AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Paxton looked away from the people’s accusing stares and swore under his breath. “Shit.”
With that, he turned and strode away, heading toward a hallway on the other side of the second floor.
Perhaps it was the adrenaline from the near-tumble off the balcony. Perhaps it was the three cocktails and two tequila shots from earlier. Either way, something made me go after Paxton. I followed him through the dimly-lit passage and down the stairs that led to the back door of the club that all the VIPs entered and exited through.
Confronting him wasn’t a good idea, given his history of savagery, but I knew he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me here. Not with the couple vaping just a few yards away in full view of where we were standing, or the security camera aimed at the alley.
“I know it was you, Paxton!” I called out.
He turned around and stared at me, head cocked quizzically. “What was me?”
I lifted my hands, using one finger for each point I listed. “The plagiarism thing. The stalking. The drugs in my water. The handcuffs. Leaking the hospital story to the media. Posting that fake sex tape. All the stuff you’ve been doing to make me look crazy.”
He smirked and scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “I think you’ve done a pretty good job at making yourself look crazy these last few years, Sienna.”
I stared at him, nostrils flaring with fury as my hands balled into fists. I hated him so fucking much.
Most of all, I hated that he was right.
I did seem crazy to the majority of people who looked into the Forrester case, and honestly, as bitter as it made me feel, it was for a good reason. I could see it all from everyone else’s perspective, and in the end, I didn’t come out looking very good, even if I was still absolutely certain that I was correct.
My mind flashed back over all of it, corroding my insides with a toxic, burning slurry of shame.
When I woke up and told the police what I saw and heard that night at the lake house, Paxton was arrested immediately, and charges were laid. He was denied bail and remanded in custody for two months as the investigation went on.
The media instantly painted him as a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who deeply resented all of the wealthy, well-connected kids who attended Forrester Academy—the school he was only able to get into because of his hockey scholarship. They claimed he was so jealous and bitter that he ended up snapping and taking out his rage on everyone at the party.
Eventually, the case against him began to fall apart, thanks to the public defender who tirelessly represented him and a dearth of solid evidence against him. At the same time, evidence that supported his alleged innocence started to emerge.
His lawyer got her hands on a copy of my hospital records from that night, so she was aware that I had alcohol in my system when I was admitted. In a pre-trial hearing, she argued that I was an unreliable witness who could’ve misheard everything I thought Paxton said to me. That was his own personal claim too—that I misheard him, and that he was actually trying to help me escape the house that night.
There was also the fact that I never actually saw my attacker’s face. It wasn’t enough that I saw Paxton covered in blood and holding a knife, and it wasn’t enough that I turned my head over my shoulder and saw him manically chasing me down the hall fifteen seconds before I was attacked. No, the fact remained that I didn’t properly glimpse the killer’s face, as I was lying prone on the ground when I was stabbed and smothered with their leather-gloved hand.
Paxton’s story was that he only chased me to ‘help’ me, and the real killer met him at the top of the stairwell and shoved him, resulting in him falling down the stairs and hitting his head on a newel post, knocking him out cold.
He did have a minor head injury, and his blood was found on the stairs along with his unconscious body when the police arrived, but the way I saw it… that could have been faked. He could have hit his own head against the post when he heard the sirens and realized the police were approaching. Then he could have curled up on the landing and feigned unconsciousness.
Unfortunately, there was also the matter of the murder weapon. When the police searched outside the lake house, they found the knife tossed in a garden bed, drenched in blood with the handle wiped clean of all prints. The knife Paxton had near his hand on the landing was a different one—slightly larger blade, and no blood. His lawyer claimed that he grabbed that knife from the kitchen to use for self-defense, thus proving that he wasn’t the attacker.
I had my own theory to explain that. I figured he could’ve wiped his prints from the knife he used for the murders before tossing it outside and picking up another knife that he’d later claim he had on him for self-defense purposes, just to cover his ass in case someone happened to survive their injuries.
Someone like me.
Luckily for Paxton, my survival story didn’t end up mattering all that much in the end, because my name was mud by the time his lawyer was done with me. Everyone knew about my high blood alcohol content, thanks to her, so no one took anything I said seriously.
Beyond my word, the evidence was flimsy and circumstantial. None of the other survivors saw enough in the darkness to definitively name Paxton as their attacker. Some experts hired by the lawyer even claimed that it couldn’t possibly have been him based on the blood spatter and wound analysis.
Apparently, the angle of the stab wounds and blood spatter direction suggested that the killer was most likely left-handed. Paxton was right-handed. Everyone else in the house was also right-handed, except for the Cavanagh brothers, and they weren’t suspects, given that one of them was dead and the other was found peacefully sleeping in his basement bed without a speck of blood on him. That supported the ‘killer stranger’ theory that the investigators were building by that stage.
Again, that could’ve been faked. A right-handed man could use his left arm to confuse investigators without too much trouble. Anyone who’d ever watched an episode of Forensic Files could’ve known it was a good idea to do that if they wanted to get away with murder.
Still, it didn’t matter what I thought. The tide had well and truly turned against me by this stage of the investigation, and I went from being the miracle survivor to the ‘drunk, crazy bitch’ who ‘tried to ruin a promising young man’s life for no reason’.
No one cared that I heard Paxton telling me to run before he decided to kill me too.
No one cared that I strongly smelled his cologne and body wash while I was brutally stabbed by the person who had me pinned face-down on the ground.
No one cared that I saw his right arm extended on the floor in front of me for stability—complete with his jersey sleeve, which had his number just a few inches below the elbow—while his left hand yanked my head up and covered my mouth and nose in an attempt to stifle my last breaths.
