Page 126 of Release

“His fatherisa police officer. He was also a jock, played football and basketball. And she wasn’t the first girl he’d raped. The last girl who’d tried to report him ended up leaving school. Her family moved after her father got fired and her mom was threatened.”

I wrap my arms around her a little tighter. “So you went to The Hermitage. What happened there?”

“I got close to him and started talking with him. Flirting with him.” She closes her eyes and tucks her face against the side of my neck. “It didn’t take me long to convince him to sneak off alone, away from the tour. I told him I’d liked him ever since the beginning of the school year, but I’d been too afraid to say anything to him because I didn’t know if he’d like me or not.”

“That was like baiting Jaws with a dead whale, huh?”

She huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Exactly.” She takes a deep breath. “I had a couple of packages of M&Ms with me that I’d carried in. We were supposed to eat box lunches there, but I snuck those into my pocket. But they weren’t really M&Ms.”

“What were they?” My mind races, thinking she poisoned them or something, and is it sick how muchmorein love with her I am at this moment?

“Peanut M&Ms. And I started eating them after we got there.”

“I…don’t understand.”

“He was severely allergic to them. Like, you couldn’t even eat peanuts in the same room with him or he’d have a reaction.”

“Ah.”NowI’m tracking. “Then what happened?”

She shivers and rolls my way so she’s draped over me now. “I let him think it was his idea for us to go off alone. There were places all over you could kind of hide, right? And he made sure we were really careful no one saw us sneak away together. So he finds us this little place behind some tall bushes. That’s when he starts to kiss me.”

“He didn’t have one of those things? An injector pen?”

“He did, but he’d laid down on the ground, and I straddled him, like I was going to suck his cock. I pinned his arms over his head and kept kissing him. Only took a couple of minutes before he stopped breathing. While he was dying, I looked him right in the eye and told him I knew what he’d done, how many girls he’d raped, and he wouldn’t be raping anyone else.”

I amsofucking turned on right now, even as horrific as that sounds.

I kiss her again. “Then what?”

Once I knew for sure he was dead. I got up, took the EpiPen from his pocket, jabbed his thigh with it, and wrapped his hand around it after I wiped my prints off it. I arranged him like he sort of fell over. Then I went to use the bathroom and snuck back to another tour group. I was going to claim I lost track of my group after using the bathroom.”

“How long did it take to discover him?”

“Teachers didn’t realize he was missing until lunch was nearly over. Took them a couple of hours to find him.” She smiles. “He was good and dead by then.”

“No one saw you go off with him?”

“Nope. If they did, they never said anything. I thought for sure I was going to be arrested. I was terrified. But every day that went by…” She sadly smiles. “I knew I got away with it.”

“What’d Shelby say?”

“She didn’t. The next day, she hugged me really hard, but we never talked about it.”

I nod. “Probably for the best. Plausible deniability.”

“Yeah.” She snuggles her head against my neck and kisses me. “Are you disgusted?”

My fingers play with her hair. “Not even close.” I nuzzle her forehead. “You’re amazing, and I love you.”

“I love you, too.” We lie there for a moment before she speaks again. “What about you?”

“I wish my story was as neat and tidy as yours.”

“Why? Who’d you kill?”

I sigh. “My father.”

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