“Does Dillon know?” I asked.
“I told him about you after Danny contacted me. I didn’t want Danny to get to him first. Dillon was upset, because he’d admired our dad. But he already liked you. He started working for you with no idea what you’d done to our family.”
Heat flared again in my face. I hadn’t done a thing to them.
But it didn’t seem like Dillon had judged me the way Zach did. If anything, he’d been more friendly over the last couple months. More protective of me.
Because he knew I was his older sister.
“Did you plant the fake drugs at Grayden’s house?”
Zach waved a hand dismissively. “Dillon’s friend Chad came up with the idea.”
“Officer Bronski.” That jerk. He’d helped set Grayden up?
“Chad didn’t like Grayden coming back to town, given his criminal record. Dillon didn’t like that Grayden had been hanging around you.”
Which was why Grayden assumed Dillon had a crush on me. I’d known that was ridiculous. But not the true reason why.
“I agreed to help them set up their little stunt to make Grayden look bad. Put doubts in your mind about him. But really, I wanted a look at your mom’s old house. By then, Danny had admitted he didn’t have the jewelry box, but he claimed you’d taken it.”
“If I’d had it, wouldn’t I have discovered the truth about my mom and your dad?”
Zach wiped a hand over his face. “I don’t fucking know, okay? Your ex-husband clearly thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us. He thought you couldn’t figure it out so easily.”
That definitely tracked. Danny was arrogant enough to believe it.
What was inside that box? A secret compartment? A note written in code?
“That day, meeting Grayden, I realized he had a thing for you.” Zach shrugged. “The moment he saw the drug package,he blamed Danny. So the rest was pretty clear. What I should do.”
So he took the sweatshirt from Grayden’s place. And it had to be Zach who’d broken into my garage. He’d stolen Ollie’s knife. And then…
“I offered Danny ten thousand dollars to go away and leave us alone,” Zach said. “But that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted more. Even after he failed to produce the proof from this mysterious jewelry box, he still demanded more.”
Zach glanced over at me.
“You should be grateful to me,” he added. “If Danny hadn’t survived, he’d be out of the picture. You’d be free of him.”
Chills sheeted my skin. Zach was talking openly about trying to kill Danny.
“But you tried to frame me and Grayden for it.”
He turned away and stared at the half-destroyed house again. “Had to have somebody to blame. You and Grayden made sense. Why the hellnotyou?”
“Then why come to me today? Why ask about the jewelry box? Nobody knew what you’d done to Danny.”
“Because there was still the risk you had the box. And maybe I just wanted to look in your eyes and see if you knew the truth. If you had any idea how much you’d destroyed, just by existing.”
He was going to kill me. Really, I’d known it all along. But fear and confusion had kept me here, frozen. The hatred in Zach’s eyes, making me desperate to knowwhy. As if listening to him, hearing every cruel thing, would somehow defuse his anger.
Same way I used to listen to my dad’s hurtful words and just take it. Or my mom’s. Or Danny’s. But that wasn’t the real me. I was strong. I’d always been so much more than what any of them said about me.
No. More.
I couldn’t sit here and wait for the worst to happen.
Balling my right fist, I swung. My knuckles connected with Zach’s nose, and hescreamed.
