Epilogue #3
“Yeah, but you’re not a stranger to them, and you’ve already built trust with them. So they might actually want to talk to you again.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I hesitated, head tilting slightly as another thought occurred to me. “Wait. What exactly would you be doing in Seattle while I’m working on all this?”
Rhys’s eyes flashed with dark amusement. “Exactly what you think I’ll be doing.”
“Killing Mattner?”
The amusement faded from his eyes. “I told you I’d always run these things by you first,” he said. “So I’m asking now. Is it okay with you?”
I stared at him for a moment without answering. The television was still murmuring in the background, reporters talking over one another while footage of Ethan Mattner walking away from the courthouse looped on the screen.
I wanted that sick asshole erased from existence, and sitting beside me was a man who would actually do it. Not just rant online about how people like him deserved to die. Not just fantasize about it or wish someone else would do it.
Actually do it.
I thought about all the women I’d interviewed at the Voices Unbroken summit. About one of them crying halfway through our conversation because she still couldn’t sleep with the lights off. About the one who checked under her car every morning. About the one who’d never be able to speak again.
Then I thought about the videos from prison. Ethan laughing. Mocking the women. Smiling while he talked about what he’d done like it was some hilarious joke.
I looked back at the TV. He was grinning again on the screen. Smug. Free. Practically untouchable.
But not entirely.
A strange feeling settled over me then, heavy and electric all at once.
Power. The kind that could decide whether someone lived or died.
Rhys had placed it in my hands, not because he needed my permission, but because he'd meant what he told me after we got together: that he'd always talk to me about these things first, out of respect for me.
A few years ago, the idea of agreeing to ‘let’ my boyfriend murder someone would’ve made me recoil with horror, even if the person in question was a remorseless psychopath who’d harmed many innocent lives.
Back then, I’d believed in the idea that the truth, once exposed clearly enough, would eventually do its job to deliver justice.
I’d believed in that because it was mostly true.
But ‘mostly’ wasn't ‘always’, and the events at Camp Blackpine had finished off whatever was left of my faith in certain outcomes.
Some people were simply never going to be reached by the system, no matter what you put in front of it.
No matter how airtight the evidence, how damning the testimony, how many journalists filed the story…
they would just get away with everything.
Ethan Mattner was one of those people. I knew it the same way I’d eventually come to know, with sickening certainty, that the sixteen Legacies were those people too.
I took a deep breath. Then I shifted even closer to Rhys on the couch. “How fast could we get there?” I asked.
Dark satisfaction flickered behind his eyes. “We could go tonight,” he said. He paused, head tilting. “Does this mean you’re saying yes?”
I held his gaze for another second. Then I leaned toward him, close enough that my mouth brushed lightly against his. “I’m saying get the bastard,” I whispered.
Rhys grinned and pulled me in, arms tightening around me like he’d been waiting for exactly that answer. “I love you,” he murmured into my hair. “So much.”
I closed my eyes, smiling. “I love you too.”
The TV kept playing, but the sound had faded into something distant and meaningless. All I could hear was Rhys’s heartbeat beneath my cheek, slow and steady, and all I could feel was the warmth of his body wrapped around mine.
Over the past few years, I’d asked him more times than I could count what it was about me that made him fall for me. What made me worth the intensity, the fixation, the obsession.
His answer had always been the same.
Because you’re you, baby, he’d say softly. You’re the only person who can see inside me.
And he was right. I really could see inside him. The darkness. The violence. The parts most people would recoil from if they ever caught a glimpse. And somehow, instead of horrifying me, it only made me fall for him harder.
I used to think love like this only existed in stories, the kind you closed at the end of the night and left on your bedside table where they couldn’t bleed into real life.
But my fantasies had bled into real life, and instead of running a mile in the opposite direction, I’d willingly stepped into the middle of them.
I knew people would call it wrong if they ever learned the full shape of our relationship, and I also knew they wouldn’t technically be wrong about that. Not with Rhys’s dark proclivities and my willingness to stand beside him through all of it.
But when he held me like this, with his heart beating calmly against mine, it could never feel wrong to me.
Not even for a second.
THE END
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