Jack (The Kings of Mayhem MC Tennessee 1)

Her words spin around me, weaving a web of confusion that leave me momentarily speechless.

“You dated him?”

“I loved him!” she yells suddenly, making me jump. “But he couldn’t see past you to realize that.”

I back away, my knees wobbly, my heart beating wildly in my chest.

“Instead, he kept me at a distance while he obsessed over his failed relationship with you.” Her face twists into a snarl, and her eyes glint with hate. “Oh, I was good enough to fuck, but I wasn’t good enough to love. It was always Bronte this and Bronte that. He said he cared about me, but he didn’t, not really. Because when he was fucking me, it was you he was in bed with.”

A past conversation with Rhys comes back to mind. “You were the girl he grew up with,” I say, remembering what he’d told me. They’d grown up on the same street and were high school sweethearts. But he’d broken up with her when he started at TSU because he didn’t think a long-distance relationship would work. Then he met me.

“When his parents brought him home, he was broken. He wasn’t the boy who left for college.” Her eyes narrow. “You did that to him. You changed him. You turned his head inside out until he couldn’t think straight anymore. But I still loved him, and I tried… I tried to put him back together again.” A darker storm falls across her face as she sucks in a deep breath in an attempt to steady her emotions. “But it didn’t work, and he died.”

“I had no idea… I mean… I…”

“I-I-I…” she mocks my stammering as she comes closer, her eyes alive with madness. “He died… because. Of. You.”

The accusation makes me take another step back. “The article I read said it was an accident.”

She scoffs. “It wasn’t no accident.”

“There were skid marks. He overcorrected—”

“It was no accident.”

“The medical examiner said—”

“I made it happen!” she yells, and I rear back as if her words actually reach out of her mouth and slap me.

Stumbling backward until my shoulders hit the wall behind me, the color drains instantly from my face. “Wh-what do you mean?”

Riley’s eyes harden, and they are now vacant of any warmth like a shark’s eyes stalking its prey. “I tried to save him, but he didn’t want saving. All he wanted to do was wallow over you.” She spits the word ‘you’ like it’s some foul taste in her mouth. “It was exhausting. I mean… I was right there, right in front of his nose and did he care? No. All he wanted to do was to moan over little ol’ you. He didn’t care that he was breaking my heart when all I wanted to do was to love him.”

Foreboding crawls up my spine. “What did you do, Riley?”

She closes the space between us, her maniacal eyes glued to mine. “I was the driver in the car with him. We were arguing. He was trying to break up with me… again.” She rolls her eyes. “Said he was feeling better. Said he felt excited about his future again. Said he wanted to finish school and move on with his life. After everything I’d done for him since he’d come back, he was going to leave me again. But I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let him humiliate me again. I knew the embankment was up ahead…” she sneers bitterly. “Of course, when he realized what I was going to do, he tried grabbing the wheel. In the confusion, I hit the brakes a couple of times, but in the end, I simply put my foot down on the accelerator and took us over the edge.”

I see the pulse thundering through the vein in her neck and the insanity glowing in her eyes. But then they glaze over, and she seems dazed, almost detached from the memory as if it happened to someone else.

“It was all over very quickly. Yet at the same time, it was like it went by in slow motion. I turned to him and saw he had this stupid resigned look on his face. And boy, I hated you in that moment more than I ever thought I could hate anyone. Because his expression wasn’t why is this happening or why are you doing this to me? No. In those final moments, he was thinking about you. About the love of his life. And you know how I know this with absolute fucking certainty…” her voice burns with hatred as she takes another step forward, “… because just as we crashed into that tree, he said your fucking name.”

The last of the oxygen in my lungs leaves me in a stifled gasp. I feel sick as Riley momentarily drifts away on the memory.

“I blacked out and when I woke, his eyes were staring lifelessly at me.” She shakes her head as she looks away. “I hadn’t planned to survive. Truth was, I hadn’t planned to kill us either. It just happened. But I survived so I had to make it look like an accident. I was hurt but even with a broken wrist, and some deep bruising to my ribs, I was able to get him into enough of a position to make it look like he’d been driving. I’m not saying it was easy, but somehow it worked.”