Page 98 of Snow in Texas

“Her ex,” Pup said. “She killed him.”

~*~

Candy

“I wanna see him.” Candy put his hands on his hips and silently dared the scrawny uniform to make him move.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to either go in the kitchen with the others, or be escorted outside.”

“Who’s gonna escort me? You?”

The kid gulped, petrified by the idea.

An older officer pushed past the techs and into view. “Leave him be, Derek. You know how this has to work. Go wait with Jen.” Officer Jaffrey, veteran of the force and a realist who understood that the Lean Dogs were a part of life in Amarillo.

“This was self-defense,” Candy said, firmly, giving the man a hard stare. “You know it was. Riley’s a sick fuck, and whatever my sister did, it was to protect herself.”

“We gotta go through the process,” Jaffrey said, but nodded. Yeah, he knew the truth here: It was only a matter of time before someone put a bullet or two in Riley.

Riley who, to Candy’s satisfaction, lay sprawled at an awkward angle on the rug, the coroner’s people poking, prodding, and recording things on notepads.

“Anyone let his brother know?” he asked, jerking his head toward the corpse.

Jaffrey snorted. “That’s none of your business and you know it.”

“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Alright. Thanks.”

In a feat of restraint, he’d let Colin go to Jenny first, had been snooping after the body to give them a moment. The guy might be kind of an idiot, but Jenny was having a baby with him, so they probably wanted to…hug or some shit.

When he propped a shoulder in the kitchen doorjamb, he saw that the hugging was still happening, Jenny’s face hidden in Colin’s throat, both of them shaking. Candy wanted badly to hug her himself, but he was the brother here, and not her lover; he would wait.

Crockett spotted him. “Candy! There you are! Where you been, boy?” His grin was wide and genuine, his gaze lost somewhere inside his memories, the way Candy had come to expect.

Jenny lifted her blood-streaked, tear-stained face from Colin’s shoulder and said, “He was only lucid for a little while, but it was long enough. God bless him.”

~*~

Colin

He cranked the hot tap as far as it would go and checked the temp of the water again. Steaming and just about perfect. He turned to Jenny.

She stood in the center of the bathroom, studying the dried blood beneath her fingernails.

The fallout. It didn’t matter what Riley had done to her, or how she’d felt about him at the end, she’d killed someone she’d loved once. There was trauma there; deep layers of it that would wear away in patches, new scales revealed when she least expected them.

“Jen,” he said, softly.

Her eyes came to him, distant with wonder. The blood on her face looked like war paint, and he recalled, for some reason, that he was part Cherokee. Some dim unconscious reasoning that they shared that now, he and his woman, the warrior legacy.

“He didn’t even suspect, you know?” she said. “That I could do that to him.”

“He didn’t? He must not know you as well as I do,” he joked, but it fell flat.

She didn’t respond. “The last night, before Candy got back,” she continued, “before he got put away. That last night.” She shuddered. “He knocked me out. When I came to, I was on the floor, and he was holding me down…while…while his prospects took turns at me.”

His lungs seized.

“I kicked one of them in the face. Broke his nose. God, he screamed…And Riley slammed my head into the floor until I blacked out again.”

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