Brittany #2
I step closer. She’s trying to breathe. Trying to speak. There’s no fury in her face now. Just shock. Just disbelief. Like she never considered she could lose.
I close my eyes.
And I stab her again.
It ain’t clean. It ain’t dramatic. It’s desperate. Her body jerks once, a sharp, terrible movement, and then stills.
The pawn shop goes silent except for my ragged breathing.
I drop the knife and back away, hands covered in red, glass crunching under my shoes.
I didn’t plan to.
But this time she ain’t getting up.
And Oaks is already in jail for protecting me once.
Now I have to decide who I’m protecting next.
Silence falls in the empty shop, like nothing just changed. Like Hell, Kentucky didn’t just claim another secret.
And I understand something in that moment that makes my chest hollow.
The lake didn’t take Bethany.
I did.
The first thing I remember after that is the sound. Not my scream. Not the glass. Not even Bethany’s voice. It’s the thin metallic clatter of the knife hitting tile, small and ordinary, like something harmless just rewrote my life.
I’m the one who calls 911, and that matters to me.
It’s the last clean choice I can find in the mess, the last proof that I didn’t come into this wanting blood.
My hands shake so badly I almost drop the phone, but I dial anyway, and when the dispatcher answers, I don’t cry. I don’t stall. I don’t lie.
“I stabbed someone,” I say, my voice thin but steady. “She attacked me. I stabbed her.”
There’s blood on the floor. On my shirt. On my arm where she sliced me first. It’s bright and real and wrong against the cases that used to hold wedding rings and watches and old coins.
Bethany is on her back.
Her eyes are open.
They’re not seeing anything.
That’s when it hits me all the way.
This ain’t the lake. This ain’t a maybe. This ain’t mud and mystery and whispers.
This is my knife in her chest.
The sirens come fast in a town like ours.
Hell doesn’t get many emergencies that ain’t drunk driving or kitchen fires.
When police lights flood the windows, I don’t move.
I don’t run. I don’t hide the knife. I sit on the floor with my back against the counter, my bloody hand pressed to my own arm, and I wait.
An officer I recognize from church kneels in front of me, his voice softer than it should be. “Brit, what happened?”
I don’t call him by his first name. I don’t ask him to look at me like I’m still the girl who served him coffee on Sundays.
“She broke the glass,” I say. “She grabbed a knife. She cut me first.”
I hold out my arm. It’s still bleeding, thin and angry. The slice is shallow but deliberate, and it’s the only thing in that shop that feels like an argument in my favor.
“She said she was going to disfigure me,” I add, and my throat tightens. “She said if Oaks divorced her, she’d ruin him. Tell everything. Put him away for life.”
The officer’s jaw shifts. He glances toward the body.
“You stabbed her twice,” he says carefully.
“Had to.” I close my eyes for a second. “The first time, she went down. I panicked. I thought she’d get back up. She faked things before. At the lake. She faked her death and then came to kill me.”
That part is important. The lake. The disappearance. The mud and the missing body. The way Bethany played everyone like a fiddle.
“She came back,” I whisper. “After we thought she drowned. She let everyone think I killed her.”
He writes it down.
Another officer reads me my rights. I nod at every line. I don’t ask for a lawyer until they tell me I should, and even then I don’t hesitate.
“Call Legend,” I say. “He’ll know who to call.”
The club arrives before the ambulance leaves.
Royal first. He doesn’t look at Bethany. He looks at the floor, the glass, the blood trail, the broken case. He notices everything without touching a thing.
“You called it in yourself?” he asks quietly.
“Yes.”
He shakes his head. “Should’ve called us.”
Legend comes next. He doesn’t touch me either. He just studies my face like he’s reading a report.
“You run?” he asks.
“No.”
“You lie?”
“No.”
He nods. “Good.”
An attorney shows up within the hour. Clean suit. Sharp eyes. Knows every deputy by name. The pawn shop gets taped off. Bethany’s body gets wheeled out. Someone in the crowd whispers, “That’s the girl.” Someone else mutters, “Told you she was trouble.”
I keep my spine straight. I keep my mouth shut. I do not cry.
Doesn’t get any better. The prosecutor makes sure of that. Two stab wounds. No witnesses inside the shop. A dead club officer’s wife. It looks bad on paper.
But there are cracks in it.
My blood is on the handle first. The hardware store next door has a grainy camera that catches Bethany storming across the lot, face twisted, hand already inside her purse before she even hits my door. She had a gun.
Holler testifies under oath that Bethany threatened me before, that she was unstable, that she staged her own disappearance at Herrington Lake to manipulate the club.
Lottie cries when she talks about the threats, about the way Bethany cornered me at the salon, at church, at camp.
Royal provides statements about Pearly Gates trying to frame me earlier, about planted evidence, about the warning notes.
None of it erases Bethany on the tile.
But it paints the picture clear enough that even Hell has to squint.
When the prosecutor asks me why I stabbed her a second time, my voice shakes, but I don’t dress it up.
“Because I was scared,” I say. “She told me she planned to cut out my eyes, my tongue. I thought she’d get back up.”
“You were afraid for your life?” he presses.
“Yes.”
“You were angry?”
“Yes.” I swallow. “But mostly scared.”
It ain’t heroic. It ain’t pretty. It’s human.
Oaks is released two days later.
The lake story collapses for good. Bethany had been alive. Checked into a spa in Cincinnati. There are receipts. Security footage. Lies stacked on lies until the whole damn thing looks like a tower that should’ve fallen sooner.
His arrest becomes a spectacle. He claimed he pushed her in. He was ready to take the fall. For me.
That should feel romantic.
It doesn’t.
It feels heavy.
When I see him outside the courthouse, the first thing I notice is how tired he looks. He’s always been solid, controlled, dangerous in a way that felt deliberate. Now he looks like a man who’s been bracing for impact and finally got hit.
His eyes find mine across the steps. Everything in my chest pulls toward him.
He moves first. Of course he does.
He steps close, not touching me yet, just breathing me in like he’s checking that I’m real.
“You okay?” he asks, voice rough.
I nod.
“You hurt?” His gaze drops to the bandage on my arm.
“I’ll live.”
His jaw flexes like he wants to pull me into him, claim something in front of everyone watching.
But this ain’t the time. There are reporters. Club tension. Whispers that stick to skin.
I take a step back.
That’s the moment everything changes.
“I don’t want to ruin you,” I say quietly.
His brows pull together. “You didn’t.”
“I killed your wife.”
“She attacked you.”
“I still killed her.”
He exhales hard, like I’ve just insulted him. “She was unstable. She…”
“She was yours,” I cut in.
Silence drops between us.
He doesn’t flinch.
“She hasn’t been mine in years,” he says.
“That doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “The club will always see me as the reason. The town will. Maybe one day you will.”
His eyes go cold, not at me, at the idea. “That ain’t how this works.”
“It is,” I say, and my throat tightens. “You’re VP. You made that marriage for the club. For stability. And I’m the girl who stabbed your wife to death.”
“You defended yourself.”
“I’m still the fracture.”
He reaches for me then, finally, his hand brushing my jaw. “Brit…”
I step back again.
“I love you,” I say, because I can’t let this end in silence.
The words hang there, fragile and reckless.
His breath stutters.
“Don’t,” he warns, like loving him is dangerous.
“That’s why I can’t stay in your way,” I whisper. “If I stay close, folks will think you chose me over the club. Over loyalty. Over stability. And they won’t forgive that.”
His voice drops low. “I don’t give a fuck what they think.”
“But you should,” I say softly. “Because you built this. You chose it. And I don’t want to be the thing that tears it down.”
He studies me like he’s trying to see through bone.
“I ain’t blaming you,” he says finally.
“Not now.”
He flinches at that. It’s subtle, but I see it. The possibility. The doubt that might grow later. The resentment that might bloom in some quiet year when the memory doesn’t feel so sharp.
“I won’t survive it if you ever look at me and wonder,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer, because he can’t promise he won’t. Not with blood on the floor and a dead wife in the ground.
So I do the only thing I can.
I step back.
“I need space,” I say.
Something breaks in his eyes. He nods once, stiff and controlled.
“Whatever you need,” he says.
It sounds like surrender. It feels like one.
I walk away from him on the courthouse steps in front of the whole damn town.
Not because I don’t want him.
Because I do. I just don’t deserve him.
And that’s what makes it unbearable.