fear as she looked up at a replica of the man who promised her the world.
“You have to listen to me,” Colt demands, his nose bloody.
“Fuck you. Did you really do it?” I ask, my fist raised above him after knocking him to the floor.
“How can you think that?”
“What about Annemarie?”
“I couldn’t give a fuck about Annemarie. Why the hell would I kill her? This is Dad setting us against each other, you have to see that. He’s always hated our bond.”
“Arghhh,” I roar, punching the floor beside his head before getting to my feet. Sharp pain splits my skull. “I can’t think,” I groan. Chaos rages in my brain.
“Clara came to me that night.” Colt pants, trying to get himself together. I recognize he could have fought back, kicked my ass, but he didn’t. He took my rage.
“She had a thing for me, but I didn’t encourage it. I don’t understand why she felt anything for me. I wasn’t even civil to her. I was an asshole, but she seemed to feed off that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m fucking sorry. I didn’t do anything. I told her to get on our boat and go the fuck home. When she refused, I drove her myself.”
“Why couldn’t she fucking love me? I would have moved heaven and earth for her.” It fucking hurts more than anything. The truth has hunted me down, and it’s just more fucking pain.
“I love you, Cash. You’re my brother, my blood. If I’d known she would die that night…I’ve gone over that night a million times in my head, I would’ve done anything to change things.”
“She was a fucking slut anyway, why the fuck can’t you both just forget her?” our father yells, blood pouring from his mouth.
I march over to the safe, pull out the hardballer gun, and aim it between my father’s eyes, firing off two rounds in his head. He doesn’t have time to react, to see it coming. Bang, bang—lights out. I should have done that five years ago. Even if he didn’t kill her, he hurt her. He was vile to her. To Mona.
“Cash…” Colt says my name in disbelief, eyes wide and hands up.
“He had that coming,” I state, and Colt nods in agreement.
“We can’t let her leave,” he tells me. “Not like this.”
“What do you suggest, brother? Locking her in your tower again?”
“I didn’t explain well enough. She needs to hear the words.”
“And what words are they?” I sling the gun on the coffee table and pick up a decanter, swigging the liquor straight from the bottle.
“That I didn’t fucking kill Clara!” Colt exclaims, snatching the drink from me and taking a gulp.
“Those videos are awfully damning,” I snort.
“You know me better than that.” He glowers.
“I understand you’d kill to protect me from pain. If she didn’t love me, you realize how badly I would have taken that fucking news.” I sit, my head in my hands.
“You’re right, you would have spiraled into darkness, killing yourself with booze and cheap women like you did when she died. But you’d also come out of it too, when something real came along, when it wasn’t an infatuation but real love, like with Mona.”
“What?” I look up at him, not sure if I heard him right.
“Come on, Cash. I know you better than you know yourself.”
I replay everything he’s said in the last twenty minutes, dissecting and arranging it all. “You said you dropped her off yourself. You drove her across the water.”
“Can you imagine the shock I felt finding her body on our property the next morning?”
“How did she get back here?” I stand.
“What are you saying?” He hands me back the drink.
“I’m saying someone either traveled to the island and took her right where you left her or…”
“Or someone from there killed her and brought her back here.”
“You heard what Mona said about our mother. She said she wasn’t on the island, never returned—just like they thought about Clara.”
“Fuck. Do you think the killer is from the island? What about Annemarie?”
“Mona said someone was watching her, felt it all the time. What if that someone followed her here?”
The possessive beast inside me emerges.
“We need to find Mona.” Colt panics.
“She’s on foot. She couldn’t have gone far.” I try to placate him, but my own anxious heart is thundering in my chest.
“What are we going to do about him?” I nod to our dead father bleeding out all over the place.
“We can get rid of him later. Let’s go find our girl.”
Twenty-Four
Mona
My