Chapter 28
It was impossible to sleep.
Remi’s mind raced through all the possibilities of what she and Everett had discussed last night.
She lay in bed, her head against his chest, one leg draped over his.
His hand rested on her abdomen, on the rough and mottled skin there, still and warm and certain.
She watched his hand there, the way it sat without hesitation, and felt something in her chest shift.
She found herself waiting for him to move it.
He never did. She had spent years learning to live with what her body had become.
He had never needed to learn anything at all. She loved him more for it.
And she loved the seed of hope he’d planted last night.
The chance that she was wrong about what happened with Bobby.
It meant more than Britt’s promise to get her off the island.
More than the boats and fake names and ugly favors that Remi knew Britt could call in from men who lived in the shadows of organized crime.
More than the chance to disappear before the cops found her.
That was survival.
Everett had offered something far more impossible.
The chance that the blood on Remi’s hands had never been there at all. If she could only remember more of what happened that night with Bobby.
She tried to force the night into focus. Tried to drag it out of the dark, piece by piece. Bobby’s face. His hands. The moment everything went wrong. Bobby’s voice, raw and insistent, tore through her rage.
Remi … stop it … Move! … Get out of the way!
Her body reacted before her mind caught up, a sharp flinch that pulled her halfway out of his arms.
“You okay?” Everett asked. His hand moved slowly along her body, over the scarred, tender map of her abdomen, so gentle it made her chest ache.
“Sorry, I woke you.” She eased back down on his chest, sighing as he softly kissed her hair.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Everett said. “You know I can’t sleep when you can’t. I guess some things never change.”
“And here I thought my fake-sleep routine had improved.” She bit back a smile, loving how they were slowly falling into old patterns. “Clearly, I overestimated myself.”
A soft rumble of laughter shook his chest. “You got a cramp or something?”
“Or … something.” She turned her head to look at him. Despite being awake for the past several hours, he looked remarkably refreshed and at ease. His calmness was one of the things she loved most about him.
Everett waited for her to continue.
“I think you might be right. Maybe I didn’t kill Bobby.”
Everett pushed up on one elbow, his attention sharpening on her in an instant. “Talk to me.”
“I keep thinking about when Bobby and I were fighting,” she said, wrapping her braided hair around her wrist, then releasing it. “He knocked the machete from my hand. It flew across the room, close to the foyer, out of my reach.” She closed her eyes as the memories came into focus.
“I changed tactics. I slapped him, punched him. I was an out-of-control, crazy woman. He absorbed every blow as he kept me at a distance. He was strong, holding me far enough away from him to limit how much I could hurt him. I can’t remember all the things I yelled at him, but I noticed he was distracted.
Like he would look at me, then look beyond me or behind me. ”
“Tell me where you were standing compared to him. How were the two of you positioned in the living room?”
“Remember, I’d come inside through the patio panel doors. My back was to the terrace. I faced the front door.”
“And Bobby had a full view of the terrace, with his back to the front door,” Everett said. “He could see the entire backyard, the pool, the pathway you used to reach the house, and the natural forest of The Bluffs behind your home.”
“The pocket doors were open. Nothing would have stopped him from seeing everything outside.”
“You said there were two machetes. You grabbed one of them. Where was the other one?”
“I left it by the tree. I didn’t pick it up.”
Everett looked toward the dark windows, his expression hardening by degrees. A chill moved through Remi that had nothing to do with the air conditioning in the room.
He said, “Chief Brown admitted that they didn’t find any machetes on the property from their search.”
“Maybe someone else was out there, grabbed the other machete, and used it to?—”
“Let’s unpack this slowly.” Everett slipped out from under her and got to his feet.
The loss of his warmth hit before she could brace for it, but Remi didn’t reach for him. She knew that shift in him. The quiet retreat wasn’t distance. It was focus. He was moving pieces around in his head now, dissecting her memories, cataloging evidence, constructing timelines.
“You said Bobby was looking past you, maybe at something behind you. But that was before he shoved you down, right? When you hit your head.”
Remi pushed herself upright and drew the sheet around her, less for modesty than for something to hold on to. The bed no longer felt like a place for comfort. Not with the memory pressing at the edges of her mind, sharper now, demanding to be seen clearly.
She nodded. “Seconds before he did that, but I remembered something I’d forgotten. That’s what made me gasp earlier. Bobby said something strange to me …”
The bedroom blurred as the present loosened its grip and the past came rushing back.
Bobby caught her next swing before it landed. His hand clamped around her wrist, hard enough to stop the blow but not hard enough to hurt her. His other hand braced her shoulder as he bent his head away from the wild arc of her fist.
Remi twisted, yanked, tried to wrench herself free.
He held her off like she weighed nothing, and fresh rage tore through her. How the hell was he stronger than her? Bobby, who spent his days behind a desk, fingers flying over a keyboard while she hauled goats up hills and wrestled feed sacks in the heat.
She drove her knee up. Missed.
She needed the machete.
Needed steel in her hand. Needed something sharp enough to make him answer for what he’d done to her. To Everett. To their baby.
“Remi, stop it!” Bobby thundered.
But he wasn’t looking at her.
His gaze had snapped past her shoulder, locked on something beyond the open doors.
Remi saw the break and took it. She kicked him hard in the shin.
“Fuck!” His attention whipped back to her. “Move!”
He pushed past her.
No. No, he didn’t get to run from the damage he caused.
She grabbed his arm, stopping his movement.
“You ruined my life! You’re not going to get away with what you did to me!” Tears streamed down her face as she slapped him.
His head turned with it, but his eyes were already cutting past her again.
“Get out of the way!” He grabbed her by both shoulders …
Everett’s voice cut through the memories. “Then what happened. Why did you stop?”
Remi blinked as the memory settled. “He didn’t push me down,” she said. “He pulled me.”
“Pulled you? I don’t understand.”
“He pulled me toward him first. Then he threw me to the side.” Her breath caught as the rest of it locked into place. “Toward the machete. Toward the same weapon I’d used to cut him.”
Everett’s expression changed. “Like he was trying to get you out of harm’s way.”
Remi nodded, the certainty hard enough to make her stomach turn.
“He saw something behind me. Something worse than me.”
“And he put you near the weapon,” Everett said, voice low. “Close enough to defend yourself if you had to.”
“But I hit my head on the side table.” Remi pressed her fingers to the spot that was still tender. “I could see the machete. I was trying to get to it. I almost had it.”
Her throat tightened.
“And then there’s nothing. Just this blank stretch where everything should be.” She stared down at her hands, the old horror moving through her as if the blood were still there. “The next thing I remember, I was slumped against the wall. My hands. My clothes. Everything was covered in blood.”
Everett stayed where he was at the foot of the bed. Didn’t move closer. Didn’t rush her.
“Then I saw Bobby,” she whispered. “A few feet away. He’d been stabbed so many times.”
“And you thought you’d done it.”
“I was sure I had.” The words shook coming out of her. “But I didn’t. I blacked out, and Bobby fought with someone else. Someone else used that machete on him.”
Everett looked at her with the careful blankness of a man trying very hard not to look smug.
Remi watched him for half a second. “Go ahead.”
He looked back. “Go ahead, what?”
“Say it.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re practically vibrating with I told you so.”
“That is a vicious mischaracterization of my restraint.”
Despite everything, a laugh almost broke out of her. Almost.
Then his expression settled, and the humor between them thinned into something more fragile.
“I believed it before,” he said. “Now you do too.”
She did. God help her, she did.
Everett came back to the bed and sat on the edge beside her, his focus already sharpening past the relief and into the work ahead.
“Now we prove it.”
“Do you think we can?”
“I won’t lie to you. This won’t be easy. The cops are closing in. We’re running out of time. It’s a risk to stick around to do this instead of leaving the islands while we can.”
He turned toward her and traced his fingers along her cheek, the touch so gentle it sent a shiver down her spine.
“But it’s a risk we should take,” he said. “I will find out who killed Bobby and build a case the cops can’t ignore.”
He said it with enough confidence that she almost believed him.
Almost.
But the reality was uglier than that. The killer had set her up perfectly. Maybe he’d watched her fight with Bobby and changed his plan based on what he saw. Her rage. The machete. The blood. The blackout. She had been the perfect scapegoat.
Pun absolutely intended.
“Where would you start?” she asked. “The killer must be the one who took both the machetes. Without them, we can’t prove the one I grabbed wasn’t the one used to kill Bobby.”
“Finding the weapon is one path.” Everett moved to the chair near the window and picked up his pants, then fished his phone from his pocket. “The other is building a list of people with motive, access, and enough nerve to use that kind of opportunity.”
“PC-5,” she said. “Bobby was on the death list. Maybe they sent someone that night.”
Everett glanced over at her. “Is that how the list works?”
She hated not knowing. Her father had been the most prolific and notorious death list assassin in PC-5 history, but he had never treated that part of his life like family history. Once he got out, he closed the door and kept it locked.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Dad doesn’t talk about it.”
Everett’s thumb moved over his phone, then stopped before he unlocked it. “Normally, this is when we’d call Bobby.”
A strange, hollow silence settled between them.
Remi looked down at the sheet twisted in her hands. “For PC-5 intel.”
“And island gang politics,” Everett said. “For who had the skill to make a body disappear, a weapon disappear, a timeline look clean. And for every hacked file we don’t have access to now.”
“Fantastic. So our best source is dead, and I’m accused of killing him.”
“That about covers it.”
“At least we’re organized.”
His mouth curved, but only for a second. “We also can’t forget the mistress.”
Remi lifted her head. “You think this could have been about her?”
“I think we don’t know enough about her to rule it out. Her husband, her family, her money, her enemies, anyone who might have wanted Bobby punished for touching what wasn’t his.”
“Or killed because of her.”
“Exactly.” Everett unlocked his phone. “Once I connect with the Stingray team, we’ll attack this from every angle. PC-5. The mistress. Bobby’s enemies. Anyone with access to your property. Anyone who knew enough to use your fight against you.”
“And if we do this,” she said slowly, “if we figure this out, you know what that means, don’t you?”
He looked up, and the smile that touched his mouth was small but real. The phone slipped from his hand to the chair, and in the next breath, he was back on the bed, his body angled toward hers.
“I won’t have to run,” she said. “I won’t need a new identity. I won’t have to give up my life.”
“No, you won’t have to give up anything. You can have your life back.”
Her throat tightened. “Can I have you, too?”
His gaze held hers. “You already have me.”