Page 129 of My Brother's Best Friend

Unlike João or Landon, who would’ve both said something to me, Kai stayed quiet and continued playing the video that he had scraped together. The next clips were from other cameras, following the car through Redwood.

“It disappears here,” Kai said, pointing to the screen where the car disappeared into the woods. “I searched what I could from other town security systems and couldn’t find the car again since the shooting. So, I grabbed what I could from the license plate and ran it across all potential matches for cars registered in Redwood and nearby towns.”

“What’d you find?”

Kai handed me a single slip of paper that had a bunch of names I didn’t recognize on it.

“Are these supposed to mean something?” I asked.

“Aliases for some members of the Redwood mob. Callan Avery confirmed it this afternoon during his free period. I searched for footage of the days leading up to the incident to see if they had met with anyone.” He paused, lips pressing together. “And I found this …”

After another pause, he pressed play, and a new video appeared on the screen of Escape, down by the beach. People walked in and out of the restaurant, chatting with each other, and then the door opened once more, and three guys walked out.

“Those are the men who were in the car,” Kai said.

The video continued with them lingering by the door until a woman followed them outside into the cold, her blonde hair shielding her face. A gust of wind blew locks of her hair back, and I froze.

“No,” I murmured. “I-it can’t be her.”

Kai paused the video so we had a clear view of her, then hopped up and disappeared into a back room. A moment later, after I agonized over it and attempted to talk myself out of what my eyes were really seeing, Kai came back with a gun and placed it in front of me.

“I don’t care what you do with it,” Kai said. “But if I were you, I would kill her.”

With a shaky hand, I seized the gun. “How do I use it?”

After Kai gave me the rundown of it, I stood up and shook my head, feeling so betrayed.

How can she do this to me? How can my own damn mother do this to her son?She had said that she’d do anything to get her family back, but the only way that’d happen was in her dreams, in her nightmares, in that magical, fictional place she called heaven.

But she wasn’t going to heaven for what she had done.

I tightened my grip around the gun and headed straight for the door, my bones and body empty and devoid of all emotion.

I’d make sure she went straight to hell.

CHAPTER79

ALEC

Whipping onto my street, I slammed on the accelerator. When I spotted Oliver’s car parked at the bottom of my driveway, I clutched the steering wheel and sped up the driveway to the garage, blinded by rage.

How could Mom do this? How could she fucking do this?!

I hopped out of the car, and Oliver grabbed my shoulder.

“Can we talk?”

“Later.”

“Please, dude,” he reasoned. “You ignored me all practice.”

After leaning over the center console, I grabbed the gun that I had shoved into the glove box and stuffed it into the inside of my jacket. Adrenaline rushed through my system the more I thought about that bitch.

“Get the fuck out of my way, Oliver,” I growled, slamming my door and pushing past him.

He stumbled back, his gaze on my jacket, then hurried after me into the garage. “Alec.”

“Go home.”

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