Page 96 of Snow in Texas

Jenny glanced at Riley, and her stomach heaved. The knife had gone up through the soft tissues in his bottom jaw, just to the side of the bone, up through his tongue. The silver point flashed in his gaping mouth. The blood loss was incredible, a vivid splash down his chest, but she hadn’t hit the carotid, hadn’t killed him.

Yet.

He met her eyes, briefly, his cloudy with pain, as vacant as an animal’s.

He made a move for his gun.

Jenny snatched hers up off the table and put three rounds through his heart.

He fell, boneless, eyes still open, and his neck snapped when he hit the carpet. She heard the dull crunch.

Silence.

It had its own faint ring, like running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.

Jenny turned slowly to find Pup and Crockett standing over the bodies. Pup very much not dead, and Crockett staring at her with tear-bright, completely lucid eyes.

“Jenny,” he whispered, his big booming voice broken with grief. “Jenny, sweetheart, I forgot. Oh damn, honey, I forgot.”

It’s okay, she started to tell him, but she couldn’t get the words out.

She turned and bolted. Jumped Riley’s body and burst through the back door. Landed on her knees in the dirt and vomited.

Thirty-Five

Jenny

It seemed an eternity that she knelt in the dirt and retched. After it was empty, her stomach kept squeezing tight, terrible dry heaves that burned her throat. Just as they started to subside, she sat back and saw the blood on her hands, and it started all over again.

She was still gagging and gasping for breath when a shadow fell across her. Pup knelt down at her side and carefully slit the tape at her wrists with a knife. He had flecks of blood on his face, and his eyes were serious. Meeting his gaze was finally what allowed her to take a huge breath, stop puking, and sit down hard on her butt.

“You’re not dead.”

He shook his head. “They shot at me, alright, but I slipped past ‘em.”

“And you came back,” she said, stupidly. Her throat was so raw it hurt to talk.

Pup shrugged. “Wasn’t gonna let my VP’s sister get killed, was I?”

“Shit,” she said, because there were no other words, and flopped back, the loose soil of the yard catching her.

The sky arced blue and hard as a marble overhead, dome-shaped from her vantage point. Cloudless. Infinite. A sign? A reflection of her conscience?

No. Not that. Because she’d just killed the man she’d shared her life with for twelve years. Whether or not he was a monster had no bearing on the situation.

Crockett’s face appeared above her suddenly, eclipsing her view, his broad features touched with an almost childlike grief.

Jenny sat up, and he sat down, so they were both cross-legged and shoulder-to-shoulder, staring out across the featureless stretch of his backyard. Pup watched them, but it didn’t feel awkward, all of them too exhausted for propriety.

In a slow, careful voice, Crockett said, “Candy came home…came home…a while back.”

Jenny knew he meant seven years ago, so she nodded. “He did.”

“He was in New York.”

“He was.”

“And you…you…” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Riley hurt you, didn’t he?”

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