Page 51 of All for her Forgiveness

"They called from the hospital," I say without facing him. "The DNA test results are ready. They sent it to my email."

"I am his father," he asserts.

"I haven't opened the email yet."

"Open it, but I know he's mine."

I clutch the device in my hand. "Hades, promise to take care of him if he's really yours and I'm not free to protect him."

"Kennedy."

"Swear on your honor."

"You have my word."

When I finally open the email and see the results, I hand the phone to him.

"Kennedy, I?—”

"Leave me alone, please. I'm exhausted. You can arrange with Ernest when you want to visit him. I'll leave the house when you do. Now, just go away."

Hades

Two days later

I take the last sip of the cheap whiskey to calm my heart, which seems to be pulsating in my throat.

I feel the old iron chair creaking under my weight as my eyes scan the ring where I will face my third opponent of the night.

An underground fight club in New Orleans is my way of releasing tension.

For a few seconds, I close my eyes and remember when I arrived at the crime scene in Cape Cod almost three years ago.

As soon as I realized something was wrong, I didn't worry about Pam or the phone call she’d made to me earlier that day, begging me to come save her. My only obsession was with making sure Kennedy was safe.

The beach house had turned into a true hell of broken furniture and blood everywhere—on walls, paintings, ornaments.

Kennedy was nowhere to be found, and only when I thought I would go mad because in every room I passed through, I saw the destruction of what had happened there, I entered one of the rooms upstairs and found Vina's granddaughter.

At that moment, the world I knew disappeared.

There was so much blood that the floor looked like an abstract painting.

Pam was completely naked, unrecognizable except for her hair and half of her face. Like a grotesque mask, she didn't look like a complete human, but rather like something between what she once was and what they’d done to her.

As I called the police, I continued to search for Kennedy because I refused to accept that she could have suffered the same fate as Pam.

Guilt oozed from every pore of my being.

I’d allowed the trip.

I hadn’t protected them.

The police arrived, and the immediate theory was that Kennedy was an accomplice to a male suspect.

I remembered Pam's phone call asking me to save her because Kennedy was "acting strange" and had invited Ryan to stay with them.

Ryan, that damned man, had done this to Pam.

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