Page 69 of A Lethal Game of Trust

I’ll Just Kill Him

Dom

I got us snacks as I payed for the petrol. Leonie had always been a chocolate girl but in the heat, they would melt all over her fingers. I would offer to suck the mess off, but I doubted that would be helpful.

I grabbed her a smoothie from the fridge in the shop and some chewy sweets she’d loved years ago.

Back in the car, she was curled up under a blanket, the aircon on high. She eagerly took the smoothie from my hands and lifted it to her clammy forehead. “Thank you.”

After a second of holding it there, she unscrewed the lid and guzzled half of it down.

I smiled as I pulled the car out onto the road. “I’ve never known someone to take their five a day so seriously.”

“Other than yourself,” she rasped. She had drank so much she had made herself breathless.

“We’re not far now,” I told her. We had gone past the muggy countryside and were now past the sand dunes, quicklymaking our way through the small towns towards the coastal city we’d grown up in.

The houses were further apart, protected by large trees and security gates.

Belov Security System signs warned every passerby.

“I didn’t realise just how successful it’s become,” she said, nodding her head at a four-story complex with my company logo on the gate.

“It makes me some money,” I said with a shrug. “It mostly runs by itself now.”

She cocked a brow as she burst open the bag of sweets and popped one in her mouth before lifting them an inch towards me.

To her offering, I just opened my mouth and she leaned over to feed me.

“Are blackberry-flavoured sweets still your favourite?”

I nodded, though it was a lie. Blackberry sweets were her least favourite, so I used to pretend I loved them just to share the bag with her.

I was chewing away as we turned down a road not too far from my family’s home. “We can visit my parents if you don’t want to go. If you’ve changed your mind.”

“I haven’t,” she said and pulled out her phone.

“Dad said you haven’t seen him for a while,” I admitted, with a cautious glance her way. She kept on scrolling. “Is it because of Firdman being released?”

“It’s because I’m about to spend a month going to and from their house like we do every summer.”

“Is that why you didn’t go to Issy’s birthday last year? Because you have some resentment?”

It had been the first season of social events where Mia hadaccompanied me and I’d itched for some normalcy, for an escape from her. For her to drag me over to Leonie. I didn’t see her at all that summer.

“Jared and I had some things to work through,” she whispered, “so we went away.”

But just months before, I’d overheard her talking about engagement rings. She’d shown Issy and Mia a house by the coast she wanted to put an offer on. A family home, where she would raise her children. Her future was set.

“Things like what?” I asked softly and placed my hand on her blanketed knee.

She dropped another blackberry sweet in my mouth. She didn’t speak for a few moments, rifling and sorting through the treat bag.

“I’ve cried enough for one day,” she said. “Only Jared knows.”

“And you want to keep it that way?” I asked, hoping the judgement didn’t fill my words. He didn’t deserve exclusive knowledge of her.

She looked out of the window and croaked, “Yes.”