Page 116 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

“Gav?”

“Yeah?”

“Did I kill Ira?”

He took his foot off the gas and turned over the seat to look back at me. “No, Cait. I promise. You didn’t kill him.”

I expected to feel a wave of relief to learn I hadn’t taken another life. I was oddly numb about it, though. He’d been taunting me, trying to get me to screw up in my grief. So he could get closer, could grab me, could torture the information he wanted out of me.

“Where’s Mona?”

“In the other car. Didn’t think you’d want to ride with her.”

“What happens to her?” I asked. “She shot my dad.”

“She had no choice,” my father insisted.

“She had a choice. She made a choice. She had the gun. She could have shot Ira. She chose to shoot you.”

My father winced at that but shook his head.

“You don’t understand, Nugget. Not everyone is as strong as you are.”

Strong.

That might have been the first time I’d ever heard someone use that adjective to describe me.

“Dad, she was working with Ira,” I reminded him. “She stood by while he beat me.”

His gaze slid away at that.

“He was threatening her daughter.”

“And I’m sure he was threatening me too. But you didn’t do what he wanted.”

“He wouldn’t let her go. She was at his side the whole time.”

“She wasn’t by his side in those woods. She raised her arm and she pulled the trigger and she shot you.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s not. It’s not complicated. You just want to believe that because you loved her.”

“Love. Present tense.”

“Fuck,” Zaro hissed when the car hit a particularly deep hole.

“Sorry,” Gav said. “You good?”

“Yeah.” Zaro was breathing hard, his hand pressed to his side.

He was hurting.

I hoped that Ira was hurting just as bad. If not worse.

“You sure you can make it all the way back to the city?” Gav asked.

“Once we’re off these rural-ass back-county roads I should be fine.”