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“Shut up, Brenda,” Marty hisses at her.
“You're as good as dead anyway. You really think a guy who looks like him is gonna let you live for what you did?”
My eyes flit between the two of them, confused.
“Let me go, and I’ll tell you everything.” She slams the top of her case shut and stares at me like I’m actually going to bargain with her.
“You’ll tell me, or I'll kill you both.” I remind her of the fact I’m holding two fucking guns.
Lydia’s old man shakes his head at her, but she ignores him.
“There was an accident when Lydia was younger,” she starts, looking like she's fucking lying.
“It was no accident, Brenda. You killed her.”
“Okay, so me and Marty were having an affair, and Laura found out about us. Things got heated, and she ended up dead.” The woman speaks callously. “I had to get out of town. Naturally, when a bitch gets murdered, the first person they look to blame is the mistress.” She looks as though she’s expecting a laugh out of me, but my stone-dead face urges her to continue.
“I left Marty to deal with the body, and this stupid son of a bitch took his fucking daughter with him when he sank her into the bottom of the lake.”
“How old was she?” I ask, imagining how horrific that must have been for Lydia.
“Seven or eight,” her father answers. “I gave her some of Laura’s pills to make her sleep on the journey, but she was stirring when I got back into the car. She was too drowsy to see anything.” I don’t know if he’s trying to assure me or Brenda.
“It was stupid of you to take her with you,” the woman shouts at him.
“Anyway. I told Lydia the next day that her mama had left us, and we moved away. Laura had no family. Her parents died in a car accident and had left everything to her. She had no friends or work colleagues to miss her. So we kept her alive on paper. Brenda became Laura when she needed to so we could access her money.”
“And Lydia went along with this. She never asked where her mama was?” I point out.
“Lydia was a compliant child. We explained that her mama wasn’t coming back and that Brenda was gonna be her mama now. We moved far away, and as a family, we kept to ourselves. But she became a problem. The older she got, the more questions she started asking about her mama. She kept mentioning a dream about a lake,” Marty explains as if it’s a fucking justification for all this.
“She had to fucking go. If I had my way, she’d be at the bottom of the lake with her mother,” the woman interrupts, and club rules be damned. The bitch just signed her own death certificate.
“I had a debt with Verretti from some gambling I’d done. I knew he liked women, and Lydia always was a pretty girl. I saw an opportunity.” I see a flicker of shame in Farrowman’s eyes. Maybe it’s genuine, but it ain’t close to being enough.
“She was showing so much resentment to Brenda, almost like she knew what had happened. Brenda wanted her dead, and I found a way to solve the problem.” He shrugs as if Lydia should be grateful.
“Without telling me,” Brenda reminds him, “I had no idea the girl was still alive until that man turned up here a few weeks ago.” She looks at me now like she’s expecting me to feel sorry for her. “Marty told me he’d taken care of her.”
“Yeah, I lied, but come on. Did you really think I was capable of killing my own daughter?” He shakes his head.
“You were capable of fucking selling her,” she swipes back.
“Enough,” I yell over their bickering. I need to wrap this up and get to Lydia. “Do you regret what you did?” I ask her father, knowing that the answer I get won't be the truth, not while he has a gun to his throat.
“I made a bad choice.”
“Okay,” I nod, appearing calm as my mind conjures all the ways I could end these fuckers. Death seems too kind for a man who would sell his own daughter to please the woman he was fucking.
“Your club are running into a trap. The man who came here to fetch her said something about a setup. Verretti is gonna move in to take down your club while you are all distracted.”
Whether this is the truth or the asshole is just trying to get himself some brownie points, I have to alert the others.
“You should go to Lydia first, though. Angelo picked her up in a helicopter. They will already be back in Peyton. Whatever he had planned for her won’t be pleasant.” Marty talks to me like he wants me to save her. Maybe the man has some regrets after all.
“Shoot her.” I offer him the gun that I'm pointing at Brenda and watch her face turn deathly white.
“What?” he stares helplessly between me and the gun.
