Tony pales—and I know I’m right.
“Okay. So maybe he made it out like it wasn’t an accident and more like he was apologizing for killing my daughter. But I honestly thought he did it, and I?—”
“Didn’t call the cops?”
“Cops? Oh, Luce… you know that’s not how things work here. Not in Harmony Heights.” He ducks his head enough so that he can avoid the outrage on my face even as he mutters something I was probably never meant to hear: “Not when I couldn’t risk them coming into my own backyard and seeing what kind of bones I’ve got buried back there. I already did enough of that when your mother disappeared. I won’t go through that again.”
What? He did? I don’t remember… but even if I had my memories, I was only seven when Mom took off. But the way that Tony says that… “What about Mom? You guys got divorced and she moved away.”
That’s what Dallas told me. That’s what Dallas told me… because that’s what I told him. Because that’s what I believed?—
Tony snorts. “Honey, you’re thirty. You grew up in Harmony Heights. You grew up with the Order all around you. We don’t do divorce here.”
His flippant words echo in my mind. Don’t do divorce… I’ve heard that before. Somewhere. Don’t know where, but it’s as much of a fact of life as seeing all the guys around the Fortress with brands on their palms, and the idea that women who step out of line get pushed out of windows, or…
No.
No.
“She didn’t move away, did she? You… you did something to her.”
He could lie to me. He very easily could. But whether it’s because he has Connor’s last words echoing in his ears or he figures that it’s not worth coming up with another story for his supposedly dead daughter, returned from the grave, I don’t know… but instead of lying, he slumps his shoulders and twists his features into a pathetic expression.
“You have to believe me. It was an accident.” Sure. Anotheraccident. “Your mother didn’t want to live under the Order’s rules anymore. She wanted out. She wanted toleave me. I couldn’t hear it. I… I hit her. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and she hit her head. She fell.” She fell… shefell…shefell…“She fell and she didn’t wake up, and I had to do something. So I called the King.”
“Jack,” I bite out.
He nods. “He told me that since I was an Owed in good standing, he’d take care of it. But my rank wasn’t high enough for it to be free. He’d put my name in a ledger, and when he needed a favor, he would call it in.”
From everything I learned about Jack Collins, that fit.
“Did he?”
Tony nods again. “Yeah. About eighteen years later, when I thought he’d forgotten all about it, he needed a favor. While he established an alibi, he had me sneak up into the penthouse of the Fortress and help Reese Collins on her way out of it—and his life. To cover up killing my wife, he had me kill his, and even that wasn’t enough… then he took you away from me, too.”
It takes a second for it to click.
Oh God. OhGod.Suddenly, everything makes sense. When Dallas turned on me, when he asked me what I knew about his mother’s death… I was under the impression that, whatever happened to her, it was?—
An accident.
Another fucking accident.
But it wasn’t an accident. My father killed Dallas’s mother, and Julian somehow knew. Before Dallas did whatever it was he did to my former husband, he must’ve taunted Dallas with it with his final breath. He let Dallas think Iknewwho was responsible for Reese Collins’s fall… and that was right after Dallas found out that Julian tried to give me the same fate as Dallas’s poor mother.
The same fate asmine.
And because this piece of shit was a serial murdering bastard, I was sacrificed in their schemes, tossing me to Julian Fairchild because Jack Collins was a sadistic monster who wanted to keep his son in line by killing his beloved mother first, then making him deal with the knowledge that the woman he loved was married to another man.
And when he finally cracked, what did I do? I ran away. I ran, and I’m not sure if I won’t keep running, but at least now I know the truth.
Even if I wish I didn’t.
But I asked. I opened that door and I asked, and now I have to deal with the fallout.
When I don’t get up and start screaming, he must think that he can make something of his confession. At the very least, he offers me a stunted, “I’m sorry.”
Fuck you, Dad.
