Chapter 17
Eddie
Vincent Harrow is dead.
The story breaks in pieces, by my design. The headlines read “SHERIFF MURDERED WIFE, FRAMED SERIAL KILLER.”
The forensic analysis of Evelyn's crime scene confirmed all of it.
The oversized handprint, the amateur nail polish, the cuts that fought the body instead of following it.
Vincent used a missing knife from the butcher block in his own home.
He left it in the bottom of his duffel bag in the Our Lady of Sorrows church pew.
He is considered “on the run.” His reputation is at the bottom of the gutter, and most importantly, his body will never be found.
The Red Hands case is officially closed—all fourteen victims confirmed as the work of Allen Webb, mortuary technician, deceased, no longer a threat to anyone.
His body was found by way of an anonymous note, which I wrote, detailing where his body could be found, with specific details of his murders scattered throughout so that it would look legit.
The case file is thick enough to stand upright on my desk.
I signed the last page, closed it, and finally felt some satisfaction for the first time in years.
Sera already looks different.
I noticed it the morning after Vincent’s death, when she came downstairs for coffee and stood in the kitchen doorway, and something in her face had shifted.
The tension she carries in her jaw, the one that makes her look like she's perpetually biting down on something sharp, has eased.
Her shoulders sit a quarter-inch lower, and she wears a secret smile now.
She's still Sera. Still strong, still armored, still capable of flaying a man with a sentence.
But the engine that's been running since the day I met her has downshifted into something sustainable, and the difference is visible in the way she breathes, like her lungs finally believe the air is less tainted to take in with Vincent now in the past tense.
I'm not naive enough to think killing Vincent healed her. Healing doesn't work like that, but the weight is different now. The thing she carried isn't gone, but it's no longer alive, no longer growing, no longer a man.
It's a memory now. Memories are heavy, but they're finite. They fade, even the ones about my sister.
I asked Sera to come visit her in the graveyard with me. I didn’t expect her to drop everything and say, “Let’s go right now,” but here we are.
When we arrive at Lily’s headstone, Sera stands beside me, close enough that our arms touch. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't ask questions. She just stands there, solid and present, her black hair billowing in the November wind, and waits for me to be ready.
The cemetery is mostly empty this afternoon. A groundskeeper operates a leaf blower on the far side of the graveyard, the drone providing a kind of white noise that makes the silence between us feel less like pressure and more like space.
"This is Lily’s grave." The name sits strangely in my mouth, like a word in a language I used to speak fluently. "My sister, younger by four years."
Sera nods. She's looking at the headstone like the text there contains more information than its surface suggests.
LILY CROWE. BELOVED DAUGHTER AND SISTER. GONE TOO SOON.
"She had just graduated KU law, which was my fault. I made her watch Law & Order all the time when we were kids." I pause. "She wanted to be a prosecutor. She wanted to put bad men in cages."
The wind picks up. Leaves skitter across the dying grass.
"Some guy was bothering her. A teacher. She called me about his strange behavior, said she’d already reported him to the police, and I told her to document everything.
Then the man raped her…and nothing happened.
” The words come out flat even though they choke me.
“When I was young and stupid, I thought everyone got justice, that the system works, that this is what the law is for. "
I stop. The groundskeeper's leaf blower shifts pitch as he moves farther away.
"The system didn't work. His family had money and clout, and…she killed herself."
There it is. The fact I've carried for years, the boulder I've been pushing uphill every morning when I put on the badge and pretend the system that failed my sister is worth serving.
Said out loud, in a cemetery, beside a woman who knows exactly what it feels like to be broken by a man the world refuses to punish.
“I should have done more to help her. I told her to trust the system because my faith in the process she was counting on was the faith that broke her when the process failed.”
I told her the law would protect her, but the law ignored her. And then she was gone.
There is no ignoring that kind of guilt when it’s so dense, so heavy.
Sera's fingers thread through mine with a firmness that isn't comfort so much as companionship. She's not trying to make it better. She's just refusing to let me stand here alone.
"I carry the guilt," I tell her, because she deserves the whole truth, and the whole truth is ugly. "Every day, I carry the guilt of being the person who told her the system works. I was her big brother. She believed me. And I was wrong."
Sera is quiet for a long moment. The wind moves through the cemetery, bending the grass, carrying the distant sound of traffic now that the leaf blower has stopped.
"Did you ever consider it?" I ask.
The question is out before I can evaluate whether it's appropriate, whether it's too much, whether asking a rape survivor if she considered suicide while standing over the grave of a rape victim who completed it is the kind of thing that gets you justifiably slapped.
But Sera doesn't operate on the same social protocols as the rest of the world, and I need to know.
"No," she says. "Not once."
I wait because I sense there’s a lot more.
"The rage was greater than the helplessness," she says, her voice steady.
"From the moment it happened to the moment he was found not guilty, the rage was louder than everything else.
Louder than the despair. Louder than the part of me that wanted to disappear.
" She pauses. "Some people break inward.
I broke outward. The explosion went out, not in.
I don't know why. I don't know what makes the difference, why I turned the blade on the world.
But I know the rage saved me, even when it was destroying everything else. "
She squeezes my hand.
"You weren't wrong to tell her to trust the system, Eddie. You were wrong about the system, but you weren't wrong to believe in it. That's not the same thing. The system failed her. You didn't. You believed her. You stood with her. You told her she mattered enough to fight back."
Her eyes meet mine, dark and steady and utterly certain.
"Do you know how many women never get that?
Do you know how many women report and the first person they tell looks at them like they're lying?
You didn't do that. You believed her on the first word when she told you about this guy. That mattered more than anything else."
Something shifts in my chest. The tightness redistributes, just slightly, making room for something else alongside it.
That something might be the knowledge that I did what I could with what I had, and what I had wasn't enough, and that's the system's failure, not mine.
I'm not sure I fully believe it yet. But I believe that Sera believes it, and for now, that's enough.
I look down at Lily's headstone and exhale. "She would have liked you."
Sera's mouth quirks. "She likely would have thought I was insane."
I chuckle and pull her closer to wrap my arm around her. "Maybe that too. But she would have liked you regardless. She had a thing for people who refused to be small."
The wind dies. For a moment, the cemetery is perfectly still, and the only sound is the faint, rhythmic pulse of the bond that ties me to the dark.
I gaze at Sera, the woman who rode into a diseased city with a purpose and burned it clean. She's a beautiful weapon. A fierce queen.
“What’s next?” I ask quietly.
She inhales and holds it for several beats before sighing. “I’m not sure yet. Do I want to be a librarian again, or do I want something different? Do I want to stay at Gas N’ Go where I can keep an eye on this city, or do I want to try the career path I always wondered about?”
“Which was?”
“Writing erotic fiction like I did in Kansas City for five years or veterinary medicine,” she says with a soft smile. “Books and animals have always been my weaknesses.”
I blink. Something some of the guys at the sheriff’s department were talking about yesterday clicks into place, and I realize I have the perfect gift for my queen.
But she’ll have to wait. Today is Lily's.
Today is grief and guilt and the slow, grudging work of letting someone help me carry what I've been carrying alone.
Maybe tomorrow.
My heart beats faster at the thought. The cold beneath my skin hums in response, and I swear I feel Azhrael's attention sharpen with something that might be approval.