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“She’s dead, baby. Bryson killed her while she was trying to help me escape. Shot her. She was gone before I could do anything about it.”
Her face was impossible to read. For some inexplicable reason, I was ready for instant sobs and even for her to take a swing at me. I thought maybe she’d lash out right at me in rage because I was the one within striking distance and delivering this news. Instead, she was perfectly expressionless. She shifted just enough to stare down at her hands in her lap rather than look at me any longer.
“And Bryce?” She asked.
“Dead.”
“You did it?”
“Shot him,” I said. “Didn’t kill him instantly so I strangled him.”
“Why would she help you?” She asked. She didn’t even seem to realize I’d answered the question about her stepbrother. “She would’ve known who you were to me.”
“She wasn’t messed up on anything. And she was there just about every time they tortured me. She made a very obvious choice to continue helping me,” I said, already trying to figure out if I was supposed to tell her about her mother’s last words. Would it help to know that her mom regretted what she’d allowed to happen to her own daughter? Or would it make it worse for Trista to have to continue living without ever getting the opportunity to tackle the subject with her mom herself?
“Jersey —.” She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth to stop herself, so I reached across the console and forced my hand in between hers to hold onto one.
“I think I need to tell you something, too. But I was supposed to wait for Memphis to be around before I did it,” she finally said.
“Why would you need to wait for Memphis?”
“I imagine there’s some concern about you shifting into that out-of-control creature version of you when you hear it.”
“I swear to God, if you’re about to tell me that you’re fucking that punk just because I’ve been unavailable, I will be that out-of-control creature faster than you can blink and not even Memphis could stop that.”
She forced a smile for just a second before she added her other hand on top of mine to squeeze it.
“You’re almost cute when you let the jealousy out,” she said.
The overwhelming urge to rip her out of this car to fuck her just for recycling one of my own lines to use on me.
“Memphis found out some stuff about your family, J.”
And suddenly, the overwhelming urge to vomit.
“She looked through everything nonstop. And I mean everything. She scoured those reports for days. The girl doesn’t miss anything. She doesn’t think your wife did it,” she said, squeezing my hand even harder. “We all think it was probably Bryce.”
I’d convinced myself that he was just fucking with me for the sake of torturing me in any manner possible when he talked about them. I should have taken my time killing him.
“I’m so sorry, Jersey.”
“Don’t be. Doesn’t change anything now.”
But now I had to figure out how to exist with the knowledge that I’d spent a portion of all this time hating my wife for the way that I thought it went; hating myself for not being there when I thought all she needed was my presence for her stability. What she really needed, what they all really needed, was for me to just not be a lunatic who was so good at being a murderous psychopath that some underworld organization would do anything to employ me. Or for me to have even just been physically present to protect them rather than half way around the world in some godforsaken jungle where my presence made no difference to anyone at all in the long run.
“She was pretty,” Triss whispered.
“She was.”
I could feel her eyes burning into me while my own dropped down to the Tigger tattoo on my arm. It was fucked up now. Bryson had done a disgusting number with that potato peeler, but there was nothing on this planet or any other that could undo my knowing what it was and who it was for.
“Your friend told me about the nicknames,” she said. “It’s cute.”
“She called him Tiggy,” I said and felt something deep inside me tighten into a knot. “That’s where it started.”
“It’s even funnier now that I really believed you had a Tigger tattoo because you thought that highly of yourself to be one of a kind.”
“I’m still one of a kind.”
