And I Love You the Most (This Love Hurts 3)

“You were a child.” Delilah’s words are meant to console me as she lifts her chin, staring up at me, but I can’t look back down at her. Not when there’s more to say. To get out of me. I’ve never told a soul, but I’ll give her my darkest secret. She can be a safe place for me and I’ll be one for her.

“I was able to fight back. I didn’t. I didn’t fight and—” I almost say his name. It was so close to being spoken. “I didn’t fight and he died because of it. Because of me. The next time they came, I fought and I got away. I killed two of them.

“I could have done it before, I could have fought and saved him. Instead I saved myself and this is what I’m left with. Memories of him trying to hold back the pain while they brutalized him. He held it back for me.”

“His name was Marcus, wasn’t it?”

There is no answer for her. Not one that I can give right now.

I couldn’t be who I was anymore. Not knowing what I’d done. I couldn’t be …

“I couldn’t forgive myself for that. Everything I’ve done since then, I did for him. I did it because I was able to do something to stop the pain and injustice around me.” My lungs still and refuse to fill as Delilah’s lips part and stay that way, her next words unspoken and her bottom lip trembling. “But you …”

The words are caught in my hoarse throat, making it feel as if there’s a swelling that will surely suffocate me. A heat wraps itself around me, drowning me with an anxiousness I haven’t felt in so long. It last held onto me, dragging me down to the depths of hell, when I ran as fast as I could. When my legs gave out and I had nowhere to hide.

It holds me captive now as she stares back at me, her amber gaze glistening with unshed tears to match the streaks of those that have already run down her bruised and broken cheeks.

“Christo—”

“Don’t call me that!” I don’t mean to lash out at her, but I do. I haven’t gone by that name in over a decade.

It takes every ounce of my being to pry myself away from her gaze and leave at once. Forcing my limbs to move and ignoring Delilah as she calls out the name of the boy I allowed to be killed in my place.

The boy who comforted me when he needed it himself.

The boy who reminds me always, that the bad men always lose.

She cries out for him, for Marcus. Not Christopher, even though that’s the name she knows I had back then. That’s the name of a coward who chose not to fight. We could both be here if I’d had fought. If I hadn’t tried to hide myself in a damp corner of a dingy cell.

I should have known better. I wish I could go back. I wish I could take it all back.

With the thud of my bare feet on the wooden floor, I ignore the tears running down my face as I leave her in the bedroom, locking the door behind me in case she gets the urge to follow, and take refuge in the empty room down the hall. I bury myself in the corner of a darkened room, huddled like I was in my most shameful moment and close my eyes. Wishing I could just go back and make it right. Wishing I’d died instead.

Marcus is the one who was supposed to live. Not me.

Marcus

“The cops are close.”

Riggins’s message on my phone causes every hair on the back of my neck to stand on end as I slice a peach, the blade of the knife traveling along the rough pit.

He continues as I watch on the monitor of the open laptop sitting on the worn laminate counter. “With Marcus the lead suspect in Mr. Jones’s murder, they’re digging into all the cold cases and overturned cases Delilah and Walsh have worked on over the years. Some of these cases are far too close.”

I nearly question Riggins, which cases? But there’s no point.

“We need to pin this on someone and make sure they stop digging. Pin every case Marcus has been involved in on Delilah’s father?”

“Marcus could be a disgruntled partner,” Riggins suggests and every piece falls into place. It’s the perfect plan to wrap up every loose end and fuck over those who have it coming to them.

“I know who can take the fall for it. I’ll send you the steps.”

Riggins asks a question he never has before: How are you?

Staring at him in the monitor, I know he’s looking aimlessly into a lens I know doesn’t show him a damn thing but a black screen.