23. Kennedy
Kennedy
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"Can I put him in the crib?" Hades asks as we arrive in my room, and without waiting for my consent, perhaps because he noticed the same thing I did in the Greek's voice, Ernest hands him King and leaves us alone.
Instead of taking my son to his bed, however, he doesn't move. He lifts a sleeping King in front of his face and watches him with such intensity that even though I despise the man, I can't help but be moved.
I see pain in his expression, and I imagine it's because he's thinking about the future, about how to explain to my son, if I'm convicted, that it was him who moved heaven and earth to send me to prison.
The scene before me is painful, and I go to the window, turning my back on the two of them. I barely manage to draw the curtain aside before my phone rings. More to distract myself than out of a desire to talk to anyone, since it's possibly either from my lawyers or the psychiatrist who has been treating me here in Louisiana, I walk to my bag and answer. "Yes?"
"Miss O'Neal, this is the laboratory at Bayou Saint Raphael Hospital. We just wanted to let you know that the DNA test result is ready and has been sent to both your email and Dr. Kostanidis', as you requested."
"Thank you very much."
I look at the device, even though in my peripheral vision, I notice that Hades has put King in the crib and is walking toward me.
I access my email, touching the screen with trembling fingers. In that moment, I do something I never imagined I would be capable of: I pray that my son is Hades', because if I'm convicted, King will be better off with the man who hates me but is honorable than if he's Ryan's, the one I'm sure is Pam's true killer.
I have no doubt that if Corey's family found out about King, if he's Ryan's son, they would do everything to take him away from me.
"Kennedy, what happened?"
"They called from the hospital," I say without facing him. "The DNA test results are ready. They sent it to my email."
"I am his father," he asserts.
"I haven't opened the email yet."
"Open it, but I know he's mine."
I clutch the device in my hand. "Hades, promise to take care of him if he's really yours and I'm not free to protect him."
"Kennedy."
"Swear on your honor."
"You have my word."
When I finally open the email and see the results, I hand the phone to him.
"Kennedy, I?—”
"Leave me alone, please. I'm exhausted. You can arrange with Ernest when you want to visit him. I'll leave the house when you do. Now, just go away."
Hades
Two days later
I take the last sip of the cheap whiskey to calm my heart, which seems to be pulsating in my throat.
I feel the old iron chair creaking under my weight as my eyes scan the ring where I will face my third opponent of the night.
An underground fight club in New Orleans is my way of releasing tension.
For a few seconds, I close my eyes and remember when I arrived at the crime scene in Cape Cod almost three years ago.
As soon as I realized something was wrong, I didn't worry about Pam or the phone call she’d made to me earlier that day, begging me to come save her. My only obsession was with making sure Kennedy was safe.
The beach house had turned into a true hell of broken furniture and blood everywhere—on walls, paintings, ornaments.
Kennedy was nowhere to be found, and only when I thought I would go mad because in every room I passed through, I saw the destruction of what had happened there, I entered one of the rooms upstairs and found Vina's granddaughter.
At that moment, the world I knew disappeared.
There was so much blood that the floor looked like an abstract painting.
Pam was completely naked, unrecognizable except for her hair and half of her face. Like a grotesque mask, she didn't look like a complete human, but rather like something between what she once was and what they’d done to her.
As I called the police, I continued to search for Kennedy because I refused to accept that she could have suffered the same fate as Pam.
Guilt oozed from every pore of my being.
I’d allowed the trip.
I hadn’t protected them.
The police arrived, and the immediate theory was that Kennedy was an accomplice to a male suspect.
I remembered Pam's phone call asking me to save her because Kennedy was "acting strange" and had invited Ryan to stay with them.
Ryan, that damned man, had done this to Pam.
But what about Kennedy? What was her role in the incident? I refused to believe she was an accomplice to that bastard.
As I watched the police do their work, one of the detectives said they had access to a street camera and saw Kennedy leaving the house, apparently unharmed, getting into a car, and driving off.
The state of Pam's body couldn't have been the work of just one woman, they said, but it was clear more than one person had been involved.
There were none of Kennedy’s fingerprints on the knife, but they found them on a small statue that they later confirmed hit Pam's face on the side.
It wasn't the fatal wound, but it knocked her out, the medical examiners later affirmed.
Everything that followed from then on was the beginning of our hell—mine and hers.
The mother of my child.
The woman I could never forget, despite everything.
An accomplice to murder?
I'm not so sure anymore.