Give Me a Reason (Redemption Hills 1)

To that dark, wicked, dangerous man.

But my heart, it screamed louder.

So loud, it was deafening.

“You said I brought your heart back to life, but Eden, you made mine beat for the first time.”

“Get your keys, I’ll follow you to your father’s house.” It wasn’t a question. Jud just widened the door.

“I—”

“Don’t fight me on this, Eden.” He edged forward and hissed under his breath. “My brother fuckin’ loves you, whether you can love him through this or not.”

My nod was jerky, and I lumbered into the kitchen, nudged my feet into flip-flops, and grabbed my bag.

Tried to dry my face.

To focus.

To process.

For it not to hurt so much.

Following Jud and Gage out, I locked the door behind me. My feet dragged along the concrete as I made my way to the rental.

How was I going to tell my daddy? How could I break his heart like this?

Jud started down the walk that led to where he was parked at the street. He helped Gage into the back of a big truck, buckled him into a booster, shut the door, then turned around to look at me.

Freezing me to the spot. His sympathy so fierce.

“I know you want to know how, Eden. I get it. Wish I didn’t. But I do. And I won’t act like I have a clue what the fuck is going down, but the one thing I do know? In the deal Trent made with Juna…or Harmony…or whatever the hell her name is, she insisted that Trent raise Gage here.”

In contemplation, his teeth raked his bottom lip. “I’d thought it was bullshit. She’d given him some story that if she ever had a family, she wanted to raise them here because she’d come here on vacation as a kid. She’d demanded this was where she wanted Gage to live. She was also the one who’d insisted on the school.”

His voice lost its edge, turned soft with understanding. “Thinkin’ now it wasn’t such a coincidence that Gage is in your life. Think she planned it.”

His words decimated.

Slaughtered and devastated.

They also warmed.

This trickle of something through the heartbreak.

Do you remember… Do you remember…

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“Please be safe, Eden.”

I climbed into the car and started the engine, cried a thousand more tears as I drove to the house where Harmony and I had grown up.

Where Aaron had lived next door.

Where our momma had gotten sick.

Jud followed close behind.

And I could feel Gage’s little spirit from where they waited on the other side of the street as I stumbled up the pathway and rang the doorbell, unable to just walk in like I normally would do.

My daddy’s face twisted in surprised concern when he opened the door and found me standing there. “Eden?”

“Oh, Daddy. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” I threw myself into his arms, hugged him as fiercely as I could, prayed I could be enough to hold him up. “Harmony’s gone, Daddy. She’s gone.”

Thirty-Eight

Trent

The lock buzzed as it disengaged, and the heavy door swung open. I shuffled out into the light of day after spending more than twenty-four hours in a tiny cell that might as well have been a coffin.

Jud was there.

Waiting for me.

Relief on his face while torment blistered through my being. I stumbled out, down the three long concrete steps, disoriented and trying to find my footing.

Jud placed a hand on my shoulder. “Trent, brother.”

My head shook. “How the fuck…?”

Couldn’t even finish the thought before I whirled around and slammed a fist into the red-brick wall of the police station where I’d been being held.

Pain splintered up my arm as the skin on my knuckles split. I reared back and did it again. Let the hatred and the sorrow and the confusion fly.

How?

I went to punch it again when Jud grabbed me by the wrist and rumbled at my ear, “Don’t, man. Not gonna change a thing.”

On a pained groan, my forehead dropped to the rutted wall. I rocked it back and forth, agony slicing through. “Who the fuck would do this?”

Who the fuck hated us so bad that they’d slaughter a woman as bait?

Fucking meat to drag me out from the shadows?

It seemed more than likely, though, that someone had been trying to frame me.

At least, that’s what Rudy Espinoza, my attorney, assumed. Way it was set up. Cops showing a few minutes after I got on the scene.

But I got this tremulous sense that it wasn’t that.

It was just a harbinger.

A prelude.

Something to fill my guts with fear and loathing.

Something to drive me to the edge.

Taunting me into fury.

Main thing pointing to that truth was it hadn’t taken much for Espinoza to get me out.

If someone wanted to frame me?

They would have done a fuckton of a better job than that.

There’d been no evidence to hold me other than my fingerprints on the bag of money where the contents had been strewn across the floor.