Page 86 of Darkwater Lane

He chuckles, and for a moment, we stand in silence.

“I’m scared, Sam,” I tell him.

His hand bridges the distance between us, his fingers wrapping around mine. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you or the kids.”

“But what if something happens to you?” I ask. “Whoever’s doing this is going after my enemies. For all I know, you could be on that list. What if he comes for you next?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

I want to believe him, but that small voice in the back of my head just keeps asking:How can he know that for sure unless he’s the one behind the murders?

Later that night, I lie in bed awake, staring at the ceiling. Sam sleeps beside me, his breaths coming in soft snores. It’s too dark in the room to see his profile, but I don’t need light to remember every minute detail of it. The peppering of scars along his temple, the old cut through his eyebrow, the small bump on the bridge of his nose.

I know this man.

He’s not a monster.

But then a tiny voice keeps whispering that I lived with Melvin Royal for over a decade without suspecting he was capable of evil.

I know what kind of man Sam is, I remind myself. He’s a soldier, someone who volunteered to fight for his country. A pilot, good under pressure. A partner who knows me in every way, who accepts my faults and neuroses. A father who adopted my kids—our kids.

He’s also one of the founders of the Lost Angels. He’s a man who was once so consumed with grief and rage that he tracked you across the country. He is a man capable of violence.

Madison asked if he’d killed anyone. I played it off, but the truth is, he has, and he did it to defend our family. When crazed, zealous cultists kidnapped Connor, Sam got taken along with him. It was a battle to get both of them back, and there’s no question Sam ended up with blood on his hands.

You said it before, Sam would do anything to protect his family.

Madison’s words haunt me. They’re true. He would. He has.

As much as I scream in my head over and over again that he wouldn’t do this, there’s the tiniest, most infinitesimal sliver of doubt. It’s the lack of an alibi. It’s the fact that he didn’t tell me about Leo reaching out to meet and that he tried to handle that all on his own.

Would he have ever told me?

If I’m being honest with myself, what would Sam have done if the meeting with Leo had taken place? If Leo had shown up at theiragreed location? I already know Sam took his gun with him; they found it when they patted him down. I’d like to believe Sam never would have resorted to violence, but Varrus attempted to ruin his life.

Leo not only set Sam up for a murder he didn’t commit, he taunted him about it afterward. It horrified and enraged Sam. Can I say with one hundred percent certainty that Varrus couldn’t have provoked Sam to drawing his gun and pulling the trigger?

No. Of course not.

But Sam wouldn’t have taken Leo to our house and murdered him there. He wouldn’t have brought that kind of spotlight and scrutiny into our lives.

Sam had been the one to clean the Stillhouse Lake house after Leo poured blood all over it. He was keenly aware of how difficult it is to clean up a crime scene. He wouldn’t have put himself through that again. That may sound petty, but it’s true.

I shake my head, furious that I’m even having this debate with myself. There’s no debate to be had. I know Sam.

But you knew Melvin too, that small voice reminds me. At least I thought I did. And while I had no idea what he was doing out in that garage, I did know something was off about him. I knew he liked to choke me during sex. He liked the fear in my eyes as I fell unconscious.

He liked violence.

And I chose to ignore it.

Maybe Rowan had a point when she said I’m complicit because I allowed myself to remain willfully ignorant. I didn’t like the part of Melvin that liked rough sex. It scared me. It shamed me. I didn’t want to think about it, or dwell on it, or contemplate what it might mean outside of the bedroom.

I didn’t want to ask what it said about Melvin as a human being because I didn’t want to know the answer. Some part of me knew that the answer would destroy my entire life.

As it did when that driver struck our garage.

At the end of the day, I can’t ignore that there’s a common denominator between Sam and Melvin: me. What if the problem is me? What if I’m incapable of seeing the truth about the men in my life? Hell, even with my own son last year, I had no idea he was spending so much time on the Melvin Royal message boards.

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