My heart stuttered. Stopped. Started again with a painful lurch.
No. No, no, no—
“She fought me.” Sebastian was still pacing, still spiraling, the confession pouring out of him like poison. “Wouldn’t let go of the files. Wouldn’t shut up about calling the cops. I just—I pushed her. Like I pushed you. Just trying to get her to stop. But she fell. Hit her head on the corner of the desk. And then she was—she was just—”
Dead. He didn’t say the word, but it hung in the air anyway. Heavy. Final.
“I had to make it look like she left.” His voice was rising now, getting higher, more frantic. “Had to stage it like she ran away with some secret boyfriend. Planted evidence. Created a narrative. Andrew believed it because he wanted to believe it. Because believing your wife was a cheater was easier than believing your son was a murderer.”
Tears burned down my face, mixing with the blood. My mother. My mother, who I’d spent years believing had abandoned me. Who I’d hated for leaving. Who’d haunted my dreams with whispered accusations.
She hadn’t left. She’d been murdered. By him.
“Why did you have to fall like her?” Sebastian screamed at me, his voice cracking. “Why do you both have to make me—why can’t you just….”
He was breaking down. Coming apart. And I was lying in my own blood, dying, listening to him confess to murdering my mother while he blamed us for making him do it.
Rage surged through me. Hot and pure and overwhelming. It cut through the pain, through the fog settling over my thoughts, through the numbness creeping into my limbs.
He’d killed her. He took my mother from me and let me spend years thinking she didn’t love me enough to stay. Let megrow up believing I wasn’t worth staying for. Let me carry that wound, that abandonment, that fundamental wrongness—
When all along, she’d died trying to stop him.
My body screamed in pain, but something deeper responded. Something primal and furious and unwilling to just lie here and die like he wanted. Like he expected.
I reached for my phone with fingers that felt thick and clumsy. Bloody. Shaking so badly I nearly dropped it twice. The screen was cracked—when had that happened?—but it still worked. Still glowed with that familiar light.
“What are you—” Sebastian’s voice cut through my focus. “Put that down. Barbara, I’m warning you—”
But he didn’t move toward me. Didn’t try to take the phone. Because somewhere in his panic-addled mind, he’d already convinced himself I was dying. Already moved past the guilt and into survival mode.
“Sebastian’s mom—my mom—Andrew’s first wife,” he was muttering now, more to himself than to me. “She died of cancer when I was eight. Eight years old, and I watched her waste away. Then he remarried. Brought your mother into our home when I was eleven. She tried to replace my mom. Tried to act like she belonged there.”
He spat the words like venom. Like my mother had been the villain in this story instead of him.
“I disapproved of her from day one. But Andrew didn’t care. Never cared what I thought. And when I was fourteen—fourteen, Barbara—he cut ties with me. His own son. Because of Los Zetas. Because I was trying to survive. Trying to make money the only way I knew how.”
When he was fourteen. When I was two. The timeline clicked into place with horrible clarity. He’d been cast out young, left to fend for himself, pulled into cartel violence as a child barely old enough to understand the consequences.
Not that it excused anything. Not that it made what he’d done to me, to my mother, to anyone—acceptable.
But it explained the monster he’d become.
Sebastian spat at me—actually spat, the glob of saliva landing near my shoulder—and turned away. “You brought this on yourself. Both of you did. If you’d just given me what I needed, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Then he walked away.
Just like that. Left me lying in my own blood, dying in an abandoned building where no one would find me until it was too late.
I watched his silhouette disappear through a gap in the wall, heard his footsteps fade into nothing. And I realized with crystal clarity that he’d left me here to die. That this was his solution—let me bleed out, let it look like an accident or an attack, wash his hands of me the same way he’d washed his hands of my mother.
Rage and grief and justice all tangled together in my chest, making it hard to breathe. Or maybe that was the head injury. Hard to tell at this point.
My fingers found Kirill’s contact. Why his? Why not 911? Why not my father?
I didn’t know. Didn’t have the brain power to analyze it. Just knew that his name was the only one that made sense in this moment. The only person who might—who could—
The call connected. One ring. Two.
