It was obvious that she was out for the count.
But it was the woman leaning against the side of the house that did interest me.
Blood was running in rivulets down Iris’s face.
Her shirt and jeans were covered in it, too.
But it was the odd, vacant look in Iris’s eyes that had my throat seizing.
“Oh, fuck me.” I hurried toward her. “Baby. What happened?”
She started to cry, and I pulled her into my arms, careful with her arm and her face.
I felt the blood start to seep into my shirt, and her goddamn sobs were breaking my heart.
Before she could explain, Iris scrambled to her feet and ran toward who I now realized was her sister.
Her sister looked rough.
As in, I’d never seen her look bad, but her weeks on the run made her look like a shadow of herself.
“Oh, God,” Iris whispered as she dropped down. “Is she okay?”
I didn’t beat around the bush. “She’s dead, honey.”
Iris looked at me with such sorrow in her eyes that I now realized that she hadn’t known.
“Please, you have to help me,” Iris cried, wiping her tears. “You have to help me.”
Gathering her into my arms and ignoring the blood, I hugged her so tight that she squeaked.
I didn’t let go of her until she’d stopped shaking.
“They can’t know.” She breathed in so deeply that her breasts pressed against my diaphragm. “They’ll break if they know that it was all an act. That she…”
“That she tried to kill you while of sound mind?” I filled in. “That they spawned a daughter that was a psychopath, not a schizophrenic?”
Her breath hitched. “They’ll hate me.”
I smoothed my hand down her hair, my fingers catching on a piece of foam.
Foam that’d been in the couch that was pressed against Iris’s back. Foam that’d come out of the couch following the withdrawal of the knife that’d been meant for her face.
“We need to call the cops.” She sighed. “I can’t make you do this.”
I stilled her hand when it shakily made a move for her purse.
“This wasn’t your fault,” I told her bluntly. “What happened? It was fucking awful. But it wasn’t your fault. You defended yourself.”
Her breath hitched. “I’ll never be able to look at my parents or Anderson again.”
There was a long pause from me before I said, “Your parents won’t matter. But I’ll take care of Anderson. I won’t let him hate you.”
“You are going to tell him? What do I say to the cops?” she whispered.
In answer, I pulled her into the house, walked straight toward the bathroom, and turned the shower on. Once it was hot, I stepped into the shower fully clothed, pulling her right along with me.
Her body was shaking again, so I pulled her in tight once again, and waited another ten minutes until her body had stopped with the shaking before I reached for the shampoo and started to wash her hair.
I made a mental checklist in my head of the things that I would need to do to clean up after I’d taken care of the body.
Because I wasn’t calling the cops.
No. I called my brothers.
• • •
“Damn,” I heard Price say as he surveyed the scene. “How the hell?”
“Best guess? When she got hit in the chest with the helmet, it caused her heart to stop.” I jerked my chin toward the helmet that was lying next to where Abby’s body had once lain.
An hour ago, my brothers had arrived.
Twenty minutes ago, Easton had.
Five minutes ago, the body had been carted out in an old piece of furniture that was loaded into a box truck.
That box truck then had about fifteen other pieces of furniture loaded into it that were covered in blood in some way.
My brother had sent the furniture back to his warehouse where they would be decontaminated in the guise of removing Teller’s blood.
“That’s just unlucky,” Rook murmured, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at the scene. “After hearing what I did tonight, I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the parents to know that their daughter’s a fucked-up asshole and can’t really blame it on her fake diagnosis of schizophrenia.”
“Speaking of that,” Haggard grunted. “How do we know that she wasn’t just lying about that? Wouldn’t that be something someone who was sick would do?”
Yeah.
Only…
“I got from the very beginning that Abby wasn’t sick,” I said. “The cold calculation in her eyes when I met her at that restaurant… I believed her when she said she wasn’t sick. I believed her, because anybody that smart and cunning, with the understanding of what they were doing to their own sister written right there in their eyes, would be able to fake an illness to get out of murder charges.”
“The real question is… why the hell did her sister hate her that much?”