looked curious about this. The only people not mystified by this question were Wilder—who had seen the same memory from Carlos’s head—and Tansy herself.
She looked at Cash and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Her lower lip trembled.
I glanced over to where Wilder was standing, and he moved towards the door in case she decided she was going to make a break for it. We’d need her when Gamigan showed up. Part of the demon was in her now.
“Did you kill him?” I asked.
“I…”
“Tans, no.” Cash shook his head. “You wouldn’t.” For a second I thought his lawyer training was kicking in and he might stop her from saying anything else to implicate her further, but she was already too far gone to look back now.
“I had to.”
We were all quiet. What was the right response to something like that? You either needed to be a sociopath or completely deluded to think you had to murder someone, unless they were coming for you guns blazing.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
“The book. The book told me it would bring back Laura and Heidi. Told me it would leave me alone and everything would be fine. No one would know about Alexandra. It would go away and never bother me again.”
“But it wanted more blood,” I guessed.
“It wanted me to prove how badly I wanted it.”
Santiago sat down beside me, suddenly way more interested in the girl than he’d been before. “It asked you to shed blood.”
“Y-yes.”
She’d killed him. She had intentionally killed Liam at the bar and taken the cinder block home as proof to show the demon. Sweet holy fuck. I was hoping there’d be some other explanation, some way to maintain her innocence. But she’d just shattered that all in one small word.
“Why him?” I asked.
She was crying silently now, no sobs or wailing. Wiping away a steady stream of tears, she took a shaky breath before speaking again. “I went where I thought people w-wouldn’t be missed.”
“Oh, Tans.” Cash looked like he might be sick.
My blood boiled, thinking of how my boys had been there. How Emmett and Mason and dozens of other people with familie
s and friends had been at that bar. But because it had been in a shitty part of town, she’d gone there thinking she could take someone’s life and no one would care.
“People cared.” My voice was so low it spooked even me. I had never wanted to hurt a person quite as badly as I wanted to hurt Tansy in that moment.
She was dumb, and she’d made dumb choices, and because of her flagrant stupidity people were dead. Lives were ruined and ended, and a goddamned demon was wandering the streets of New Orleans.
“I’m sorry.” It felt like the hundredth time she’d said it, and it was starting to lose its impact.
“Yeah, well, sorry doesn’t cut it.” I got to my feet, not able to look at her anymore.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I saw the fight and thought…accidents happen all the time.”
Wilder groaned. He must have known this would set me off, but he didn’t move to hold me back.
“Give me your knife,” I said to Santiago, still no longer acknowledging Tansy’s presence.
“W-what?” she stammered.
I wheeled around, leveling a finger at her. “You’re done talking.”
Cash didn’t leap to her defense this time. He was still sitting beside her, but he hadn’t tried to touch her or comfort her since she’d confessed to killing Liam. He looked shell-shocked.
