Pushing me, but not pushing me too far. Testing me.
“Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?” he asks. “That night you broke into my house? You buzzed a bullet right past my ear, but you couldn’t finish me off.”
“That’s enough, Noah.”
“Why’d you get me out of prison?” he says.
“Because your trial was unfair,” I say, my voice shaking. My hands are shaking, too.
“My trial was unfair?” He lets out a bitter laugh. “You kill, what, eight people but suddenly you care about the justice system?”
He takes another step.
I fire a round into the floor near his feet. Noah jumps back, startled for a moment. But he quickly recovers.
“That’s the second time you deliberately missed me,” he says. “Why, Murphy? Why not kill me?” Heat coming to his face now, the snarl returning. “Why? So you could kill everyone I ever cared about and watch me suffer?”
His eyes are filling with tears now, his shoulders trembling.
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” I say. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
My mind racing. Signals flying in all directions. He’s screwing with you, Murphy. He always does this. Anyone who could be this good, for this long, made a living out of mind-fucking people.
He takes another step toward me.
This time, I take a step back.
“Jenna, what are you doing?” Justin says.
“Yeah, Murphy, what are you doing?” Noah says, tears falling down his cheeks, his hands clenched in fists. “Aren’t you going to kill me?”
“I’m taking you in.”
“Jenna, you heard what he said,” says Justin. “Isaac’s gonna arrest you. We know that’s true. You heard Isaac say it himself at my house. Noah’s gonna walk away from this!”
Noah takes another step toward me, his eyes searching mine, pure bitterness in his expression.
I take another step back, an earthquake inside my head.
“You can’t let him get away with this!” Justin cries. “He killed Melanie! He killed your uncle! He sent Aiden to my house to kill you!”
Aiden.
Aiden at Justin’s house with a knife, coming through the window.
Noah shakes his head slowly, his eyes still on mine.
Aiden.
And then it happens. It comes to me, all at once, just with the mention of Aiden’s name.
I can’t be sure. I couldn’t prove it in a court of law.
But I think I finally figured it out.
I fire another round into the floor. Noah jumps back again.
His momentum temporarily stopped, I reach into the back of my pants and remove the revolver Justin lent me.
“Justin, catch,” I say.
Justin drops the golf club. I toss him his revolver, which he catches in both hands.
Noah steadies himself, looks to his right; Justin is now pointing his revolver at Noah.
Then Noah turns again and looks into my eyes, the odds against him mounting now, me holding Noah’s Glock, Justin holding his own revolver. Two people, two guns, two different angles.
I search his eyes for an answer. Every time I’ve looked into those eyes, I’ve received mixed messages, a series of crisscrossing signals, heat and passion and rage and lust and pure hatred.
My gun wavers as I replay everything in my head, sorting through it all, trying to make the puzzle pieces fit, everything flying at me at once like a tornado.
“Justin,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Aiden didn’t come through your window to kill me.”
“What—what do you mean?” he asks.
“He came through that window to protect me,” I say. “To protect me from you.”
119
STILL FACING NOAH, the Glock in my hand still trained on him, I see, in my peripheral vision, Justin move the gun away from Noah, toward me.
“I’m so tired,” I say. “I’m so tired of all of this.”
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Justin says. “But all the same—keep that gun aimed at Noah. If it moves one inch toward me, it’s a bad outcome for you.”
“It was you,” I say. “You’re the one who brought me to this house when I was a little girl. You and Holden the Sixth were going to kill me. Your first murder together, your initiation into the family or something, I don’t know. But I do know that Aiden rescued me. For some reason, Aiden never told anyone about you. Maybe you held something over him. That bloody knife, I’d guess—the one with Aiden’s and my fingerprints on it. The one that killed Holden the Sixth?”
Justin doesn’t say anything. I keep my eyes on Noah, who returns an intense stare.
“If I’m guessing,” I continue, “Aiden came here that day out of revenge, after Holden the Sixth killed his mother. He got his revenge. He killed Holden with that knife. And somehow you got hold of the knife, the murder weapon, and you held it over his head all these years. You threatened him, blackmailed him, whatever. Aiden would be easy to intimidate. He’s practically a kid even now.”