AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A cold feeling snaked down my spine and I saw the blurred memory of the small room, the large glossy photo of my mother in her police uniform set up by the closed casket. “It’s okay. I didn’t want to go either.”
Mickey swallowed hard and stared at the ceiling before continuing in a low voice, “She loved you. You should follow her path — the right path.” He shook his head. “She lived by a deep sense of justice.”
My lips twisted to the side, and I decided to broach what I wanted to ask Mickey. “I saw your evidence.” Mickey glanced over at me. “All of that stuff — it was my mom’s work, wasn’t it? And you continued it?”
Mickey slowly nodded. “Yep, her life’s work. She’d sent me a copy, just in case.” He shifted on the pillows and slowly sat up while I fell back.
Now, the silence was a taut line, and it took me several moments to gather the courage to ask, “Just in case?”
“Aw, hell, Lia,” Mickey said and swore softly under his breath. “I never wanted you to find out this way. But all that work, everything I was doing — it was so I could finally prove that your mom didn’t take her own life. She’d never do that. She’d never leave you.”
My eyes began to burn and a spectral hand gripped my throat while the hospital room seemed to waver around us. There was no going back from whatever Mickey was about to tell me, the answers that I’d been running from — and to — for over a year.
His eyes were grave and endless as he regarded me. I clutched the chair's sides as though I could brace myself for whatever was coming. But my stomach had already bottomed out, my body prepared for a fatal blow.
“Deep down,” I whispered. “I always wondered if things weren’t what they seemed.”
“They aren’t,” Mickey rasped. “Because Tyler Michaelson murdered Marina.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Lia
Blood staining blue tiles, an expression of terror forever frozen on my indomitable mother’s face, dark hair mixing with a dark pool around her head, a silver glint in her outstretched hand. A gun.
“No,” I whimpered. “No, please…”
Stains of tears on her strangely pale skin, waxen gray like a doll, as though this was all fake. And then broken, terrible sounds filling the kitchen, the sobs of a kid left all alone in the world without her fierce mom to defend her.
The crack of pain in my kneecaps as I fell, arms wrapped around me, while I screamed and screamed, begging myself to wake up, for my mom to please wake up—
I surfaced from my memory with a gasp, glancing down at my shaking fingers to ensure they weren’t stained in blood and touching my lips to see if I had split them from screaming so hard.
But no, it had all been inside my head, and Mickey Weiss didn’t even seem to notice that I'd had a traumatic flashback. He was lost in his own hell and then he began to speak, too fast and rambling for me to beg him to stop.
“Michaelson staged the suicide, he knew it would scare plenty of cops off and also cause the BPD to scramble. And he was right. If I hadn’t had Marina’s backup, if I hadn’t worked on it in secret then I would’ve never been able to collect enough evidence to put Michaelson away for good.”
Ty murdered my mom. No.My fingers dug into my face, yet I could barely feel them.This can’t be happening.
But somehow, it was happening. It had happened.
And somehow, my lungs still worked and my heart still drummed out a beat despite the agony ripping me to shreds from the inside out. I couldn't even form a thought or react. This was happening; this was the answer that I wondered if I’d known all along.
Would I let Ty try and convince me that he couldn't do such a thing because I didn't want to know the truth, because it would break me?
Ty killed my mother.
A scream rose from a deep, broken place inside of me and my stomach roiled. Every breath seemed to be more painful than the last.
I’m falling for the monster who killed my mother.
“Oh my god,” I choked out.
Mickey nodded and continued, even though his voice sounded even more distant. “I’m sorry to tell you like this but I had to warn you. Before she died, Marina suspected she might’ve been had. Someone had been trailing her. She tried to get our brass to do something but it got caught up in red tape.”
“And so you…” I whispered.
He shrugged. “She wanted someone to carry on her work and take down those fucking bastards. Marina thought she had enough time to get you guys out of the city.”
