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He kept glancing between the road and her, intrigued beyond measure. “Who knew? Who are you talking about?”
“Isabel.” She swallowed, her eyes still closed, a line forming on her forehead. “She kept my secret all these years.”
“What secret?” he asked, his voice gentle and soft so as not to startle her.
“Robert didn’t die of a heart attack. And Isabel didn’t kill him.” A heavy pause. “It was me.”
His eyes widened as he looked back at her. “You killed Robert?”
A brittle laugh escaped her. “You’re so shocked. They’d all be shocked. Everyone suspected Isabel. But they could never prove anything. Because she hid the evidence too well. You see”—here she opened her eyes halfway and looked at him—“she was protecting me.”
He stopped at a red light, put one hand on the headrest of her seat, and turned to her. “What did the motherfucker do to you?”
She blinked fast, a wet sheen in her eyes. “He—” Breaking off, she looked straight ahead, swallowing several times.
Tallak had the overwhelming urge to pound a certain long-dead male into the very ground he was currently buried in.
The light turned green, and he reluctantly took his attention off Hazel.
“Tell me,” he said softly as he drove on.
“You know what Robert was like?” A quiet question in the brimming silence of the car.
“Enough to know I’d break every one of his bones if he were still alive.”
Hazel fiddled with the hem of her dress. “He was charming at first. Swept me off my feet. I was so young, and so impressed by him. My family didn’t approve, but he was my kind of rebellion. And when I got pregnant, he pushed for marriage. He convinced my family, and we got married as soon as I turned eighteen.”
Tallak’s brows drew together in a fierce scowl. “How old was he?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Fucking son of a bitch.”
“Things went downhill from there. After marriage, he was never as nice and charming as he was in the beginning, only when he wanted to make up for one of his outbursts.”
“Outbursts?”
“He’d rage and yell. Would throw things around. Make me feel at fault for everything that went even slightly wrong in his life.”
Tallak gritted his teeth so hard a muscle popped in his jaw.
“I endured it all. Because I thought that the spell the fae had placed on him to make him forget about the baby exchange had somehow warped his mind. And I felt guilty for it.”
“Why? It wasn’t your fault that the fae took away your daughter and gave you Basil in return.”
Hazel shrugged. “Yeah. But I knew about it and couldn’t tell him. And he suspected Basil wasn’t his, and it drove him mad. So many times, I thought that if I could only explain to him what had happened, it would make him understand, would make him see, and…become better. He wouldn’t accuse me of cheating on him anymore, and he’d go back to loving me the way he did in the beginning.”
“But it was never about the spell, though, was it?”
She shook her head. “No. It wasn’t the spell that had warped him. He was warped inside already. But I didn’t know it back then. I tried to appease him as much as possible because I felt so bad for him. I thought he was a victim of this entire situation.” The passing streetlight kissed her face with a warm glow before shadows claimed the car once more. “I never realized he’d made me the victim of his scheme.”
Tallak had to make an effort not to choke the steering wheel in lieu of her dick husband’s neck. “Did he ever lay a fucking hand on you?”
She was silent for a long moment. “He would hurt me in so many subtle ways, with his words and his disdain. He wasn’t always terrible, though, you know. There were moments when he’d be nice, almost loving again, showing me a glimpse of his former self. It took me far too long to realize that those moments weren’t genuine—that they were the cruelest part of his behavior. He’d make me hope, and then he’d smash that hope to pieces.”
Another pause, during which Tallak considered exhuming the shit stain of a man, only to hack his corpse into tiny bits and then feed them to cockroaches.
“That’s how it went for the longest time,” Hazel said, breaking through his dark fantasy. “Over the years, he’d worked really hard to get me to move out of my family’s home and into our own place. It’s not common for witches to do that. We usually all live together under one roof. He never liked how tight-knit witch families were, and he kept pushing me to leave with him. When the kids were young teenagers, I finally relented. We got a house a little bit away from the Murray mansion. I thought once we’d moved out, he’d calm down a bit. He’d always been at odds with Isabel, and she kept arguing with me to divorce him. She never saw the full extent of his viciousness toward me, but she saw enough. And Robert resented her for trying to get rid of him. But after we’d moved out, he didn’t treat me any better.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “He only got worse.”
