“He would have me hack into Tony’s computer and seek out the things that were going well for him. Prostitution rings, where he got the supplies, it goes on and on, but I’d find the information and hand it over to my father. For a while… I didn’t know what he did with it. I didn’t know… until the graves in those woods began to fill with the bodies of each and every one of them. I didn’t… I didn’t know he was killing them. My father is sick, I knew he was twisted, but to be killing them for no reason? And I was handing him the names. Just… handing them over…”
Shepherd squeezes my hand, giving me confidence to continue.
“I started to dig into my father. He made me into this person who could just search through everything and find the little things people fought to keep hidden. So I dug into him. I found something… something absolutely horrid. Shepherd… I didn’t talk you into breaking into that safe for the money. It’s because there was a flash drive in there that would ruin everything for him.”
“Then why didn’t you use it?” he asks.
“I don’t know… because I was afraid? Because I wanted to pretend life with you was all there was? I think… more than anything, I had it in my head that my father would always win. It never mattered what I did or how I did it, he would always win. And I just… I knew it would be useless.”
“What’s on the flash drive?” he asks.
“Pictures of everyone he’s killed. I’m not… I’m not talking about just Tony’s people. No… no, there are so many more people than that. So many, Shepherd. But so many of them I gave to him. I pointed them out and when I saw the photos of their bodies… they were dead because of me.”
“You didn’t know what your father was doing with that information,” Shepherd says. “You couldn’t have known. You just thought you were helping your father get back at a man you thought killed your sister.”
“I didn’t know, but if I hadn’t helped him…”
Shepherd shakes his head. “He would have killed them anyway!”
“Shepherd… if you knew about all of this stuff, about how awful my father was… all of it, why didn’t you say anything to me?”
Shepherd’s eyes drop. “Because I was afraid that once I started telling you what I knew, you’d start to dig deeper and deeper until you found out the worst parts of me. Killian, I saved you as an attempt to right a wrong I did. It wasn’t for the money, it was because I felt like you deserved it. So I planned to just leave you once you were safe and then… and then I started to care about you so much that the thought of telling you anything hurt so badly. So many times I wanted to tell you but then I realized that if I did, you might not trust me anymore. You might not love me anymore.”
“I get it. I had the same fears,” I say. “I was afraid I would be a horrible person in your eyes.”
That’s when I hear a gunshot, making me jump.
“What the hell?” Shepherd says and realization dawns on me.
“Shepherd, I might have done something wrong,” I say.
He anxiously looks at me. “What happened?”
“I thought Tony was going to kill us, so when we were in the forest, I told my father how to find us. I didn’t… I don’t—”
Shepherd squeezes my hands. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. This could be good. We don’t know for sure that Tony was planning on letting us out. So this is good.”
I’m not sure if he’s telling the truth or not, but Shepherd pulls away from me and picks up the knife, which he hands me. We cut the ropes off our hands with it a while ago, but since then have been focusing on talking instead of trying to escape, hoping that Tony would follow through on his promise.
“Take this. If you need to use it to get away, do it, okay?”
I nod. “I told him not to hurt you.”
“We don’t want him to take both of us,” he says as gunfire fills the building.
“What? No, I want to stay with you, Shepherd.”
“I’ll come get you. I can’t help you if I’m with them and handcuffed.”
Panic fills me at the thought of leaving him. “No, no, no. What if you don’t come back for