Then I thought about our daughter.
I thought about all the years ahead of her. All the ways they could use her the same way they’d used me. All the ways they could twist her into something she wasn’t meant to be. All the men who would look at her the way they’d looked at me.
And I stepped forward.
I don’t want to write about what happened next.
Maybe that’s cowardly. Maybe after everything else I’ve confessed, after every other secret I’ve spilled onto these pages, this shouldn’t be the part I struggle with.
But I do.
Because once I put those words on paper, it becomes real in a way it never has before. Real in a way I can’ttake back or pretend it didn’t happen or blur around the edges until it’s almost bearable.
I killed him.
Not Steele. Not Stone. Not some faceless stranger from a rival club.
Me.
With my own hands. In his own bedroom. While his wife slept next to him.
The rest happened exactly the way they planned it would. Steele and Stone were good at this. They’d been watching their father for years, learning how he operated, understanding how the club worked. The club believed the lie without question. The rival club got blamed. Someone probably died for it on their side too, though I never asked and no one ever told me.
The world moved on.
And a few months later, my daughter and I left Arkansas behind.
We drove west with everything we owned in the back of a ten-year-old Honda. We built new lives from nothing. We became different people.
I told myself it was over. I told myself I’d paid the price and earned my freedom. I told myself that what happened in that bedroom would stay there, lockedaway in Arkansas with everything else I was leaving behind.
But guilt doesn’t work like that.
It follows you.
It crawls into bed beside you at night. It sits with you at the kitchen table while your daughter does her homework. It stands behind you while your daughter blows out birthday candles and you smile and take pictures like a normal mother. It waits in the mirror every morning, looking back at you with eyes that know exactly what you did.
It never leaves. Not for a second. Not ever.
For years I’ve carried this secret alone. Years of wondering whether I destroyed my soul to save my child. Years of wondering whether there was another way, but I was too broken to see it. Years of asking myself if freedom purchased with blood is really freedom at all or just another kind of prison.
I never found the answer.
I don’t think I ever will.
What I do know is that I loved you. I loved you before Titan. I loved you after Titan. I loved you every single day in between. I loved you in ways I couldn’t let myself show because showing it would have made everything worse.
And part of me believes that if I’d never met you, none of this would have happened.
Not because you caused it. You didn’t. You and our daughter were the only good things in that entire nightmare.
But because loving you showed me there was something better. Something worth fighting for. Something worth escaping for. Something worth becoming a murderer for if that’s what it took.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t keep living the way I was. Maybe that’s why I agreed when Steele and Stone made their offer. Maybe that’s why I’m sitting here now, dying and writing all of this down with hands that barely work anymore.
Because I need one person in this world to know the truth before I go.
Not the club’s truth. Not the convenient story everyone tells themselves.
