And he didn’t sound the least bit sorry about it.
“What happened?”
“I’m not going to tell you any details, sunny,” he said, eyes pleading with me not to press the issue further. “You’ve been through enough, and honestly, the less you know the better. Plausible deniability and all that.”
“Is there any chance you could get caught? That even after all this time, whoever is sending this shit to us will turn you in?”
Lane shook his head. “I covered my tracks well,” he said. “Whoever is behind these packages, they mightthinkthey know what happened, but they’ll never find enough evidence to make anything stick. The only people in the world who know the truth are me, you, and Trey.”
I frowned. “Trey?”
“When I got my envelope, I had him do some digging into the people involved in the case, particularly that fuck ass detective, Chadwick. He conducted your initial interview, right?” I nodded. “Shortly after you signed that settlement, he quietly retired and moved to Florida.”
Indicating the envelope, I said, “You think he’s behind this?”
“No. Like I said, Trey looked into it. When he retired, the Boyd family set him up nicely. Regular deposits into his bank account, a nice house on the beach in Naples. He’d have no reason to come back and stir all this shit up. As far as the Boyd family is concerned, their son’s death was an accident. They were happy to leave it at that and move the fuck on.
“Unfortunately for Ryan, I wasn’t as forgiving.”
I was positively stunned. This man had done a lot for me over the years, had loved me, laughed with and at me, healed me, held me. A slew of other things, especially recently, that had done more to put me back together than anything else over the last sixteen years had.
Butkillingsomeone?
“Butwhy?” I asked, though I could probably guess. “Why did you do it?”
Lane looked me dead in the eye and in no uncertain terms said, “Because he hurt you, Sutton. And for that, he no longer deserved to exist.”
My entire perspective of Lane shifted in that moment, like the Earth’s plates colliding with each other, rocking the very foundation on which my opinion of him had been built.
In many ways, he was the same Lane he’d always been. A bit broody if you didn’t know him, but free with his affection for the people he loved. He’d been a fun guy in our late teens and those first couple years of college, never taking anything too seriously.
As long as I’d known him, he wanted to be a cop—wanted to help people. Over the course of his career, even before he’d become an official deputy and had worked at the Dusk Valley Sheriff’s Department under the tutelage of his predecessor as a glorified errand boy, hehadhelped many people.
But once he joined the department in an official capacity, he became more rigid in his ways, more anal about adherence to the rule of law. I’d always thought it was because hehadto. Because the bright-eyed optimism of his youth needed to be shed to usher in the seriousness of his adulthood.
Now, I realized how far off the mark I’d been.
Or, maybe not too far off but for reasons I couldn’t possibly have imagined.
He’d grown more uncompromising when it came to enforcing the law because, at one point, he’d compromisedeverything. Had betrayed the very thing he’d worked his whole life to protect in the most egregious way possible.
The only way he’d been able to look at himself, to keep pursuing his lifelong goals, was to flip a switch. To lock away the part of him that had escaped in the moment he’d committed murder and never allowed it to see the light of day again.
He’d done all of thatfor me.
If I hadn’t already been sitting, that realization would have taken me out at the knees. To be so…cherished and loved by this man that he’d destroy a part of himself in retribution for what someone else had done to me?
I didn’t deserve him.
We’d both been quiet long enough that I startled when Lane spoke again.
“I understand if this changes things for you. For us.”
“What?” I asked dumbly, still trying to pull myself out of my own swirling thoughts.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you left right now.” He shrugged, feigning a nonchalance betrayed by the clench of his teeth, which had the muscle in his jaw ticking. “I did something horrible, and I can’t even begin to guess how you feel about it. If you never wanted to look at me again, I would understand.”
Though not entirely confident my legs would carry me, I got to my feet and stumbled over to him, falling onto his lap. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I hugged him to me, clinging as tightly as I possibly could. Burying my face in his neck and inhaling that deeplyLanescent. Warmth, a little spice, and safety.
