Epilogue Jakob #3
Her brows rose. “What? Jakob! You promised me you didn’t kill him!”
She sounded mad, borderline petulant, like she wasn’t upset that I might have killed Redding but that I hadn’t let her be part of it.
Please God, let her want to be part of it, I thought. If I’d misread the situation, if I’d misread her, then what I was about to do would send her screaming away from me forever.
“Come on,” I said. “I got you something.”
She frowned. “What?”
I held out a hand. “Just trust me, okay?”
With a wary expression, she put her hand in mine and let me pull her up.
I tugged her through the house and led her out the back door.
This cabin wasn’t much, but it was secluded, and that made it priceless right now.
I hadn’t been lying when I told her no one would hear her scream out here.
The land around us was part of a conservation easement, and there wasn’t another human being for a hundred acres in all directions.
This was Mike’s summerhouse. Yeah, that Mike.
Dad’s Mike. And all the shit that Dad didn’t want tracked back to him usually ended up out here. And by shit, I meant bodies.
There was a narrow path between the trees out back.
I dropped Krista’s hand and led her up it.
The sun was disappearing beneath the horizon, throwing long shadows across the trail, and I made sure to call out when I stepped over a root or a rock, so she didn’t trip.
A few hundred feet into the woods, a small, low hut came into sight.
It was barely more than a lean-to, paper-thin walls holding up a metal roof that was covered over in rust.
Krista stopped behind me. I turned and saw her looking around, wariness being edged out by fear. “You’re not about to whack me, are you?”
I frowned at her. “Whack you? Who even talks like that?”
She grinned sheepishly.
“No,” I said. “I’m not about to whack you. Would you come on? I want to get this over with so we can go back to enjoying ourselves.”
She huffed out a breath and started walking again.
I stopped her just outside the door and put my hands on her shoulders. “Close your eyes, or you’ll ruin the surprise.”
She stared up at me for a moment, gaze searching my face, but then finally her eyes fell shut.
I pushed the door open and guided her into the shack. “Okay. You can open them.”
She did what I said and let out a strangled gasp.
There, tied up in the far corner, was Spencer Redding. He sat on the dirt floor, arms behind him, head lolling to the side. He looked like he’d spent the past couple of days getting the shit kicked out of him. Because he had.
In my defense, he’d earned it. He wanted to go after my girl. He had successfully gone after countless other women. The only reason I hadn’t carved him into fucking ribbons was because I was keeping my shit together for Krista.
I’d gone through hell and back to get him without getting caught.
Nick had been watching him, and my closest buddies in the Kings had come with me and run interference, distracting the feds while I snagged him.
It had been some Ocean’s Eleven shit. Krista probably would have loved it, but I didn’t know how close Nick was watching her and couldn’t risk involving her at that point.
She’d been confused as hell on the way down here.
We’d switched vehicles several times, swapping out my truck for a minivan, an SUV, and then finally a midsized sedan.
She shut up when I’d told her we were shaking off the tail Nick put on her.
Even with the vehicle swaps, I’d doubled back several times, my buddies and my dad’s flunkies running even more interference for us, creating traffic jams in our wake.
Only when I was convinced that we were free of the feds did we finish the drive.
“Oh,” I said. “I almost forgot.”
I fished a rumpled bow out of my pocket, pulled off the sticker backing, and slapped it down on top of Redding’s head. His eyes cracked open, and he looked up at me with loathing. That was all he could do. It was too hard to talk with a freshly broken jaw and several missing teeth.
“Surprise,” I said.
Krista didn’t respond. She just kept standing there, staring at Redding.
I held up my hands. “Before you get mad, I want to point out that technically, I didn’t lie to you. I told you he wasn’t a threat to anyone in Kearny, and clearly,” I added, motioning toward him, “he wasn’t.”
She blinked a couple of times. Shit. She looked like she might be about to go into shock. I’d misread her after all.
Fuck it, I thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.
In case it wasn’t abundantly clear what my intentions were, I pulled the gun from the back of my pants and handed it over to her.
I held my breath as she turned to me. This was it. The moment she realized what a fucking psychopath I really was and went running back to Nick for protection.
She lifted her eyes to mine. They weren’t full of fear; they were full of warmth. A radiant smile split her face, and she stood on tiptoes and planted a gentle kiss on my cheek. “Oh, Jakob,” she said, taking the gun. “This is the nicest present anyone has ever given me.”
She dropped back to her heels and faced Redding, her grin turning into something sharp enough to cut.
“Hello, Spencer,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you again.”