“Oh my God,” I whispered.
There was my face—my smiling yearbook photo, to be exact, and underneath my face and my name were words in capital letters that blurred together.
WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH THE MURDER OF COL. SYLVIA DASHER.32I’d laughed.
I’d sat down and listened to the Columbia chief of police’s briefing while my mom’s picture was on the left side of the screen and mine was underneath hers. The police chief said I was a suspect in an ambush-style killing.
I didn’t even know what ambush-style killing meant. Like I’d hidden in a freaking bush somewhere and then jumped out?
The police chief also said I was considered armed and dangerous.
That’s the exact moment when I laughed.
So that was my reaction to hearing I was suspected in my mother’s murder. I laughed, and I felt like I was going to laugh more. Like in the never-stop-laughing kind of laugh.
Something was wrong with me.
It never crossed the minds of the law enforcement that perhaps something bad had happened to me? No one thought that I needed help? I was immediately implicated in an act where the evidence had to have proved otherwise. I wasn’t a forensic pathologist, but I knew that it was obvious to see a bullet was fired from outside the house. Did they think I was an expert marksman? Besides the fact that the front door had been blown in?
Why was I even asking these questions? They weren’t reporting what really happened, and I knew what that meant. The police were involved in what happened to my mom.
They were involved with the Daedalus.
Kent turned off the TV, tossing the remote onto a cushion. “Things just got really complicated. This is way bigger than we’d anticipated.”
I pressed my lips together because I could feel a really inappropriate giggle bubbling up.
Luc crossed his arms over his chest. His jaw was clenched so hard I wondered if the lower half of his face was going to snap in half. “That’s an understatement.”
“This is what they do.” Kent dragged his hand through his blue hair. “They twist what really happened to fit their agenda.”
I stared at him, opened my mouth, and then closed it, utterly at a loss as to how to respond.
The garage door suddenly opened, and all three of us whirled. Grayson and Zoe walked in, carrying several bags straining with groceries. They stopped.
“What’s going on?” Zoe asked, looking between the three of us.
Grayson sighed. “Do I even want to know?”
“Oh, nothing big,” Kent said, plopping down on the couch. “Just that Evie was just implicated in her mother’s murder on national television.”
Zoe lowered the bag she was holding.
“Nothing like a little matricide to start your week off,” I said, another near-hysterical laugh building in me. “Right?”
“Right,” she murmured.* * *I stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep, unable to shut my brain down long enough to even doze.
It had been the same last night.
After Zoe and Grayson got back with groceries, dinner was made. Spaghetti. I’d eaten half a plate and then gone to my room and stayed there, pretending to be asleep when Zoe knocked on my door and called my name.
The moment Zoe had seen me in the morning, she’d tried to talk about what had been on the news, but I shut that down really quickly and tried to ignore the look of concern creeping into her expression.
Luc never knocked on the door, last night or tonight. He’d been gone this morning when I’d woken up, and according to Zoe, he was scouting the surrounding area to make sure there was no unusual activity that would indicate that someone had discovered our whereabouts.
I had no idea what was up with Luc. Something had shifted between us. Who he was in my bedroom the day before they came for Mom, for me, was not the same Luc I saw now. There were glimpses of him, when he’d washed my hands and held me at the safe house. He was the Luc I’d begun to fall really hard for while I’d slept against him in the car.
But there was a distance between us I didn’t understand, and right now, when I needed him, he was gone, and I didn’t know if it was because of what happened to his club, to Clyde and Chas, or if it was something else.
Moonlight stretched over the ceiling as I rolled onto my side. I thought about my mom, about how little I knew her. She could’ve been involved in the Daedalus up until the moment they took her life with a single gunshot. I had no idea, and it was unlikely that I’d ever know.
How could she, though? Treating me like I was her daughter, loving me and taking care of me—
Sucking in a sharp breath, I sat up and swung my legs off the bed as pressure clamped down on my chest. I couldn’t lie here any longer.