TJ begins pacing behind her, growing increasingly agitated that blood isn’t staining the concrete floor yet. He’s never been one to care for confessions. If we have proof, he wants blood, but in my gut, I feel like we moved on this too fast. Within an hour of discovery, Miller was grabbed out of his own bed in a shitty motel in Worcester and tied up in the basement. When he was grilled for information, all he would say is, “why don’t you ask your whore.” He threw her to the wolves, or the Ravens as it were, and TJ, after only a second of indecision went upstairs to get her.
“Please,” she begs again, only this time she takes a step in my direction.
She sees the monster. She knows now what I’m capable of, and she still closes the distance between us. My heart kicks in my chest, but I shove it back into stasis. Her willingness to stand by me in the darkness doesn’t make her betrayal any less factual.
“You’ve been Molly’s friend for years.”
“Yes,” she answers.
“You told me your name was Zoe Clark.”
Sticking with the facts is the only thing I can do right now.
“It is.” Her voice is still unsure. She’s a smart girl. She isn’t looking at this line of questions to mean that she’s off the hook. I just need to wrap my head around what’s going to happen before it actually does. She’ll tell me her truth because she’s just as resigned as I am.
“This piece of shit is your father,” I confirm. “That makes you a Miller.”
Her head shakes immediately. “My parents were never married. My mother gave me her last name.”
“That fucking bitch taunted me constantly about not being good enough to have children named after me,” Miller seethes behind me.
TJ’s hand hovers over his knife, fingers twitching against the handle, but he steps away from her, making another circuit of the small room.
Without pulling her eyes from mine, she says, “My mother always told me he didn’t want me to have his last name.”
Miller chuckles. He has to be fucking psychotic considering a rope is around his neck, and he’s standing on a fucking chair. “That would’ve ruined everything. That Princess Whore being friends with a Miller would be too suspicious.”
I don’t pull my eyes from Candi as Miller moans in pain. I know either TJ or Briar just stabbed him. In the stillness of the room, I can hear his blood dripping on the floor.
“He doesn’t even know does he?”
I turn at the taunt, finding Miller glaring at Briar with blood slipping from his mouth and a new wound in his side.
Briar doesn’t say a word, merely drawing his phone from his pocket when it chimes with a text alert. I turn my attention back to Candi. We only have a few short moments left together, and I want every second I can have looking into her dark eyes.
Briar steps closer, leaning in close to my ear. “Phone records show that she hadn’t spoken to him for weeks before she arrived at the clubhouse.”
He lifts the phone to show me the text. Hornet was sent out before dawn to locate the snitch we had following Miller. Slowly information has been trickling in all morning, but at a snail’s pace. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to work through this before setting everything into motion. The picture above the last text is one of the junkie’s mutilated body. It doesn’t faze me, death never does.
While reading over the text Hornet sent for the third time, another text comes through. It’s a video link. With the phone still held in Briar’s hand, I tap the triangle and let it play, even though I have no fucking clue what’s going to come from the phone.
Video of Miller walking down the street fills the screen as the video expands.
“She doesn’t have a fucking clue,” Miller tells someone on the phone.
The video doesn’t look very old, but without further research, I can’t be a hundred percent sure when it was recorded.
“I don’t give a shit,” he spits angrily into the phone. “She’s put herself in fucking danger, and I don’t fucking care if Zoe dies, so long as we get what we need.”
My eyes jolt up to Candi. She swallows thickly, but the pain and anguish that was in her eyes earlier are gone.
“She’s been dead to me since the second she spread her legs for that piece of shit Eric Quintal.”
I expect the words to crush her. I anticipate her falling to her knees at the realization that she’s been a pawn her entire life. I wouldn’t put it past Miller to knock someone up the second he found out Donna was pregnant with my father’s child. His long con almost worked out for him, almost.