“The moment I stole that case, he put a hit out on me,” she laughed humorlessly. “Everyone in this town knows my face. I’ve been hanging off his arm for months. No one would let me near their business, no matter what I offered them. I’m telling you, if I walk in there, it’s a death sentence.”
“Alicia—”
“I won’t help you, and I won’t change my mind.”
I paced the motel room,trying to come up with any solution that didn’t end with Krista or me dead.
“You should have just kidnapped her,” Liam seethed. “Take her and turn her in. That’s what she deserves.”
“Krista would have hated me,” I said, staring at the ground, searching the carpet fibers for answers.
“So what if she hates you. She’d be alive.”
Alive and hating me. Would that really help our situation? I wanted to see if I could make this work with her, and starting outwith the murder of a woman who looked just like her didn’t seem like the way to go.
Then again, starting out with a marriage wasn’t exactly brilliant either.
“Are you even fucking listening to me?” Liam snapped, grabbing me as I walked past him again.
I stared down at where his hand was wrapped around my arm. My anger grew by the second as he dug his nails into my skin.
“Let. Go. Of me.”
“Or what? You’ll walk away? Isn’t that what you do?”
My eyes slowly rose to meet his. I got it. He thought I was a pushover, but that wasn’t true even for a second. There were just things I believed in, and making my wife unhappy by getting another person killed was something I strongly didn’t believe in.
“I’m not turning her in, and that’s final.”
“You’re such a fucking pussy,” he sneered.
Cocking my head, I unleashed all the nasty shit that had been building up inside me since I got here. “Didn’t you hurt your wife to save her?”
His jaw clenched hard as his grip tightened.
“Yeah, made her think you were cheating on her so you could save her life. At least, that’s what I heard. That’s what my research tells me.” Sighing, I tsked a few times before continuing. “Couldn’t figure out a way to save her life, so you decided to break her heart instead. Which, in the end, still hurt her.”
“You know nothing,” he growled, his grip tightening.
“I know that she would rather have been told about the situation than kept in the dark, wondering what the hell she did wrong to make you throw everything away.”
With the flex of his muscles, I gripped his wrist and tore it from my arm, twisting it up behind his back as I shoved him against the wall, slamming his face into the dirty drywall.
“I know that every fucking second you were without her, you were fucking miserable.”
I wrenched his arm up, but he refused to beg for mercy.
“I know that even when you hated yourself, you knew deep down that you were doing the right thing because if she got hurt, there would be no moving forward for you. You’d hate yourself forever. You’d never forgive yourself if anything happened to her because you refused to put away your pride to save her life.”
He was breathing hard, his white teeth bared in a snarl.
“That’s all I’m trying to do for Krista,” I said, lowering my voice. “She would hate herself if anything happened to another person because of her, even if it wasn’t her fault.”
Slowly, I released him, taking a step back. He shook out his arm, turning to face me with a little less malice than before.
“Maybe I am a fucking idiot, but I will exhaust every option possible before I do something that I know will hurt Krista.”
“Because you love her,” Jeff spoke up.