Page 35 of The Verdict

Darius and his hard, disbelieving glare came back into focus.He didn’t trust me. It might be for all of the wrong reasons, but it didn’t make him wrong; my answer hadn’t been a full lie, nor was it the whole truth.

“The very best lies are armored in truth,”Saba had said to me. He was my mentor. My rock after Mamá… and anothersomeoneI’d lost—someoneI never should’ve mentioned to Rhys.

“Have you heard from them? Have they found anything?” I probed when he didn’t respond, mingling concern with the innocence in my voice as he approached.

Darius stared like he could see right through me. He might not trust me, but even with the scowl on his face and the coldness of his tone, I never felt threatened. Never felt unsafe. Not like when I was with Mars or Mercury. Honor… duty… that was the difference between Darius and those men; he had a code he’d never break, no matter how he disliked me.

“No.” The word was like a stone wall.

“Will they be back soon?”

The rest of the guys had left to explorea leadin the city,according to Rhys. It was all he ever hinted at. Possible leads but no answers. After three days, I’d learned no more information about Les, the murder, or how they were going to prove my innocence.

I tried to pretend like it didn’t matter. It was a lot—unreasonable, even—to expect a murder to be solved in such a short span of time, but I was stuck—unable to hunt down the truth and the real killer because the police were looking for me.But ifI knew what Jupiter looked like… where to look for him… that would be a different story.

“Probably.”

I swallowed hard. “But they didn’t find any information on his criminal patients? It has to be one of them, right?”

I knew that had to be their theory—that one of his clients was responsible for his death. They weren’t wrong. Jupiter was one of Les’s clients. “You didn’t even recognize him,”Mars had revealed to me. Except it wasn’t Les who Mercury had been after; it was me. And he wouldn’t stop until he found me. My only chance at escaping—at freedom for good—was finding Jupiter first.

So, I had to know what Rhys knew. What their leads were. I was the only one who could put an end to this.

“Most likely,” Darius drawled, banding his arms over his chest. “Don’t worry. We’ll find whoever did this.”

“How?” I charged, knowing I had nothing to lose when it came to Darius’s perception of me.

“Because that’s what we do.” It was a dare. I could tell by the glint in his gaze.

I stepped forward. “What is it you do?” They didn’t just work on motorcycles, and Rhys’s claim they assisted the police went out the window when he’d decided to shelter their murder suspect.

The faintest hint of a smirk toyed with one corner of Darius’s mouth. “We catch criminals. The ones that think they are above the law.”

Like me.I could practically hear the charge echo in the silence that followed. He might agree that I hadn’t killed Les, but he didn’t believe my story.

“With the police?”

He wiped a smudge off the side of his bike. “Police adjacent,” he replied, lifting his leather jacket off theseat and draping it over the front handlebars, the large arrow-and-shield patch on the back emblazoned with the name,the Vigilantes.Underneath it, a creed:Family first. Justice for all.

Dios mío.I’d never seen Rhys’s up close.Probably because I was always wearing it.

“I see.” Vigilante justice was what he meant by police adjacent.Lawful ends by unlawful means.

All the pieces of information I’d collected snapped together like gears eager to spin. His lethal skills and sense of justice were honed by military service. The guarded seclusion of the garage. The expensive surveillance equipment. Their access to information.And the way almost all of them lived here—like they’d returned from battle but not the war.

It explained a lot, but not everything.Not why Darius didn’t trust me.

“Do you think I killed Les?”

His attention returned to me, the scowl in his brow deepening. “No.”

Well, that was a start.“Then why don’t you trust me?”

If he was surprised by my boldness, he didn’t let it show. Instead, he met my bluntness with his own.

“Gut feeling that you haven’t given us the whole story.”

“You don’t trust me… because of a feeling?” I tried to make it sound like the idea was ridiculous.

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