Page 78 of Relentless Oath

“He would have never worked for someone like him!”

Her denial was vehement, but in her eyes, I could see the first signs of doubt. Maybe I was a monster because I took advantage of that moment.

“Are you telling me there weren’t times when he disappeared, and you didn’t know where he was or what he was doing?”

“He was a cop,” she began. “He couldn’t tell me everything.”

“Like who all his associates were?”

“No matter what you say, I’m not going to let you sully his memory. Jason was a good man?—”

“A good man who worked for Matteo. Try again.”

“He would never.”

I shook my head, tired of arguing, “Believe what you want. I’ll show you proof. I’m done trying to convince you of who Jason was.”

Her eyes searched mine, and then she turned away from me. I supposed the conversation was over. Good. I didn’t think I could take it anymore.

Jason was the angel, and I was the villain.

I should have stopped there, but I was feeling prickly. She’d hit a nerve.

“If I were lying, Mya, then I’d like you to explain to me how Jason died. Why would Jason have even known a man like Nico if he wasn’t involved in things he never should have been wrapped up in? You think good cops get murdered by men like Nico?”

She stayed silent.

Finally, she didn’t have anything to say. I’d won. “The way Jason died proves that he wasn’t the man you thought he was.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Mya

The numbers didn’t lie.Alone in my room, I stared down at the computer screen, not believing my eyes.

There were accounts I didn’t know about set up in Jason’s name. The accounts showed money flowing in and out for years. Large sums of money.

When we arrived at the house, Dario had dropped a ledger next to my leg with the names and account numbers. At first, I’d thrown the ledger at his head and told him to fuck off. He’d easily dodged and walked away casually, like nothing had happened.

I told myself that he was trying to sully Jason’s name. He was trying to make me believe that a good man had worked for a monster.

I’d told myself to just ignore the ledger, but then I looked through it.

“What had you gotten yourself into, Jason?”

My hand shook as I looked over the statements. Tens of thousands of dollars over the period of several years after we were married.

Where had it come from? And why did he open these accounts?

I thought about how little money we had had. We had kept a jar in the kitchen with cash in it, saving up for a vacation to a tropical location that we never got to take.

My insides felt twisted into knots. I didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore. What had Jason done? I knew he couldn’t have been working for the Mafia, there was no way. That’s not who Jason was. Or was it?

Then I thought of how manipulative and Machiavellian Dario was. Was this some sort of trick by Dario to get me to vilify Jason? To get me to believe the worst in him?

Staring at the coffee table in front of me, my mind wandered back to the night Jason came home looking dejected right before he died.

I’d asked him what was wrong, and he had walked right past me as if I wasn’t even there. It had surprised me, because Jason always acknowledged me as soon as he came in, even if it were just a grunt…which it frequently was toward the end.

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