Page 81 of Lights Out

I pulled my hand from Josh’s before I broke one of his fingers from squeezing too hard. “That right there is why I won’t ever feel bad about this.”

Josh let out a low, angry sound. “It barely scratches the surface of what Brad got away with.”

I glared at the road ahead of me. “I keep getting stuck on how it went on for so long. That one judge? I get. Not that I understand, just that there are corrupt shitheads in every profession. But years and years of Brad getting away with his crimes?Thatno one will ever be able to explain to me in a way I’ll understand, even if they give me a detailed bullet list of every misstep along the way.”

“Maybe it all led up to tonight,” Josh said. “Maybe I was meant to kill him.”

I frowned. “Like fate?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I was always meant to be a killer, and it would have happened one way or another.”

What the fuck? How could Josh possibly think something like that? Him? Destined to be a killer? I couldn’t accept it. He was too good, too kind, and yes, he’d broken into my house and stalked me, but I’d asked him to commit the B&E, and I’d never told him to stop watching me. I had a feeling that if I had, he would have listened and never bothered me again. His actionsmight be similar to Brad’s when examined through a wide lens, but when you zoomed in, the two men couldn’t be more different, and I refused to let Josh compare himself to such a garbage human being.

“No,” I said. “I reject the idea that this was your fate. It’s too fucked up when you take into account the pain and suffering of Brad’s victims. There’s no way they were put on this earth to fall prey to him.”

Josh ran a hand over his face and released a heavy sigh. “I sound full of myself when you put it like that.”

“Not full of yourself, just conflicted and confused after a traumatic event.”

A glance at him revealed the worry on his face, brows drawn together, full lips flattened into a hard line.

I needed to drive my point home, and what better way than using his logic against him? “You asked me if I would ever blame another teenager for killing their parent, so let me turn that around on you. If it was me who’d accidentally killed Brad, would you be wondering if I was always meant to be a killer?”

“Never,” Josh said. “But it’s not the same.”

“It is, though,” I argued.

“It’s not. This is something I’ve worried about since I was a child.”

My blood ran cold. Who had thoughts like that as a kid? “What do you mean?”

“Uh-uh,” he said. “We’re not doing this now. If there was ever a worst time to have the Josh’s Tragic Backstory conversation, it’s right after I killed someone.”

“No fair. I spilled my guts to you about mine.”

He let out an exasperated sound. “Aly, my backstory is the stuff of people’s nightmares.”

I glanced over at him, starting to worry. “Have you ever killed before?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Have you ever hurt anyone?”

“Not outside a martial arts studio, and even then, only accidentally, and never seriously.”

“Are you a criminal?”

“I’m a hacker, so technically, yes. I’ve broken countless laws, but the worst thing I’ve ever done was break into your house and stalk you.”

I lifted a brow at him and then sent a pointed look over my shoulder toward the trunk. “Really? That’s the worst thing?”

He shot me a grin. “I said what I said. Weren’t you just telling me we did the world a favor by killing Brad?”

I smiled. Yeah, I had, and it was nice to see some of Josh’s sass returning. “Then that’s all I need to know. I trust my gut that you’re not a bad person. Anything you have to tell me can wait until you’re ready. No rush.”

He leaned over the center console and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “You are the best girlfriend a guy could ask for.”

My eyebrows flew up so fast it felt like they were trying to jump off my forehead. “Uh, what was that?”

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