Page 26 of Crossfire Creek Vengeance

Jessa’s voice shook. “Roman, what did they find?”

Roman finally looked at her. “The cancer didn’t kill her,” he said.

Silence crushed the table flat.

Deacon didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Roman’s voice was barely above a whisper now, Raw, lethal. “Our mother was murdered.”

Chapter Six

The world tilted.

For a second, Jessa couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t process the words still hanging in the space between them.

Her mother, Lauren, had been murdered.

It didn’t compute. Couldn’t. Her mother had died at home after a failed round of chemo. Cancer had stolen her breath. Cancer had taken her heartbeat. Cancer had taken everything.

Except apparently it hadn’t.

Deacon reached across the table and took Roman’s phone from his hand. He studied the screen, jaw tightening, eyes scanning line by line as Roman stayed silent.

While she waited for Deacon’s take on this, Jessa’s heart pounded so hard she thought something inside her might crack.

Roman dragged a hand over his face. Then he turned toward her, eyes steady but lined with something raw. “It wasn’t the cancer, Jess.” His voice was low, controlled, but thick with fury. “Someone administered a toxic compound to her. Slowly. In tiny doses.”

Jessa blinked hard, trying to force the fog back long enough to focus. “What kind of compound?”

“The lab found trace amounts of a cardiac glycoside in her preserved tissue samples. Most likely digitalis or a derivative.”

Her breath hitched. “Digitalis?”

“It mimics organ failure,” Roman explained. “Heart irregularities, weakness, nausea, confusion. Everything her doctors believed was the cancer advancing.”

Deacon looked up from the report, meeting Jessa’s gaze with something like horror simmering behind his calm expression. He nodded. “Roman is right,” was all he said.

“This…” she whispered, her hands curling into fists in her lap. “This was deliberate?”

“There’s no other explanation,” Roman assured her. “The doses were small, microdosed over time. Enough to accelerate everything. Enough to make her collapse look natural. And the standard toxicology testing they ran during her autopsy never screened for cardiac glycosides.”

Jessa swallowed hard, her throat burning. All those days when Lauren was suddenly more fatigued… when she couldn’t keep food down… when her heart rate spiked then crashed… when the doctors said it was “normal progression”…

A cold wave crawled through her veins.

Deacon set the phone down slowly. “Jesus, Jessa…”

Her breath shuddered out of her. Someone had murdered her mother. Someone had taken away the chance Jessa would ever make things right with her. Someone had stolen the last of Lauren’s life. And beneath the pain, beneath the shock, something dark and fierce began to rise.

Deacon’s voice cut through the fog, low and tight. “Who did this to her?”

Roman dragged in a breath, slow, controlled, as if he was holding back a storm. “I don’t know. Not yet. But Wynn and Corbin Knox both had access to her. Both were around during the last few weeks. And a quick internet search could teach anyone with half a brain how to microdose digitalis.”

Jessa’s pulse hammered painfully. Wynn. Corbin. Either one capable of cruelty. Either one capable of obsession.

But Roman wasn’t done. “And Lauren…” He paused, his jaw clenching even more than it already was. “She’d been dealing with Shade.”

Jessa’s head snapped up. “What? Why?”