Page 345 of Wicked Brutal

“He said he wanted time alone with me before Switzerland. That he’d make a trip out of it. Shopping. Dinner. A few days, just us, before he dropped me at the school.”

My jaw locks so hard my teeth hurt. Dad’s hand closes around my forearm. I haven’t moved. He does it anyway, because he knows exactly what I want to do.

“What did that mean to you?”

Ally has gone pale. “That I was out of time. That whatever we were going to do, it had to be before Friday, or it was never happening.”

“Did something happen with your mother while Roman and Victor were outside?”

“Yes.” Her eyes drop. “Mom pulled me upstairs. Fast. Like she’d been waiting for a chance. And she showed me everything she’d hidden.”

Arthur’s team opens another binder. Ally looks toward it, and her face does something complicated — grief and pride tangled together.

“Photographs. Notes. Names, dates. Things she’d overheard him say on the phone over years. Things he’d done. Things he was part of. She’d been collecting it the whole time. Quietly. For years. In a place he’d never look, because he thought she was too beaten down to do anything but survive him.”

“What did she tell you to do with it?”

“Get it out of the house.” Ally’s voice breaks clean in half. “She said if anything ever happened to her, somebody had to know. She said it like—“ She stops. Swallows. “She said it like she already knew what was coming.”

My chest caves in. Because that’s the part I can’t get past. Jane knew. Maybe not the exact moment, not the marble, not that night specifically. But she stood in front of her daughter and handed over years of evidence and told her to get it out in case something happened to me, and then twenty minutes later she put her own body between Roman and her children and it did.

“What did you do?”

“I photographed as much as I could. I couldn’t take the originals — he’d have noticed. So I took pictures with my phone, page after page, as fast as I could.”

“Where did you send them?”

“To you. Immediately. Everything, as I shot it.”

“What happened afterward?”

“Dad knew something was wrong.” Ally rubs her palms down her dress. “He kept watching me. Watching Mom. Asking questions in that voice. I was terrified he could see it on us. So I texted Ryan.”

My heart kicks, three weeks too late. I can still see the message. I can still feel the exact second my whole body went cold. All three, Ryan.

“What were you trying to tell him?”

“That it was happening. That we needed help, right then, not in a week.”

“Did help come?”

“Yes.” Her eyes find mine across the whole room and hold. “Ryan came. Walter. Arthur. All of them. Everyone came.”

I hold her eyes and try to put my whole self into it. I’d come again. I’d come a thousand times. I’ll always come.

Roman shifts at the defense table. The officer behind him straightens.

Arthur’s voice stays perfectly level, which is its own kind of terrifying. “When your father realized people had come to help you and your mother leave — how did he respond?”

“He lost it.”

Ally’s hands start to shake in her lap. I want to get up so badly my legs are burning with it. I don’t. I fucking don’t.

“He was screaming at everyone to get off his property. Victor was screaming at me to come with him. Tobias was crying. And Mom kept trying to keep Tobias behind her, kept putting her body in front of his.”

Arthur takes one step closer. “Take your time.”

Ally nods. Breathes. “And then my dad realized Mom was the one who’d given me the evidence.”