She whips around, her eyes blazing. “After everything I’ve shared with you? You of all people? How dare you?” Her voice cracks, but the anger doesn’t waver. She stalks toward me. “I told you when Blake beat me, when Shane… When he... I trusted you and told you everything, and now you’re standing here acting like I’m some kind of liar?”
“I’m not calling you a liar.” I level my gaze with hers. “But you didn’t tell me everything. You told me how Shane and Blake hurt you, but that’s not all there is to the story.”
She stills, the kind of stillness that sends a chill down to my bones. “Some things should stay buried, Tristan.” Then something shifts in her eyes, a flicker of raw darkness, before fury crashes back in. “You of all people know that.”
“Oh, I do. But not if they’re putting you in danger. Not if your pieces of shit husbands can use them to hurt you.” She is hiding something. A secret so destructive even recalling it is a menace. I won’t stop until I find out what it is one way or another.
She shakes her head and wraps her arms around herself, her eyes darting back to the cabin walls. “Remember, you asked for this.” Then she sighs in defeat. “Walk with me.”
I don’t leave her side as we go deeper into the woods. The waves from the cove grow distant, replaced by the whisper of wind through bare branches. Dead leaves crunch beneath our feet, marking our path like breadcrumbs. Part of me wants to stop her—we’re too exposed out here, too far from backup—but her confession won’t come within those cabin walls, not where Brandon or anyone else can hear.
When it comes to her darkness, I’m the only one allowed to listen. A privilege. A curse.
She walks ahead, arms still wrapped around herself, until the cabin disappears behind the treeline. Only then does she stop. “Do you know how long a man who beats his wife serves in prison?”
As a matter of fact, I do. I’ve looked it up a million times, hoping with each search for a better answer that can put me and my mom out of our misery. An answer that never came. “One year and a thousand-dollar fine.”
“Maximum.” She scoffs. “Unless the charges change to aggravated assault. That can put him away for a whole five.” She exaggerates the way she says the number, making a humorless face.
Pain squeezes around my soul. “You said Shane smashed your bones. He should be in for aggravated battery, which is up to fifteen.”
“He should, but you know as well as I do that never happens.”
I’ve spent my life watching monsters like my father, like her husbands, walk free because the system is rigged against the victims. Even when justice comes, it’s never enough to heal what’s broken.
“If Shane wasn’t charged with aggravated battery, and he’s still in prison after eight years…” A gust of wind whips through the trees. My pulse quickens as pieces click together. “What is Shane really in for? And for how long?”
Dead leaves crunch under her feet as she retreats a step. Her eyes dart between the trees as if checking for shadows that shouldn’t be there. And I see it, the weight of something much darker than she’s ever told me, something that’s kept Shane locked away all these years.
“Birdie.” My tone softens, but the urgency remains. “What did Abel frame Shane for?”
She goes dead still, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. When she finally meets my eyes, there’s an inferno of blue I’ve never seen before. I can hear the word before she speaks it. “Murder.”
The confession hangs in the frigid air between us. Eight years makes perfect sense now. Shane is in for murder. He’s got alife sentence to serve. He deserves the electric chair—a lethal cocktail ending his miserable life would be an act of mercy. But I wasn’t lucky either way. They never pushed for the death penalty.
“Whose murder, Birdie?”
“Some woman who would have been another cold case. Blake planted evidence that linked Shane to her murder. I was Shane’s alibi, but I testified we weren’t together at the time of the murder. Shane couldn’t afford a good lawyer, and with his history of violence and biker gang affiliation, it wasn’t hard to stick.”
“And now Shane is in for life for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“It was the only way I could live knowing he couldn’t hurt me or another woman again.”
“You asked Blake to do this for you, and he did it because he loved you that much?”
“Because it earned him a detective shield.” She scoffs again. “It didn’t hurt that he got to be the hero for the weak and broken battered wife, the one he could marry later and manipulate into being anything that satisfied him, one he could abuse without consequence.”
Something Abel said the day he tried to attack Birdie echoes in my head.Everything I do is to protect you. Who has been protecting those secrets for you all these years? Who has been running to your rescue all this time like a damn dog?
Even then he was trying to guilt her, to manipulate her into believing he was her savior, when all he did was use her to build his career. He made himself look like a hero while planting false leads, manipulating the system he was supposed to protect, allso he could swoop in and use Birdie even more, only to become the very monster he claimed to be fighting.
Will you tell your new savior? Do you think he’s gonna stay and protect you after he finds out what a monstrous little bitch like you is capable of?
“Pelotudo! He was threatening to expose you that day at the house. All this time, why haven’t you told me?”
“Tell my bodyguard on his first day on the job that I’d asked my sick husband to falsify evidence to put a man in prison for life for a crime he didn’t commit, and I gave false testimony to make it stick?”
Maybe she couldn’t trust me enough then. Maybe Blake’s questions got to her head. Maybe she didn’t know I’d have answered yes. Yes, I’d have stayed and protected her. I’d always stay and protect her.