“Don’t!”
Scott-Evans skirts his eyes toward Delaney, then decides to ignore him.
“What do you want to know?” He sighs. There’s only resolve in his voice now.
“Daniel Stockton was the third man in that car that day. Where…”
But I don’t get far, because Scott-Evans looks at me like I’ve grown two heads and interrupts me.
“Daniel had nothing to do withanything!” he hisses.
Marcus makes a strangled sound, as though his soul is leaving his body.
“You dumb fucker! He’ll kill us!” He shrieks.
Scott-Evans has gone still.
Not calm—empty. The kind of numbness that comes after the body has exhausted every other response. His eyes are dull now, unfocused, like he’s already stepped halfway out of himself. There’s no fight left in him. No fear either. Just the faint impression of a man who would welcome the end if it meant this would finally stop.
“Not if they kill us first,” he mutters, tipping his chin toward us.
It’s hard to tell whether it’s resignation or calculation.
That’s the problem with men like him. They understand despair well enough to wear it convincingly. I can’t tell if he’s reached true defeat or if this is just another mask—one more version of himself deployed to provoke doubt, to blur intention, to make us hesitate.
It’s classic sociopathic behavior. I’ve seen it before. Notrecently—but often enough to recognize the shape of it. The way hopelessness becomes a tool. The way surrender is used not as an ending, but as leverage.
And standing here now, watching him hollow himself out in real time, it’s becoming harder to tell which version of Scott-Evans is real.
The broken man. Or the one still playing the game.
46
JUSTIN
Scott-Evans is still hanging from the rafters.
Wrists bound above his head, shoulders trembling now—not from pain anymore, but from something closer to panic. The kind that settles in when the body realizes the lies have run out and the truth has nowhere left to hide.
A few feet away, Delaney slumps in a chair, zip-ties biting into his wrists. Sweat darkens the fabric beneath his arms, soaks through the collar of his shirt. His eyes keep flicking around the room, never landing anywhere for long, like a trapped animal still searching for a door that no longer exists.
We’ve already burned through the lies. Stripped them bare. Shattered them. What’s left is truth—and it’s ugly. Reluctant. Dragged out of them inch by inch, claw mark by claw mark.
Then Scott-Evans speaks. And the words come out wrong. They’re too fast and too sharp, and too tragic.
This one detail—this single fracture—splits open everything we thought we knew about the night Missy Hale died. We knew there was a third man. We were told who it was. His own father placed Daniel Stockton behind the wheel.
“It wasn’t Daniel,” Scott-Evans says again, hoarse, like repeating it might make it less real.
I stop moving. So does Titan.
“What?” I ask, the word barely audible.
Scott-Evans lifts his head. His eyes are bloodshot, his mouth twisting into something bitter and broken, like even now he can’t quite believe he’s saying it. “Daniel Stockton wasn’t even there that day.”
Delaney exhales—a thin, shaking breath. He doesn’t argue or try to deny it. He too, now looks somewhat relieved.
Something cold slides down my spine.
