The Devil's Daughter (Hidden Sins #1)(93)
Knew what Beth and Chase were doing. Knew where those girls were being held. Knew everything.
She didn’t have to say it. The glint in her mother’s eyes told her enough. Martha might not have put the idea to kill those girls into Beth’s head, but she’d let the woman walk down that path without stepping in.
Anything to remove the competition without getting her hands dirty.
Eden pushed off the edge of the tailgate, hating that she wobbled a little on her feet, but refusing to sit in this woman’s presence another moment. “We’re not having coffee. And if you contact me again without my permission, I will do whatever it takes to get a restraining order in place.”
She made it a single step before her mother’s voice stopped her. “You’re more like me than you care to admit. You wouldn’t fight against this if it wasn’t true.”
Enough. Eden spun and stalked back to Martha, getting close enough that she got a face full of her mother’s hyacinth perfume. “There are two girls dead because you gave Beth enough rope to hang herself with instead of removing her from Elysia like you should have. There would have been another murder if things hadn’t worked out the way they did. Don’t think for a goddamn second that I don’t know the truth—nothing happens in Elysia without your knowledge. With that camera network, you knew that she was up to something, and you didn’t say a fucking thing. Those girls’ blood—Jon’s blood—is on your hands as much as hers.”
Martha’s smile disappeared, leaving her dark eyes cold. “There isn’t a court in this country that would convict me, so don’t you go wasting your time and energy on it. As far as I was concerned, Beth was sneaking around on her husband.”
Bullshit. But . . . that didn’t make it any less true—or easier to swallow. She wasn’t going to roll over and play dead, though. Eden stared her mother straight in the eyes. “You step out of line once and your ass is mine.”
There was nothing left to say. She strode away from the truck with as much dignity as she could muster, her mother’s words ringing in her ears. You’re more like me than you care to admit. Maybe, or maybe she was more like Abram. He was the one who wouldn’t hesitate to pull a trigger to remove a threat. Too much had flashed through Eden’s mind in that millisecond. She didn’t have the ability to put it into words.
So she went in search of Zach.
He was in a group of cops, their heads down as they spoke in low voices, but he managed a tired smile when she limped over. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
The cops took one look at her and drifted away. There wasn’t much left to see. The scene had been worked, the bodies removed, Rachel and Vic taken to the hospital. There was a team of forensic folk just showing up to work the cabin, but most of the people currently on the scene weren’t vital to the investigation.
Really, at this point, it was just a matter of tying everything up all pretty, complete with a bow.
Zach pulled her into his arms, and she hugged him tight, his warmth driving away some of the ice caused by the conversation she’d just left. Take me home. She started to hold the words back, but the sheer enormity of the day crushed what was left of her resistance. Eden buried her face in his neck. “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
His grip tightened on her. “I have to finish up here, but I can get Henry to give you a lift back to the B&B if you want.”
“I’ll wait.” She didn’t want to be alone. She hesitated, then changed the subject. “You solved the case and got the bad guy. What are you going to do next?”
“Get back to normal, and hope no one on the national media circuit gets wind of this.” He didn’t want the glory any more than she did. The fact that the media hadn’t sniffed out this story up until this point was a miracle from on high—and it wouldn’t last. If she had her way, she’d be long gone by then.
Except . . .
For the first time in her life, the thought of leaving someone in the rearview filled her with a loss she didn’t know how to deal with. It should be too soon to feel something like that for this man, but logic had no place here.
Zach didn’t speak until she’d leaned against the side of his cruiser, her blanket still wrapped firmly around her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She opened her mouth to tell him no, but that wasn’t what came out. “I shot her, Zach. Maybe I didn’t think that the world would be a better place without her in it, or consider the fact that if she lived, she’d probably get a lighter sentence because she didn’t look like she could hurt a fly, let alone orchestrate something like this . . . but I shot her before I saw that she had a gun.” It wasn’t what a white knight would do, and maybe it had saved her life, but she couldn’t get her mother’s words out of her head. “I’m not like her. I don’t care what Martha says. I’m not an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.”
He took her hand, the warmth of his skin settling her like a final piece of a puzzle sliding into place. “You lived, Eden. You got the bad guys, and you saved the victim who could be saved, and you lived. That’s as close to a win as you get.”
“But—”
“Don’t think for a damn minute that I’m going to ask you to apologize for surviving.” He squeezed her hand harder. “God, Eden. I was so fucking sure that I’d show up and you’d be gone. I thought I was rushing to the scene of your murder.”