But I wasn’t going to say that. It felt too selfish of me to be thinking about what I’d gained out of all this.
“I think you should go back to New York.”
I pulled back, and he let me go. “Say that again?”
“I can’t stand the thought of you getting hurt.” He’d lost all the ease that was usually on his face. He didn’t just look serious. He looked worried and angry. “You can give Min what you have, and I’ll send everything I find to you to look over for your case. I’ll find somewhere else to stay, and that’ll keep anyone from messing with you or the Huxleys.”
“No.” I didn’t snap at him, but I made the word as firm as I could. “I’m not running away. We’ll find out if anything’s gone, file a police report if we need to, and then we’ll make a plan. We see this through, and that’s how we’re going to protect everyone. We make sure whoever did this is exposed.”
I didn’t add that there was a good chance all this shit would be traced back to Bradyn’s family. We both knew it. It didn’t need to be said.
“Nyx, I–”
“When we’re done, I’m going to call the lab we sent your and Kathie’s DNA to and have them send a second copy of the results straight to Min at the firm, just so we’ll know there’s one that’ll be safe, even if the ones to you and Kathie get ‘lost’ somehow.” I looked back up the driveway to where a man in a suit was talking to the Huxleys. A detective, I assumed. “We’re going to need someone in law enforcement we can trust.”
Rather than arguing with me, Bradyn simply nodded. “I know who to call.”
Thirty
Bradyn
This was turning into one of the longest days I could remember.
After Nyx and I confirmed that some of the copies of the files that had been left in our cabins had been destroyed, we knew for certain that we’d been the reason for the ranch being vandalized. Whoever had done it had been sneaky about it too. They hadn’t stolen anything, but they’d torn up enough that there would’ve been no way for anyone but Nyx and I to know exactly what had been destroyed. And none of it could be recovered.
If Nyx and I hadn’t decided to put the originals of everything in safety deposit boxes before we’d gone to New York, we would’ve lost everything. I’d only been worried about my family finding out I’d taken the box from Ashley’s house. Someone doing this hadn’t occurred to me at all.
I think that was what bothered me the most, that I hadn’t seen it coming. Nyx hadn’t either, and it wasn’t like she was naïve about the way the world worked, but this was my city. I’d been raised in Savannah and knew just how deep the roots of racism ran in the South.
Like how the daughter of one of my dad’s friends had a kid with a biracial guy we’d gone to school with. After they’d broken up, he’d gone to see his daughter, and she’d called the cops, telling them that her abusive ex was trying to take her kid. The guy’d gotten arrested and ended up on probation. I’d heard, after the fact, that he’d spent two hours being asked what race to put on the report.
Fucking racists.
And I still hadn’t thought that Nyx investigating claims against one of Savannah’s proudest white families on behalf of people of color would come back to bite her on the ass.
I should’ve known something like this would happen.
I was still beating myself up over it when Nyx and I arrived at Zunzi’s to meet Maury Nieto, a cop I knew I could trust. The fact that he’d called me when he’d found my card in Nyx’s purse after she’d been arrested meant she knew the two of us were friends. I wasn’t sure about how much she’d trust him, though.
We’d met when I’d been a junior in college, and he’d been a rookie sent to break up a party on campus. I’d been the idiot trying to make an exposé film about underage drinking in college. An idiot who’d used duct tape to strap a burner phone on the inside of my thigh like I was some hotshot undercover cop in an action movie.
We hadn’t become friends because he’d done something like let me go