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I nodded, not having a whole lot of faith in the system, but praying to be wrong.
I didn’t know what would happen next. Maybe they wouldn’t believe our story, but whatever happened, I knew we would face it together.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Parrish
One month later
“Hey, baby.” Riven sat beside me at the outdoor table we’d brought over from my house and placed under one of the trees. It was silly that we stayed here rather than moving into my place, but Riven needed to be close to Betsy, and to be honest, I liked our little garage apartment—liked that it was smaller, more intimate, liked knowing that Betsy was close and being able to share meals with her.
“Hey, you.”
“Are you okay?” Riven fingered a lock of hair on my forehead.
It had been an interesting month. There had been an investigation into everything that had gone down, complete with Becca turning over a shit ton of recordings. We didn’t have all the details from those, of course. That would all come out at Les’s, Dad’s, and Uncle Bill’s trials, but for now the three of them were locked up, and with the information they had on them—drug trafficking and plotting Riven’s murder, they would hopefully go to prison for the rest of their lives.
The cameras had helped out. They’d showed my dad and crew on Riven’s property. As far as the authorities knew, when they went to blackmail Riv into the drug deal, they were really just threatening Riven that they would hurt us. The day everything went down, the cops believed Riven had been blackmailed to meet Rex and he’d gone because he was trying to protect us. Really, it had been a setup for Rex to kill him, one that Frank, Bill, and Les all took part in. There was no evidence that Riven had planned to take part in a drug deal that day or do anything else illegal, so he was in the clear.
And me? I wasn’t getting charged for Rex. They knew I’d killed him but that it had been an accident while I was trying to save Riven’s life. I’d told them I’d heard Riven went to meet Rex, and I was worried, so I’d followed him. When I saw the gun, I’d taken action. It didn’t escape my notice that Riven had gone to prison for self-defense, and I hadn’t, but then, the situations were different. They’d plotted to kill Riven. They’d also been buying a shit ton of heroin. And while there were likely some recordings that could have gotten Riven into trouble for planning to get drugs that day, I was pretty sure Becca had taken care of that for us so they never saw the light of day.
“Are you okay?” Riven asked again, making me realize I hadn’t answered him.
“Yes. I’m perfect.” That might be exaggerating some, but I was okay. Maybe I should be struggling more with what happened to Rex or my dad and uncle, but I wasn’t. There had been a heaviness weighing me down my whole life, and now it was gone, making me feel like I could breathe, giving me hope I had pretended to have before but hadn’t.
Every time it hit me that I had taken a life, I reminded myself of all the bad things Rex had done, and that if I hadn’t ended up killing him, he would have taken out Riven. That wasn’t something I could live with. The nightmares I’d been having, which didn’t happen often, would hopefully go away.
“It’s okay if you’re not,” he said gently. I knew Riven still blamed himself for everything—that’s the kind of man he was—but I spent every day trying to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that everything was worth it, the same way he didn’t let me sink into the darkness of what we had been through. Funny that Riven had given in to the pain of our lives before, but now he was actively trying to make sure I didn’t lose myself to it. It was hard not to wait for the other shoe to drop. I knew Riven felt the same. Not much in our lives had gone our way, but so far this had.
“I know,” I told him.
“You’re a good man.”
“Isn’t that my line?” I teased. “How do you think Wayne is going to do?” We’d taken him to rehab—drugs, alcohol, and gambling had been causing him more struggles than I’d known before all this had gone down. Wayne had made mistakes, and like the rest of us, he was flawed and imperfect, but he wasn’t all bad either. Sometimes people conflated mistakes with badness without taking into consideration how messy or hard life was.
Some people deserved another chance.
Some didn’t.
To me, Wayne was one of the former.
“I think he’ll be okay. You wouldn’t let me believe otherwise.” I chuckled, just as the sound of wheels on gravel broke through our conversation. We both turned to see Becca’s car pull into the driveway.
