30. Jude #2
“Jude? Where are you going?” The panic in his voice makes me pause.
“You got on a flight to come here after three years. I don’t know the lengths and risks you took to get here. But if you aren’t prepared to take a risk by trusting me and telling me the truth, then you need to leave now. And this time, don’t come back.”
The words kill me inside. They shred at every flimsy strand that’s fighting to hold me together.
He came here for me. He couldn’t function without me.
But if he can’t be honest with me, we have nothing. I wish he’d stayed gone. I was doing okay. Seeing him again has allowed hope to spark inside me—a small, pathetic fleck in an otherwise dark pit. I need to snuff it out before I spend all night crying over him again.
Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I keep walking, and for the second time this evening, I’m grabbed by the upper arm. Only this time, it’s with a heartbreaking gentleness that makes me fight back tears as my bravado evaporates.
“I’m sorry, Jude.” His voice is thick, as if it’s taking everything in him to speak. “I’ll tell you… because I can’t stand to watch you run from me again. I’d sell my fucking soul for more time with you. Even if you won’t be able to look at me again after.”
“You don’t know that,” I breathe.
“I do. But you still want to know, don’t you?”
I nod.
We’re getting somewhere. Finally.
But it’s never been just about me knowing the truth. It’s been about Slade. He needs to be honest with himself. Because I know—at least, every cell in my body hopes—that whatever he’s about to tell me will make him see himself differently once he understands he isn’t the monster he claims to be.
Because I refuse to believe he’s capable of killing someone he loves.
My throat is raw and burning. “Go on,” I coax softly.
“She was having an affair,” Slade hisses the word like it’s difficult to say out loud. “I caught her arguing with her lover. I was so mad at her. So fucking mad. That she’d do that to my father, to all of us. And I… I lost it. I totally lost it. I… killed her.”
I search his eyes for doubt in what he’s admitting to. There’s remorse there, but nothing else.
“You strangled her?” I whisper.
I thought what he told me that final night on his boat—about holding her around the throat as he watched the light fade from her eyes—was merely a cruel way to stop me asking difficult questions.
Tears sting my eyes. I prayed it wasn’t true.
“I might as well have strangled her… I didn’t save her,” he chokes.
“Wh-what? I don’t understand.”
“I was so angry, Jude. I didn’t look at the bottle before I threw it.
I wasn’t aiming for her, but it broke, and she got splashed and…
” His face contorts, lost in a harrowing memory.
“Her fucking EpiPen was in the car! She always had it with her. Always. Until the one fucking time she needed it! Jesus,” he sobs, hanging his head.
“She had an allergy?”
His face is stricken with grief. “Peanuts. My father wouldn’t allow any nuts onboard.
But cooking oil had been brought on somehow.
Goddamn peanut oil.” He holds his hands up, staring at the backs of them like they’re weapons used to end someone’s life.
“I held her. I felt her struggling to breathe beneath my hands. Felt her dying. She fucking tried to smile and tell me it would be okay as I ran off to get her medication. But I knew. I fucking knew I’d be too late.
Before I made it back, I blacked out. Only after I woke up on that other boat did I find out my father’s had gone up in flames. ”
“With your mother still on it.”
He screws his face up, pushing his head into his hands. “Yeah.”
The final night in South Africa he told me about the stranger on the boat who helped him.
I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for him waking up without the people he knew and loved. Then never seeing them again.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him in a gentle voice. “You were going back to her with her medicine. She might have been fine if you’d gotten to her. You don’t know—”
“I do know! I killed her. Fire or not, she wouldn’t have survived without her medication.
She almost died as a child and again as a teenager.
The only reason she survived those times is because she got a shot quick enough.
She should have been safe on my father’s boat. She should have been safe with me.”
“She was safe with you! It’s not your fault.
You could ask why she left her medication in the car, or why that oil was on the boat.
You could ask if it was the fire that was the real cause of her death.
You could ask a million questions about how what happened that day came to be.
But you don’t. You keep blaming yourself for a horrible, horrible accident. Why? Why are you torturing yourself?”
He lifts tear-filled eyes to mine and the sight makes my heart stall.
“You’re not a killer,” I whisper. “I know you. I’ve seen the real you. And you’re not this evil person you’re making yourself out to be.”
“It was me. I know it. And my family knows it. They know it wasn’t the fire that killed her. Her cause of death must have been in the autopsy.”
“You don’t know that,” I cry, desperate for him to believe me, to consider for a moment that there could be another explanation.
There has to be.
“It’s the one thing I’m certain of. I know my family, Jude. It’s why they held that press conference the day after it happened. It’s why my father used the specific words he did. He was delivering a message to me. They knew. And they wanted me to know that they did.”
“Beauforts stick together,” I whisper.
He drags in a slow, rough breath. “It was my father’s message to me. Telling me they knew what I did and were covering it up.”
“They announced to the world you were dead,” I say.
“It was that or let me face a life behind bars. They were giving me a chance to remain free.”
I wish I could shake some sense into him.
“Why didn’t you tell them? Explain what happened with her allergy? They’d have understood.”
“They wouldn’t. Don’t you get it? They held that press conference because they thought I killed her. They blame me for her death. If they’d thought it was an accident, they would never have declared me dead from the fire too.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say again, not knowing what else I can do or say to take the look of utter devastation from his face.
“Maybe I’d have believed that once if it wasn’t for the fact my entire family blame me.
They know I can be hot-headed. They’ve seen me punch walls and smash windows when I’m mad.
I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but no matter what you want to believe, I am capable of hurting someone, I know I am. And my family knew it too.”
“You’re not, though. You’ve never hurt me. You saved me at the beach. And you didn’t hurt Callum just now, either.”
“Only because you’re here and I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it.
You’ve been following him for days. You’ve had ample opportunities to hurt him if you wanted to.
But you didn’t. Smashing up stuff when you get mad is not the same as taking someone’s life.
I threw all Callum’s stuff out the window and some got broken.
Does that make me capable of killing too? ”
“You threw his stuff out?”
“All across the sidewalk.”
The corner of Slade’s mouth lifts into a ghost of a smirk. “Good girl.”
I shiver at the glow coming back to his eyes and lean closer, lifting my hands to stroke his cheekbones and along his jaw.
He sucks in a sharp breath at the contact.
“You made me remember who I am. You made me strong again. And I’m going to do the same for you,” I breathe.
I trace his lips, admiring their softness. Remembering the gentle kisses they can give, the tender words they can say. Only a man with a good heart would have lips capable of such things. A man with a golden soul, just like Nandi said.
“Jude—”
“Don’t argue. I know who you are. And I’m going to help you find him again. But I need you to promise me one thing.”
His eyes drop to my mouth, and his warm breath fans over my lips.
“I’d do anything for you,” he rasps.
I quell the flutters in my stomach, wanting to sound strong, because he needs to know how much I mean this.
“Don’t you dare disappear on me again. Tell me if you’re leaving this time. I can’t go through that again. I can’t… Don’t fucking do it, okay?” My voice cracks as my composure slips. I thought I’d never see him again, but here he is. Right in front of me, baring his soul to me. Trusting me.
“Ssh.” He threads his hands into my hair and tilts my face up. “I promise, all right?”
I nod, losing the battle to hold my whimper inside as he slants his mouth over mine and finally kisses me.
The alleyway blurs as I sink into him.
It’s everything a kiss of two reunited souls should be—raw, vulnerable, breathtaking, and heart-stopping.
It steals my control, and as my legs collapse, he lifts me into his arms and holds me up, so I don’t hit the ground.
He rescues me.
Just like I intend to rescue him.