“He doesn’t,” she screeched, each syllable tearing at the night. She lurched forward as far as the ropes allowed. “Nobody wants him. Nobody ever wanted him, but I was forced to keep him. I’m the victim here.”
Rage flared up Lucas like gasoline. Who could do that to a child? Who could weaponize the most intimate betrayals into a life of emotional exile? He didn’t remember when he reached for the knife; his motion felt both animal and inevitable. August’s arms were suddenly an iron brace, keeping the blade from smashing into Beverly’s face.
“You’re a fucking monster,” Lucas barked, voice raw, still struggling in August’s arms. “You. You’re evil. You deserve every ounce of pain you get tonight. Every single bit of it. We’ll all laugh while you burn, you heinous bitch.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she wailed, a practiced stab at indignation.
August plucked the knife from Lucas’s hand and let him go. The second his wrists were free, Lucas’s palm flew, a hard, clean slap across her cheek that echoed. She jerked to the side; the slap opened some black drawer in him.
Memory unfurled like film. Cold tile underfoot. A child in footed pajamas. The kitchen light too bright. A woman laughing on the phone while a small body sobbed. He heard the old voice, the mantra Zane had been fed as a kid, the justification for cruelty:He cries to get his way. If I go to him every time, he’ll never learn.
A kitchen timer ticking down. A little hand—Zane’s—hovering near a hot oven door. The sudden hush that follows a slap. Bev and a man shouting at each other about someone named…Liam. The man calling Bev a whore, a terrible mother, the bane of his existence. Saying Gage dying was the punishment she deserved for betraying him.
“Who’s Liam?”
Bev’s eyes went wide, but then she shut down again, glowering at him as she made a show of clamping her lips together.
Lucas inhaled through his nose, let the air sit heavy, then released it slowly. “Take the rest of her fingers and her fucking tongue too. Every word out of her mouth is a lie.”
August shrugged. Jericho drew another blade from his own belt, both of them advancing with the lazy confidence of men who didn’t need to rush violence for it to be effective.
“Wait. Wait! I’ll—I’ll tell you who his father is if you just stop!” she screamed, eyes wild.
They both stopped.
“Is it this Liam person?” Atticus asked.
She gave a jerky nod.
“Go on then,” August said. “Speak while you still can.”
“It is…his name is Liam…Liam Scott. Irv’s brother.”
For a moment there was nothing, no sound but the high electric buzz of the floodlight and the soft drip of blood hitting gravel.
Then Zane whispered, “I didn’t even know my father had a brother. What the fuck?”
“It wasn’t about Zane,” Lucas said, calm, final. “It never has been. It was about you.”
Bev’s eyes glittered. “Everything is,” she snapped. Honest, at last.
August’s smile sharpened. “There it is.” He glanced toward Jericho, a silent acknowledgment. “Bonus point.”
The knife descended.
Atticus had the towel ready before the scream arrived. He fed her a sip of water, wiped her mouth, and tilted her chin so she had to look at Lucas again. “Last question,” he said, almost gentle. “Just for me.”
She blinked, glassy. “What?”
Atticus’s voice didn’t change. “Did you ever, at any time, try to get help? Therapy. Group. A twelve-step program for anything. Did you ever sayI need to be different, and mean it?”
The garden went very quiet.
Bev worked her jaw, anger flickering, then faltering under something like confusion. “I…don’t need help,” she said, but the sentence fell apart, word by word, as if even her throat couldn’t stand to carry it.
Lucas didn’t need to touch her for that one. He did anyway, because it mattered. What he saw was nothing—long blank rooms where accountability should have lived, a mirror she’d never looked into with honesty.
“Lie,” he said, and for the first time his voice held pity, not for her, but for Zane who had learned time and again that her love came at the cost of his self-esteem, his self-worth, his dignity.
