Their relationship was a two-way street. Liam knew Darius was holding something back, just as Darius knew that Liam was trying to get him to admit to it.
But he couldn’t.
Not yet.
So Darius stuck to the truth he could tell. The truth that might best help the sheriff understand why he was acting out of character. Or, really, why acting out of character for Eve was as in character as he could ever be.
First Darius cleared his throat.
Then he told the sheriff a story only three people in the world knew about.
The story of why, even as a boy, he would do anything for Evelyn Myers.
“When we were younger, before Eve moved, there was a boy who lived in the neighborhood who really, really didn’t like me,” Darius started. “Even now, two decades later, I have no idea why he hated me as much as he did. I wasn’t mean to him, didn’t ignore him, never fanned the flames when he still tried to bully me. He just didn’t like me. Every summer he spent with his grandmother, he would find ways to peck at me. Not Eve—who, by the way, tried to fight him multiple times in my name—just me.”
The heaviness of memory pressed into Darius’s back.
He was uncomfortable, but he continued.
“Then one summer, something in him changed. He wasn’t just some annoying kid who was annoyed by me, he was angry. Andthen that anger almost killed me.” Liam’s eyes widened a little. It was enough to verify that the man really hadn’t known the story. That there hadn’t been a thread of town gossip about him that Darius had managed to miss the past several years.
He was glad for it.
This was his and Eve’s story. It wasn’t some cheap tale to give out for some kind of shock value or as a way to break boredom.
“Before the steel mill ruled this town by itself, there was a tractor-supply company that employed a lot of the town,” Darius explained. “They had two locations—the main office, and a warehouse where they stored equipment and occasionally did maintenance. The warehouse was rarely staffed unless someone actively needed to use what was inside or do a pickup. It was also two miles from my house. Which is how Jon got me there on foot and alone.”
Darius shook his head, unable to avoid the anger he had at himself for being so stupid back then.
He said as much now.
“I was naive enough to believe him when he said he and Eve had found something that they wanted to show me,” he continued. “The second he said Eve was there, I was already anxious that I wasn’t, so I followed him into the warehouse without blinking an eye. But she wasn’t there, and Jon attacked. He got the upper hand, and before I knew it, I was tied up to an old industrial rotary tiller.” Darius laughed. It was in bitter disbelief, even all these years later. “He had jerry-rigged the tiller to twist the rope until it broke or until I was pulled up to the first blade.”
“My God,” the sheriff interrupted.
Darius understood the knee-jerk reaction. The horror, the sudden escalation of it all, had made it feel like he had been placed in a tub of ice in the moment. It wasn’t until the tillerturned on and started to drag him backward that young Darius pushed his shock aside to fight against the rope.
“No matter how much he hated me, he couldn’t stomach watching whatever happened next. He left when I was a foot away from the first blade.” Darius shook his head a little. He could still feel the twisting panic in his stomach like it had only happened yesterday. “The rope was for industrial use, and the knot he’d tied was surprisingly effective. I couldn’t untie it, and I couldn’t miss that first blade, no matter how much I moved.”
It had been the single most terrifying moment of his existence.
He would die alone, in a terrible way, on the floor of a warehouse his dad and police would never think to look in, while his mother would never care to look for him at all.
The quiet son of parents who were never there, gone missing at the hands of a bully down the road.
Darius smiled.
“But I had Eve.”
Warmth spread over that twisting terror in his gut.
The scariest moment of his young life held hands with one of the most profound.
“She got worried when I wasn’t home, and instead of waiting around to know the reason, she went directly to Jon’s house.”
“How did she know he was behind it?” Liam asked. It was a genuine question, no suspicion that it might have warranted from an outsider.
Darius couldn’t help but give a little laugh.
