Page 103 of Before Now

I scramble to my feet as he steps forward, my skin throbbing with every pound of my heart.

“She was already gone,” Daniel repeats, tone steady. So fucking steady while my body’s near convulsing.

My eyes fall to the literal blood on his hands. “I tried to find the source of the blood and resuscitate her, Remi. The intruder attacked her. She must have fallen on the fireplace poker and punctured an artery.”

My phone vibrates. Foster’s text. His picture.

“The intruder,” I say, voice weak and not steady, “who ran out the front door?”

He nods and comes closer, but I side-step the body and then back up to keep the distance between us. I dart my gaze over him—no holster, no gun. The next step he takes, I run for the front door.

I have to open it.

I have to open the door because no one else has run out of it or they’d have left it open like I do. No one else was in the house. Daniel never came in from the garage. Henevercomes through the garage.

Every other word is likely true. The attack. Mom landing on the fireplace poker and becoming the body.

But it was him.

Daniel shouts after me as I run down the street. I run until my lungs heave and my legs ache. But it’s more. All of me gives out once I reach the town square. I bend over and empty the contents of my stomach. I continue to heave, even when nothing else comes up, like my body thinks it can purge what just happened.

My mom’s dead. And Daniel killed her.

* * *

They putme in a room at the police station. An interrogation room with the two-way mirror and a camera in the corner. There’s even a metal arch on top of a table where handcuffs attach. I have no idea how long it’s been since the female officer, Julie, with the apologetic eyes, draped me in a blanket and left me alone.

She found me mid-panic attack on the freezing ground in the square. I was hyperventilating and violently shivering, and she helped me breathe, then helped me to her car. My mind felt as numb as my fingers when I stupidly let her put me in the passenger seat. Then she brought me here. To the one place I should have been going after finding my mom murdered. After seeing the body.

Except she hand-delivered me to the king’s personal court. The gilded walls equally as rotten beneath as the ones I’ve wanted to escape. I can’t escape.

And the longer I sit here—the more my body warms and my mind emerges from the fog—the sicker I feel again.

The door finally opens, and I’m not even surprised when toxins invade the air.

Elvin.

Julie reappears behind him, but she stays by the wall, letting him approach me.

He repeats what I stuttered to her through my useless breaths in the square. Only he phrases my convictions as questions, doubt veiling the words.

When Elvin stoops down in front of me, I recoil in the chair. But he takes my hands anyway. I close my eyes, tears spilling down my cheeks as he apologizes for what I witnessed.

“…it can’t be easy to process … our minds like to play tricks on us.”

I struggle to breathe while he continues to try to convince me of what I know is a lie.

He knows it too. He just doesn’t care.

The next time the door opens, I don’t need to look as the footsteps enter, slow, steady, threatening.

“Are you okay, Remi?” Daniel asks, tone soft now. “I tried to go after you, but I … I couldn’t just leave her?—”

An award-worthy sob leaves him. I draw in poisoned air before opening my eyes. Fresh clothes. Clean hands. At least that’s what everyone else sees. Everyone except Elvin. And then Marlo when he walks in a second later, his hidden teeth showing in the once-over he gives me.

Julie shuts the door behind him, trapping us with the danger. The concern she aims at me seems genuine, but my gaze lowers to the tile floor.

“I found enough at the scene to bring the son-of-a-bitch in,” Marlo states.

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