small clearing in the trees. The lake glistened before me.
I didn’t move as Kai came to sit next to me. There was just enough room for two of us. Perhaps a third could’ve climbed on behind, but for now, two was perfect.
“I’ll never be a Hider again.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I wondered what that was about.”
“You are a murderer. You hurt people. You traffic women across the nation.” I caught his look and amended, “If you don’t, you allow it. Drugs. Guns. There are so many horrible things you do.”
He kept quiet, letting me talk.
“I loathed you.” My gut rolled over. “I loathe what you do. I don’t think that’ll ever change.”
He nodded, looking at the lake again.
I watched his profile, adding softly, “But I’m beginning to hate myself instead.”
He tensed, his eyes closing.
“You are a big part of the ‘bad’ in life, and I was part of the ‘good.’ I was doing my part. That’s what I told myself. I liked that feeling. In some small way, I was giving my father a middle finger because while he was in Milwaukee hurting someone, I was helping someone twenty hours from him. It meant something to me.”
My chest hurt. I took a deep breath.
“Then your sister showed up, and everything was destroyed. It seemed like it took days, weeks, the last month, but in reality, it took only the moment when she decided to come find me. I helped her. I told her how to hide from security cameras. I told her to use a disguise, walk with someone else, literally be someone else. I didn’t tell her to pretend to be an elderly woman, but she took my advice. She evaded you because of me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
It was a weird emotion, feeling at the precipice of two worlds. I’d been fighting against admitting this, but I couldn’t any longer.
“I’m going back to my father,” I said.
Kai turned to look at me, a strong emotion shining in his eyes.
I didn’t name it. I looked away. I didn’t care.
“He can’t hurt my cousin. He can’t hurt anyone else. He has to pay for what he did to my mother, what he wanted to do to my mother.”
“I’ll help you—”
“No.” I was firm. “I want to do this myself. I have to.”
He was quiet before nodding. “Okay. When?”
It was getting dark now. “In the morning I’ll go.”
He shifted to face me on the boulder.
I stared back.
One night. I’d give him one more night.
As if reading my mind, he nodded again. “Okay.”
Then, because it’d been in the back of my mind this whole time, I asked, “Why’d you destroy that house?”
His mouth tightened for a second.
I didn’t think he was going to answer, until, in a low voice, he did.
“You think I’m bad, but I’m not. I do bad things. Those people, whoever stayed there, whoever was a floor above my sister, they were bad people.” A sadness came to him. He didn’t move, or blink, or change his tone, but I saw it. I felt it. He gazed out over the lake again. “There was a room in the back that had pictures of children in sexual—”
I blanched. I didn’t want to hear any more.
His jaw clenched. “Brooke was in that house. She was in the vicinity of people who could do that.”
“Were they there?”
“No.”
I had a feeling it didn’t matter. I had a feeling he was going to find them anyway.
And I had to sit and think again.
I couldn’t slap Brooke; that was wrong. But what I knew he would do? That was murder.
And I didn’t feel any qualms about it, so who was the real hypocrite here?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Kai put me in a first-floor bedroom adjoining his through the bathroom, similar to the last place we’d stayed. Brooke was on the second floor. There was no third floor or I had no doubt she would’ve been put there. As it was, Kai had guards outside her door, outside the house, and in the hallways. Every door and large window had someone stationed there.
It was an odd feeling to step out into the hallway a few hours later, long after it had grown dark outside, and walk past the guards, not having them even blink at me.
I was free.
It was starting to sink in with me. I knew it, but feeling it was different.