Page 141 of Pretty Savage: Defy

Millions of dollars my family earned. All taken.

“The problem,” Bowey continues, “is that every man you cast out becomes an enemy. Men who once carried the same names you do. Men who know what you are and hate you for what you took from them. What happens, I wonder, when there are more of us than there are of you?”

“I don’t know anything about your father or what happened to him.”

“Of course you don’t.”

This time, he turns his back on me and walks several paces away, either certain I can’t hurt him or daring me to try.

“What am I being arrested for?”

Harris steps forward and pulls a photograph from the folder beneath his arm. He holds it out.

The image takes the strength from my legs. I stumble backward until the bed catches me behind the knees. I sit on the edge of the bed.

Ashford House is recognizable, which makes only its destruction more devastating. The white columns are blackened. The roof has collapsed over the eastern wing, and several upper floors have fallen into the rooms beneath them. The windows gape open, exposing scorched walls, twisted metal, and the remains of furniture inside.

The cornfield is gone. Only black earth and a few burned stalks remain.

My family built that house more than a century ago. Every generation added to it, expanded it, and buried secrets on the land surrounding it.

Now it looks like a carcass picked clean. Just the bones left behind.

“It’s ruined.” I look to Thomson, sure he’ll tell me this is a lie, an elaborate trick.

Thomson lowers his eyes. He’s already seen it. Probably stood close enough to smell the wet ash and burned wood while I lay unconscious.

Bowey gives me time to absorb the image. Harris does not. His eyes remain on my hands, following every movement as if someone warned him before entering that I prefer knives.

“When the cornfield burned, it exposed several burial sites,” Bowey says. His hands remain loose at his sides, but he’s positioned himself outside the range of my reach. “One body was more recent than the others. The victim was murdered within the past year.”

I look again at the photograph. Dark shapes interrupt the scorched earth. Excavation tents. Floodlights. People in white protective suits.

I know the name before he says it.

“Dental records identified him as Trent Riveria.”

Silas asked Laurel where we put Trent’s body. He claimed the man had a family who deserved answers, but she couldn’t give Silas any answers because she didn’t know we’d buried him where all the bodies go. Where they’ve always gone.

In the cornfield.

Now the federal government has found Trent instead of Silas.

Harris raises a clear evidence bag. “This was recovered near Riveria’s remains.”

Inside is my favorite dagger.

The dagger I left downstairs in Ashford house before the bonding. The ceremonial robe had no pockets, and I knew I wouldn’t be wearing it for long.

It shouldn’t have been anywhere near Trent’s grave, which means someone put it there.

The black resin handle has blistered and warped from the heat. Part of the grip has melted away, exposing metal beneath it, but I recognize the curve of the blade. I know the exact balance of it in my hand. I know how it looked when Laurel’s fingers held it at Sinners.

I used it on Trent the night he entered Ashford House intending to kill me. The night I tortured the location of a tainted batch of cocaine out of him so I could stop its distribution. The fact that he deserved what happened means nothing to the men standing before me.

Bowey watches my reaction rather than the weapon. “Riveria’s wounds match the blade. Preliminary testing identified your DNA on the grip.”

“Why is the FBI investigating a body found in my cornfield?”