is all it takes for her to grab a fistful of my hair and pull it as hard as she can. I nearly slide off the chair, so Nicolas finds a way to secure me to it as if the duct tape isn’t enough.
I wish I could tell her to go fuck herself. Excitement seems to roll off her.
With great exaggeration, she sticks out her bottom lip, mocking me. “Poor baby is upset. She didn’t get to hang out with the murderer all day.”
I let out a muffled scream as she paces in front of me, playing with her gun.
“We’ve got twelve minutes,” Nicolas says before stepping outside and closing the garage door again.
Brittany acknowledges his words with a nod but keeps her focus on me.
“I know you’re probably wondering why I want to kill your boyfriend,” she says, randomly pointing her gun at me to try to scare me.
If I could talk, I’d tell her I already know why. Instead of giving her any sort of response, I keep my eyes forward, not acknowledging her because that’s what she wants.
She doesn’t like me ignoring her, so she grabs my cheeks and forces me to meet her cold gaze. “Gabe loved me. He loved me so damn much, more than he could have ever loved you.” Her voice shakes with anger, or maybe it’s pain. I can’t tell.
“The night of the accident, he met me at the bar so we could come up with a plan for him to leave you. You disgusted him, Katie. It’s why he fell in love with me so hard. I was your opposite in every sense. He promised me we’d be a family and move away from Lawton Ridge to start a new life together. Him, me, and our son, Anthony.”
I try to stay calm, but my breathing increases, and I feel red-hot anger. Though Loretta told me most of this, it hurts coming from Brittany.
“We were together for over a year, sneaking behind your back. There were plenty of times I fucked your husband in your bed. The same one you woke up in that morning and made before you went to work.” She smears it in my face.
“I pleased him in ways you never could, and he had said the only reason he married you was because he felt obligated.”
I don’t want to hear anymore, but she continues.
“Gabe was going to hand you the divorce papers the next week. I’d taken money from my savings so he could hire a lawyer to do it. But all of that was ripped away from me the night your fuckhead boyfriend killed him. Noah stole my happily ever after, and I’m ready to take that from him.”
I want to tell her it was an accident, and Noah never intended to hurt Gabe, but it’s not like she’d believe me anyway. Brittany paces, then she puts the gun to my temple. Though the metal is cold, it feels as if it’s burning my skin.
She’s a loose cannon, and I don’t doubt that she’d kill me. I slam my eyes shut and say a prayer that Owen will be taken care of if something happens to me. Tears spill down my cheeks as I imagine him not having me in his life. It’s bad enough he’s growing up without a father—losing me would destroy him. And Noah too. Everyone would be devastated, and the truth is, I’m not ready to die. Not yet. Not when I feel like my life has just begun.
“You wanna know the reason Gabe wanted to start a family with me? He said he wasn’t convinced you’d keep your baby full-term.” Her words stab through me as I relive the devastation of the miscarriage and how worried we were about Owen surviving.
“But you did,” she says with a snarl. “And our boys are the same age. In the same class. Who would’ve ever predicted such a thing? He’s a sweet kid and has the same mannerisms as Gabe, but then again, so does my Anthony. Too bad they’ll never know they’re brothers.”
She forces herself under my skin with her words.
Brittany laughs as if she finds something funny about this situation. “Loretta knew the whole time and never told you, did she? Guess she planned to take it to her grave until I showed up again.”
With every passing second, I grow angrier. Pissed that Gabe would do this to me, would lie, but then again, he had a way of promising things without delivering.