I push off the chair, straightening and removing my cell from the inner pocket of my suit jacket. It doesn’t take me long to pull up the video I sent myself from Michelle’s laptop and hold the phone up in front of Ember.
For the next ten minutes, silence fills the room as we watch her watch the security tape. A myriad of emotions marches across her face. Shock. Anger. Resolve.
Guilt.
My gut clenches hard around nothing, and I grip the phone hard. Either that or hurl it across the room to shatter against the concrete wall. Or go kick a fucking hole in that wall. Anything to release this fucking pain. If I caught that flicker of guilt, then everyone else in this room did, too. Ember has sealed her own fate.
Sealed ours.
And that’s a good part of my rage. Her actions ruined us before we could even fully begin. I get the why—God knows I get the why—but her recklessness, her carelessness has stolen something from me.
Stolen her.
And that makes her crime fucking unforgivable.
“I didn’t kill Marcus,” she fervently says as I lower the phone.
I study her face and chuckle, the sound dry, disbelieving as that flash of guilt flickers in my mind again. Part of me hungers to claw it out of my head, but I can’t.
“What were you doing there, Ember?”
“I went to see him.”
I wait for her to continue, to add to that obvious-as-fuck statement. When she doesn’t, I huff out a dry laugh and hunker down in front of her.
“Careful, baby girl,” I murmur. “Be real careful how you choose to move next. You about to fuck around, but I’ma help you find out. Now”—I lower a knee onto the floor and lean closer to her, peering into her eyes and letting her glimpse the pain she’s courting by being evasive with me—“what were you doing there at Marcus’s apartment building?”
“I didn’t kill him,” she reiterates, jerking at the bindings on her wrists. With a frustrated growl, she sucks her teeth. “Marcus was a piece-of-shit human being and an even shittier father, but I. Didn’t. Kill. Him.”
“Then why did you go there, Ember?” Makeda asks as gently as I’ve ever heard from her. Ever. Uncrossing her arms, she steps forward into Ember’s line of sight. “That apartment was well-known as his ho pad. Why would you go there to see him?”
Ember’s head jerks toward Makeda, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she looks at her for a long moment but eventually shifts her attention back to me. And I decipher the answer in her eyes.
Michelle.
It’d been years since Ember had willingly stepped foot in her childhood home, and she for damn sure wouldn’t seek out Marcus in that house where Michelle lurked, exerting influence.
“I said all I’m going to. If you don’t believe me, then you better get on with what you have planned. But the answer isn’t going to change.”
Rising, I’m almost rocked back on my heels by the blast of heat surging through me. She thinks this is a game? Thinks we’re playing fucking show-and-tell? She’s in a torture chamber, andin this moment, with all these people here prepared and eager to witness her death, she isn’t better than Deacon or Xavier. Nah, she’s worse. To them, she killed not just the head of Cross but her own father. To them, she’s worse than any traitor.
“Were you working with Deacon and Xavier?”
Unbidden, an image of Deacon’s body invades my mind. Just last night, she confessed she’d done that for me. Because he’d hurt me. But could it have been for an alternative reason? After all, dead men can’t talk…
She recoils in shock… or flinches in guilt.
“What?” She frowns, and what sounds like genuine offense and hurt echoes in her voice. “Are you serious right now? You believe I…” She trails off, but I pick it up for her.
“You killed Deacon before we could get to him.” I tilt my head. “Was it because you didn’t want him speaking to me? You afraid of what he had to tell me?”
Disgust darkens her expression, and the shit leaves me winded.
With my back to the rest of the people in the room, I risk briefly closing my eyes. Risk that momentary sign of vulnerability. I believe her. I believe she didn’t have anything to do with Deacon or Xavier. Or the attempt on my life. Even with all signs pointing to the exact opposite. And yet, it won’t change a mu’fucking thing. Except my loathing for myself. I won’t ever be able to wash the stink of that clean.
“Fuck you,” she coldly snarls.
The blow of it, of the hatred drenching those two words, has my body aching but I step back and away from her. I don’t try to smother the pain. Nah, I bask in it, fucking roll in it. Because what kind of man abandons the woman he… the woman he claimed for his own to this fate? I’m no better than Michelle, killing my father for a come up.