Page 14 of The Truth You Told

You killed for family. You hid the body for family.

Sometimes ... sometimes you hid evidence for them.

A dog barked a few houses over, and Shay flinched, nerves frayed. It got her moving again, creeping around the corner of the house into the “backyard.” She crouched when she got to the flimsy wooden stairs that led down from the kitchen door.

One of the slats was loose, and she carefully worked it free to create a space large enough to slip her arm in. Shay closed her eyes and prayed that no creature had made the stairs into their little den and began feeling around on the ground.

A couple of times she yanked her hand back as imaginary whiskers brushed her fingers, but finally her knuckles tapped against metal.

She grabbed the handle and pulled the gun free, only half wishing she’d pulled out a snake instead.

The weapon looked so innocuous.

Shay couldn’t ever see it without seeing Max, too. There had been so much blood, but none on the handle, where her little knuckles had gone white with how hard she’d been gripping it.

I’m glad he’s dead.

Shay shook her head and shoved the thing in her waistband, scuttling through the dark back to her car, hoping the fact that it was just past 3:00 a.m. would give her cover.

She wasted some of her precious tip money from the busy night on gas—the bored teenager working the till nearly having to pull the bills out of her hand. It was a place close to their house, deliberately picked so that if anyone went asking later, she could just tell them most of the truth: she’d hooked up with a dude and then realized she needed fuel when she was almost home.

No one would ask later. She was being paranoid.

But that’s how the best criminals got away with things. They thought through everything that could go wrong, and when it did, they’d already taken steps to avert disaster. All it took was one gas receipt from a station near Galveston to have the police getting interested in her.

The drive passed in a blur, her thoughts pinging betweenThis is ridiculousandThis is the smartest thing you have ever done.

She didn’t land on either for long.

Callum Kilkenny wasn’t going to come after her. Logically, she knew that. He didn’t even know her last name. But he was smart, clearly. If he found the articles somehow, if he linked Shay back to Max ...

He was an FBI agent, not some local at an overworked sheriff’s department willing to believe an easy explanation when it was given on a silver platter.

Callum Kilkenny was harmless, maybe. But he had thepotentialto ruin their entire lives.

What it all came down to was that Shay should have done all this earlier. It had been almost a year now—it was time to get rid of the damn thing.

Maybe then Shay would be able to stop picturing Max’s cold eyes that night.

The creeping dawn light brushed over rusted hunks of metal up ahead, and Shay slowed as she neared the junkyard. A couple of years before, a boyfriend had taken her here to drop off some car parts, but Shay had no other ties to it. There was nothing that could be traced back to her.

Shay pulled to a stop at the back corner of the place, the little office just visible half a mile away. There wasn’t a security fence, likely because nothing in the yard that was actually valuable was easy to steal. She didn’t understand the business model, but she did know there were hundreds of cars here that would never be sold. Maybe they’d be stripped for parts if someone ever got around to it, but if she found the right one ...

She tucked her hair underneath a ball cap that had been sitting in the well of the passenger seat. It would hide the length and color just enough that any description of her would come out bland. Then she wiped the gun, getting all the nooks and crannies. She wasn’t about to go to jail because she missed a partial print.

It took her twenty minutes to find the right car—a battered old Ford with just enough of a glove compartment left to hold the weapon. The thing was parked in the farthest corner of the lot, mostly crushed beneath the weight of three other trucks, all in better condition. If the gun was ever discovered, it would likely be in years and not months. And it was more than probable that whoever found it wouldn’t be the type of person to hand it over to the police.

Careful not to leave any prints, she managed to get the weapon hidden and get herself back to her car without unspooling into a panic attack.

The whole way home, her eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror, sure there would be red and blue lights there. But she pulled into her neighborhood, unimpeded.

The whole thing had been rather uneventful, and she was beginning to feel incredibly stupid about it all.

Beau was in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, coffee cup cradled in both hands, staring at nothing. He startled slightly when the door banged open.

“Sorry,” Shay said, listening for Max. She was in the shower, still rapping. It was as if the past twelve hours hadn’t happened.

“Morning,” Beau said, his voice a sleepy rumble. Then he wrinkled his nose. “You stink like sex.”

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