The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(77)

I’m so far beyond anger I’m mental. “You might as well have pushed her off the bridge yourself.”

“No. What she did wasn’t my fault,” Mara says.

“It’s not your fault, Mara. Say it.”

That’s what I said to her when my father forced me to choose between saving her and killing Daniel or the other way around. Mara begged me to give her a shot to stop her heart, and I wouldn’t do it. Not until I heard her compare herself to Jude.

“I can’t let Daniel go,” she’d said desperately. “I can’t let what happened to me happen to Joseph. They’ve done nothing, nothing wrong. I’ve done everything wrong.”

“Not everything.”

“You haven’t been here! Your father isn’t lying. I did those things. All of them.”

And then I said next, “I’m sure they deserved it.”

How many other people had died because Mara thought they deserved it? “Is anything ever your fault?”

“Yes. Your father.”

“What about him?”

“I killed him.”

She announces it. Just like that.

I laugh because it’s fucking gorgeous outside and Stella’s broken body was just pulled out of the river and the girl I love is announcing that she made my sister an orphan. “He killed himself,” I say like an idiot, knowing it’s not true.

“It looked like he killed himself,” she says. She’s studying me, spine straight, stare direct. Not hiding. Not crossing her arms, not defensive.

“Because you made it look that way.”

“Yes.”

I blink and see Sam Milnes, hanging from the buttress. “Like the others.”

“No,” Mara says.

Beth steps off the platform in front of the train.

“Not like the others,” she says.

Felicity burns herself alive. It’s all I see when I look at Mara now. That and my fucking father. Stabbed himself, they said in the fucking obituary, and that piece—“What the fuck was that about the poisoning?”

I regret the question as soon as I ask, watching the words shatter against the stone of her skin. No guilt, no remorse, no fear—there’s nothing there. Nothing anymore.

“Everything Stella said . . .” I let the sentence trail off, thinking of her in the hospital, alone. “I defended you.”

“I never asked you to defend me,” she says. “Not to anyone.”

“You asked me to help you. You asked me to fix you, for fuck’s sake!”

“That’s true, I did, once. And you told me I wasn’t broken.”

What else had gotten twisted up in her mind in the past nine months? She’d endured trauma beyond torture, I always knew, but that doesn’t lead to this?

“My father,” I start, grasping at what I can understand. “How did you do it?”

“I stabbed him in the neck.”

I think back to my conversation with Stella, to just the other day with Mara, in our bedroom. To walking out of the room, my hand dripping blood on the floor after I found—“The scalpel? The one you kept after stabbing Dr. Kells?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t keep that one. The one I have is different. From a hospital.”

“Have you murdered anyone with it?”

“No.”

I think back, revise. “Have you killed anyone with it?”

“No,” she insists.

“Then why keep it?”

“I told you, it makes me feel safe,” she says, and now her arms are crossed, and she is defensive. “I haven’t lied to you. You never asked, so I never told.”

“I’m asking now,” I say.

She shrugs. “And I’m telling you now.”

“A bit fucking late.”

“You told me you saw me,” she says. “So many times. You said you loved me anyway, no matter what I’d do. I thought you understood.”

“I want to.” God help me. “Help me understand,” I beg her. “My father . . . you were defending yourself—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she says, but this admission costs her. “I waited. I knew it would hurt you even though you said more than once you thought that he should die for what he did. I mostly wanted to make sure he could never come after my family again.”

I do understand that, I do. But the others . . .

“Why everyone else?”

Her silence is horrifying. The flat is so quiet I should be able to hear our hearts beating, but I can’t hear anything at all.

“There were twelve who showed up,” she finally says. Her voice is toneless, robotic. “Jamie and Daniel were in a chamber beneath the factory. Then it was just me, holding you, and Jude begging to die. I killed him because he killed you, which was what he wanted, it turned out.”

“No great loss.”

“No. But you were.” Her voice tightens. “I was still holding the knife I killed him with when the police came. I wasn’t thinking about them. I felt the breath leave your body. I listened to your last heartbeat. And then I was surrounded by people who would do their job and then go home to their families and laugh around their dinner tables and read their children bedtime stories and you and I were never going to get that because you were dead and I was alone.” Her voice breaks, and a cold finger traces the nape of my neck.