“Harlow is not our enemy. There’s—fuck!” I scrub my hand down my face. “There is a lot that we didn’t know. About why things are so tense between her and her parents, and it’s not my story to share. That said, she has a very strong reason to be angry at them. They have done some truly unforgivable things to their own children.”
Bryce shakes his head and laughs indignantly. “I can’t believe it. She’s got to you.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did. I didn’t think it was possible, but she’s done it,” Bryce says. “Next thing we know, you’ll be saying Harrick doesn’t have to die.”
“Well, Harrick doesn’t have to die because he’s already dead,” I say.
“How?” Carter asks.
“Harlow killed him, along with her mother,” I say.
“Did you see the bodies?” Bryce asks.
I shake my head. “No, but considering my wife is a serial killer who murders abusers, it’s not a stretch to believe that she would take care of the ones in her own life.”
They all quiet. Carter and Bryce exchange a look.
“I saw her afterward,” I say. “She’s not that good of an actress. She just lost it yesterday. Broke down in the garden and then destroyed Harrick’s study with a fire poker.”
Carter steps forward. “If Harrick and Liza are dead, then who’s in charge?”
“Able, I suppose—assuming she hasn’t killed him by now,” I say.
“Weren’t you supposed to be watching her?” Naima asks.
I rub both hands down my face. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I fucked up. She saw the orange in my aura this morning before I was fully awake and she ran off and I don’t know where she went or what to do, and fuck?—”
I pace away from them, trying to ease the tension in my chest. I’m so angry at myself, I can barely breathe. The suffocating tightness in my chest slowly abates. I take three deep breaths and finally turn back to my friends.
“I can’t believe you can see color,” Bryce says.
“I knew it,” Naima says, beaming. “I saw you look at that woman and I knew it.” She points at Bryce. “You owe me a bottle of wine.”
Bryce groans and waves a dismissive hand at her. “Unbelievable. When did it happen?”
“Yesterday, during the whole fire-poker-in-the-study situation,” I say.
“Thatwouldget you going,” Carter says, rolling his eyes.
I run both hands through my hair, tugging at the ends. “I almost had her—reallyhad her. And I can’t believe I fucked up so monumentally at such a critical moment.”
Back when we arrived in Lunameade, I was so certain this would be easy. I didn’t know then that a woman would rip out the seams of my life and I’d want to thank her for it.
Naima crosses the courtyard and pulls me into a hug. I don’t even bother fighting it.
I tried to be blind to it, but I always felt the discord in Harlow. Her parents wielded her like an assassin’s blade, so she made herself sharper. But beneath that cutting exterior, she is something else entirely.
Her almost-admission of love and the abject panic in her eyes are cemented in my brain.
I didn’t know I would find someone who understood grief like I do, who knows what it is to lose and to make that loss fuel. For ten years, I let my heart rot with anger, and not once did I consider it could be a liability.
There was no accounting for Harlow. I never imagined someone would crawl inside my chest, touch my rawest wound, and fall in love with the monster it made of me.
“So what happens now?” Bryce asks. “If we choose to believe that Liza and Harrick are dead… Where does the power shift?”
“Today is going to be about managing Rafe,” I say.
