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Everything fell apart that day.
“This is my pain. My scar. My fucking hell, I was finally over; peace I finally had, and you had no right to take it from me!”
She wouldn’t answer me. She couldn’t.
“Why would you do this to us, Cade? We were finally free.” Every dream I lived for had her in it. But in one act, in one moral broken, the highest moral, she killed my dreams too. “I don’t wanna believe it. But I do. I can see it in your eyes—it’s true.”
She just stood by the bed we shared, the one we wanted to make a baby in, and she couldn’t admit a damn thing because then she’d admit to murder.
Cade Bryant will never be stupid enough to do that.
“You let them win!” I couldn’t stop yelling. “You’re one of them now. You’re a criminal, too. You hurt people, too.”
“There’s always more than one victim in a crime.” Her words were measured, careful not to indict herself or me if anyone gets called to testify. “The law isn’t big enough to get justice for all.”
“Justice?” I grabbed half a row of her clothes hanging in our closet and threw them on the bed. “That’s not justice, Cade; that’s vigilante murder. There was no trial, no jury, no sentence. You just fucking decided for yourself. You were judge, jury, and executioner.”
“Please don’t do this,” she muttered.
“I didn’t do anything. I never got my say. You never talked to me about it. You sure as shit didn’t ask me.”
“You never asked me either.”
She didn’t flinch. Not while I piled her clothes on the bed because she needed to leave. I couldn’t breathe next to her. I sure as hell couldn’t sleep or even live with her. Not after what she did.
“You never asked what I needed to heal, and I never judged your pain.” She didn’t yell. “Your addictions. All those other women. Every soul-crushing thing you did, and I never hated you. I knew you were hurting, but I’ve been hurting too. They took from me, too, and from those other victims. So, how dare you judge me?”
“All this time, I know I failed you, and you never abandoned me.” Fuck, I choked on the words. On pain. On love.
“Please don’t do this,” she murmured again.
I didn’t listen even as tears wet her lips.
“You were the one I protected, Cade. You survived being the good one, while, yes, I was the bad one for so long. And I got sober believing that. That the hell I went through was worth it because they didn’t ruin you too.” I broke. I gulped back tears; I couldn’t help it. “That’s all I believed. That if I could hang on and get strong again, we could be together. And now that’s a lie because they did get to you. They ruined us both.”
Her chin trembled. I’d never seen so many tears pour down her beautiful face. Her voice barely worked.
“I’m not ruined. Neither are you. They didn’t win because our love survived.” She glanced in dismay at her clothes on the bed. “Don’t you believe in us?”
“I believed in you. But you killed that too.”
“You can still believe in me. I’ll always do the right thing, even if it’s not the perfect ending.”
I wanted to vomit. “So you killed TJ? What was his perfect ending? Did you shoot him or use your bare hands?”
Fuck, it made me sick imagining Cade going that far.
I get the impulse. But to plan a murder? To actually do it?
What does that do to your soul?
That man, he’s probably at the bottom of the ocean, but he’s still a ghost in our lives. TJ wanted Cade. He stalked her. He tried to attack her, so I protected her, and he ripped my soul into pieces for it. Now he has hers, too.
“What about Gentry and Derek?” I glared at her. “Are you gonna kill them too?”
Those two evil men were there, too. They had the drugs, the power, and the intent to take Cade, but I wouldn’t let them.
So they went after me instead.
