Page 69 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“You’re as crazy as she is, you fucking cunt.”

“Ohhh, he didn’t,” Fi murmurs into my ears.

“He sure did,” I murmur back.

His eyes widen with terror when I set the knife against his remaining pinkie.

“The evidence is real,” he babbles. “There’s enough to⁠—”

I take off the tip. His scream’s so loud, Hugo probably heard it through Fi’s AirPods.

Hugo.

My grip on the knife goes lax, but I shake my head sharply.

I can’t think about him. This is about Greg.

“Who fucked with the evidence?” I ask again.

“No one!” he shouts.

I take his pinkie down to the middle knuckle.

“It’s not going to make a difference,” he chokes out, snot thickening his voice. “It’s already charged. The evidence is admitted.”

“The false evidence?” I ask sweetly, resting my knife against the remains of his pinkie.

“O-okay,” he chokes out. “There was… it… it was Timms. Her husband.”

“Ex-husband,” I remind him sharply.

And hell yes. This is essentially a dying declaration, which means Gomez and I don’t have to search Timms’s house for proof of his guilt, and we can jump right into making murder plans on Thursday. Plus, it validates the bad feeling I’ve had about the Franklin case since basically the moment I walked away from processing the scene. Something was off, something was missing, and it’s been dancing at the edge of my memory for months. At least now I know Lester Timms has the answers I’ve been looking for.

My gaze returns to my sweating, bleeding, seething former boyfriend. He’s still conscious, which means I can still use him.

“Who else?”

“W-who else what?” Snot bubbles from his nose, and his red, swollen eyes dart to the top of his right hand, where I’m casually resting my knife.

“Who else is railroading Angie Timms?”

“The judge,” he says, his voice cracking. “Judge Brown’s going along with it.”

I beam at him. “Good boy.”

He slumps in relief, the trusting idiot, and with a flick of my wrist, I slice off the rest of his pinkie, hold up the nub and toss it to the floor to join the other bits.

“Why?” he screams. “I told you the truth!”

“Because.” My voice drops to a lethal hiss, and I lean in so we’re eye to eye. “You took videos of me and posted them online.”

His gaze sharpens through the pain, and where some men might be feeling guilt or remorse right now, all I see in those brown depths is cold calculation. “What videos?” he grits out, like feigning ignorance might save him.

“I know everything, remember?” I say, straightening. “The forum. Your online pals. All that shit you shared with them.”

His eyes flicker again, this time in fear.

Good.