Page 105 of The Sweetest Revenge

"You killed Kacie." It came out before I could stop it, and when she didn't deny it, I knew I was right. "Why would you kill your own daughter?"

"She was going to ruin everything." She took a step closer. "She was going to give those pictures to her dad, and I would lose everything."

"What the fuck could be more important than your daughter."

"Dennis had it put in the prenup that if I was caught cheating, I would leave with nothing, and I couldn't let that happen."

"What the fuck?" I threw up my hands. "She was your daughter."

She huffed out a humorless laugh. "Let's not pretend like you weren't just looking at her birth certificate." Anne's voice lowered, taking on an almost conversational tone that was more terrifying than her anger.

"Kacie wasn't my daughter. Dennis knocked up one of his whores, and she dropped her on our doorstep."

The words hit me in waves, each one more impossible than the last. My brain rejected them, then scrambled to rearrange everything I thought I knew. The room seemed to pulse around me. Kacie—not her daughter?

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My throat had closed around questions I couldn't even form.

"I was so young and stupid then." Anne's voice shifted, a false nostalgia creeping in that made my skin crawl. "I let him convince me to raise her as my own, and he'd made everything in her past disappear. Including her mother." Her lip curled slightly at the word. "No one would ever know she wasn't mine."

She waved the gun, the metal catching the light. The casual way she handled it—like it was an extension of her hand—told me this wasn't her first time holding one.

"Except he didn't get rid of the original birth certificate, and Kacie found it."

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. Kacie had discovered this bombshell and kept it from all of us. Even me, or maybe that was what she needed to talk to me about the night of the party. What else had she been carrying alone? How many secrets had died with her?

"So, you killed her." The words fell from my lips, simple and devastating. Not a question.

Anne's eyes met mine, and what I saw there froze the blood in my veins. No remorse. No grief. Just cold calculation, as if she were discussing a business transaction gone slightly awry.

"I didn't have a choice."

Four words. Four simple words to justify destroying a life, her daughter's life, biological or not. The room seemed to shrink around us, the air growing thinner with each breath.

Everything sank in all at once, and everything made sense. "So you and Coach worked together to kill Kacie." It wasn't a question.

She shrugged. "He wanted her dead as much as I did." She rolled her eyes. "Kacie was trying to expose him, and while she was digging into him, she found out about us."

"Did you know what he was doing to us?" Anger colored my tone. "What he did to her?"

"Yes," she shrugged. "Well, I mean, I didn't at first, but it didn't take long to figure out, and let's not play the victim here. You didn't have to do it. He didn't force you."

"Are you serious?" My voice cracked as disbelief collided with rage. "For some of us, that dance team was our only chance at affording college. We didn't have a choice."

She rolled her eyes—actually rolled her eyes like we were discussing a trivial disagreement over lunch plans. "Well, Kacie could. If you didn't notice, her daddy's rich." The word 'daddy' dripped with contempt. She waved the gun in a dismissive gesture that made my stomach lurch. "But I put an end to Ryan anyway."

My brain struggled to process her words, rearranging them, searching for a meaning that wasn't the obvious one.

"You were responsible for the school shooting?" The question emerged as barely more than a whisper. My lungs seemed to have forgotten how to draw breath.

The edges of my vision darkened as the implications cascaded through my mind. This wasn't about Kacie. This wasn't about an affair or a prenup. This was systematic. Calculated.

Anne's smile, small and satisfied, confirmed everything before she spoke another word.

"He was supposed to kill you and Ryan, but that didn't work out." She said it like she was discussing a minor inconvenience, a delayed delivery, or a scheduling conflict. Not the planned execution of people.

The room tilted around me as my brain struggled to process her words.

My mouth went dry. "Why me?" The question scraped against my throat. "I didn't know anything." A humorless laugh bubbled up, edged with hysteria. "In fact, this morning, I thought my mom was responsible."

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