Page 49 of Jayson
“I needed your reaction to be real,” I say simply. “To throw off suspicion. You start putting on a performance and they’ll sniff it out. But confusion? Shock? That, they believe.”
She shudders. Not from the cold. From the weight of what we’ve done.
“You used me,” she says, quieter now. There’s hurt there, buried under the rage. “You let them blindside me. On purpose.”
“I protected you,” I bite back. “They left, didn’t they? No one is in cuffs. There’s nothing here to lead them to believe this is anything other than a disappearance. Or a middle aged runaway,” I say, pointing out the obvious. The world needs to know, if it doesn’t already, that we’re not the only ones who were gunning for Mayor Bishop’s head. There’s a long list of enemies that were lining up, waiting for their turn to take a shot at him.
She shudders. Full-body. Like my words are a draft crawling under her skin.
“You’re unbelievable,” she mutters, backing away until her spine meets the kitchen counter. “You just… manipulated me. Like a puppet.”
“This wasn’t about you, Keira.” I exhale hard through my nose. “It was necessary.”
“And what if I’d said something wrong?” she snaps. “What if I still do? What if they come back and they want to search the house? What then?”
“They will come back,” I say bluntly. No use sugarcoating it now. “But you don’t have to worry.”
“Don’t have to—Jayson, they were standing right there. In the foyer. Right underneath the bloodstain that used to be my father.”
“There’s no bloodstain.”
She stops. Eyes narrow.
“What?”
“I said, there’s nothing left to find. The room’s been cleaned. Scrubbed down to the damn molecules.”
She stares at me like I’m a lunatic. Which, maybe I am.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” I say, pushing off the fridge and walking toward her. “We cleaned everything. Sheets. Floorboards. Mattresses. Walls. Bleach, vinegar, peroxide—name it. If it could kill a trace, we used it.”
She swallows hard, throat bobbing.
“They won’t find a thing, Keira. No matter how hard they look.”
Despite the barrageof questions she wants to ask—how, who, why, when—I don’t give Keira the courtesy of answers. Not because I can’t. Because she doesn’t need them. The truth is a luxury she’s not entitled to. Not now. Not when every word could fracture the careful illusion I’ve spent days constructing.
Details are dangerous. They’re weight. And she’s already carrying enough.
What she does need to do is simple: follow the script. Breathe like nothing’s changed. Move through the world like her father didn’t vanish off the face of it. That’s the only way this works. The only way the cops sniff somewhere else. Any stutterin her story, any flicker of fear in her eyes—and they’ll swarm. Start peeling back the layers with scalpels and subpoenas until they hit bone.
And if the worst happens—if they start pressing too hard, digging too deep—she has the cleanest alibi blood money can buy. A brand-new husband and three unimpeachable witnesses who watched her sign her name away the same weekend her father disappeared off the map.
Married, tucked away at the estate, playing house.
It’s practically poetic.
She’s quiet on the ride back. Barely a breath, barely a blink. Just silence, thick and bruised between us. I don’t offer her reassurance. I don’t soften. She doesn’t ask, and I don’t give. Because some truths aren’t meant for her ears.
Like the fact that this was Ghost’s handiwork.
He didn’t like it when I brought Keira back. Unraveled faster than I expected. But he’s efficient in his rage—cold, brutal, and precise. And when he moves, he moves fast. The body was gone before I even had to ask. Before the blood could dry.
There’s no man better suited to disappearing the dead than Ghost. He’s had more than enough practice.
And after ten years of being caged like an animal, he’s perfected his process. Refined every step, every cut, every drop of bleach. He’ll never get caught again. Not in this lifetime.
