Page 67 of All for her Forgiveness

"I'll go to hell to fight Satan himself if necessary, but no one will take her away from me."

"From you? You think she's yours?"

"She always has been, even if she hates me."

"She doesn't remember everything that could make her hate you, but one day her memory will fully return. If you made promises, payment will be demanded. Kennedy will feel that you chose Pam."

I look at the sky, knowing what he's saying is true. "You said she doesn’t remember everything?"

"Have you ever been in prison, Hades?"

"No."

"I have. The first time, you're desperate. The days don't pass, they drag, and the uncertainty about the future and the loneliness are an invitation to depression. She went through that alone for a month, right after coming out of a coma that separated her from King for two years. For now, Kennedy is afraid of you, of you taking King away, but make no mistake, the time for resentment will come. Kennedy is remembering. Today, she remembered that she never dated Ryan. Yourward"—he says the word with disdain—"was the one involved with him and who kept trying to push him onto my Kennedy."

"I know."

"You do?"

"Yes. I've uncovered almost the whole truth. There are recordings, and that might help her defense. We'll prove Pam's involvement with Ryan."

"Almost the whole truth, you said? What's missing?"

"The night Pam died—there are questions that need to be answered."

"Yes, and I've been looking at the case. I don't understand much about law, but there's something I noticed that Kennedy's first lawyer, a public defender, overlooked. The defense team that's handling her case might not have picked up on it yet."

"What?"

"The basis of the accusation against Kennedy is them saying that she entered into a 'drug-induced psychotic frenzy' with her boyfriend and assisted him in killing Pam, right?"

"Yes. The theory is reinforced by her fingerprints on the statue."

"But they never tested Kennedy's blood."

"What?"

Hades

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

"There wasa lot of blood from my girl spread all over the place, mainly in the bathroom, which she said, in the statement she gave after she came out of the coma, was where she 'woke up.' I'm assuming that Kennedy hid there to protect herself," he says, and I close my eyes, imagining the scene and wishing to kill someone. "The fact is that it is stated that these samples still exist. They have her blood, Hades. I'm not a forensic scientist or anything like that. I have no idea how the blood needs to be preserved to be viable for testing whether there was alcohol or drugs in it, but don't you find it strange that if the Prosecutor's Office did it, they never attached the result to the process? Kennedy's defense was entitled to access that test too."

I've read the case several times, so I know there's nothing about her blood being tested, and to be honest, I never paid attention to that. "Or they didn't test it, in which case there must still be samples, or the Prosecutor's Office made a point of forgetting, and the incompetent who defended her before let it slip through."

"I don't believe it was an accident. The prosecution would have wanted the test results. They would be proof of their theory."

"Yes, that's what I thought too," he says. "If it's proven that Kennedy wasn't on drugs, the memory loss could be a result of the shock she suffered. A shock so great that even after spending a year with me in the cabin, being run over, falling into a coma, and surviving, she couldn’t remember the past. It was seeing you that brought her memories back."

"They could have drugged her," I say.

"I don't believe that. Kennedy never broke the law in her life, and she wasn't old enough to drink yet. If I'm right and her fleeing the house without asking for help was the result of the fear she felt combined with memory loss, the prosecution's supposed 'drug-induced frenzy' theory falls apart. All that remains are her fingerprints on the statue, which could have gotten there while she was trying to defend herself from Pam and that bastard."

"I fired the team of lawyers I hired to assist the Prosecutor's Office tonight. They will present their withdrawal tomorrow in court. I also have people investigating Ryan's whereabouts, and my cousin will prove that Kennedy never had anything to do with him."

"How?"

"There's no way not to leave traces in the world today, whether online or physical. Unless Pam's contact with Ryan was by smoke signal, Odin will find the clues and follow them."

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