Page 137 of A Smile Full of Lies
I got myself a drink, and then went back to the laptop.
I stared at the blinking cursor in the new document I’d named simply: The Stonewood Slaughter.
I didn’t know where to start.
The truth? It didn’t feel like mine to write. Not really.
His family was gone. His whole fucking world had been burned to ash, and he still let me be the one to tell their story. He gave me that. More than that, he trusted me with it.
And I’d betrayed him. Or protected him. Maybe both if you squinted and looked at the situation sideways.
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair, wrapping my arms around myself. The scars beneath my sweater still ached if I moved too fast. I could feel every stitch like a tally of everything I hadn’t said, hadn’t confessed, hadn’t put into words.
But he’d made one thing patently clear: this mandatory writing retreat wasn’t exile. It was a countdown, and when it ended — when the stitches were gone and I wasn’t a healing liability anymore — Knox was going to collect what he was owed.
Every word I wrote would bring me closer to that moment, to the reckoning I both dreaded and craved.
So, I opened my eyes and started typing.
KNOX
Sending Ros away was like tearing out my own heart with a rusty blade. Twenty-one days in a cabin on the Tensaw, no contact — just her, a stack of books, and the quiet I swore she needed to heal and write my family’s story. The scars from Thayer’s knife still marred her skin, her eyes haunted by the truths she’d uncovered. But the exile’s real purpose? Keeping her safe while I erased the remaining men who’d helped Thayer slaughter my family.
Besides that, I needed a solid alibi, so I was going out of the country for at least a few days to meet with clients overseas. And since that particular client owed me a big favor for finding a leak in his organization so he could plug it, he and his men were more than willing to fudge the records at the private airport I’d be landing at to say I arrived on any date I wanted, no questions asked. According to them, I was already in their compound in Europe right now.
Thayer’s cousins — Eli, Caleb, and Chad Williams — were the other masked assholes in the Stonewood Manor security footage I’d recovered, alongside Thayer in his demonic clown mask. Four men total, whose intended robbery collapsed when my father, Henry, burst out of his office, waving a gun to protect my mother and sister. Thayer shot him down first, quick on the trigger, then ordered his cousins to leave no witnesses. His cousins complied, knowing exactly who we were: the wealthiest family in Stonewood, Alabama, multimillionaires in a small town where the Knox family name was legend.
Thayer, my so-called best friend, had no excuse, and neither did they. Eli, with his rap sheet and shady ties, gunned my mother down in the foyer when she tried to run and policed the brass, telling Thayer and Chad to do the same, leaving no shell casings behind. Chad hunted my sister Ava to her bedroom and shot her three times. Caleb, the getaway driver, idled outside while my family bled. For four years, they’d guarded their secret.
Not anymore. Ros got Thayer to confess everything. I hacked into the police database and listened to the recording of her confrontation with Thayer, and it told me everything I needed to know.
I took them over the course of two nights, fulfilling my promise to myself, wearing the Nox Obscura mask, watching their fear when they saw it, drinking it in. Eli was first. I slipped a sedative into his beer at a Mobile dive bar, and when he passed out trying to unlock his truck, I loaded him in the back seat of my extended cab and drove him to Chad’s deep-sea fishing boat where it was docked in Orange Beach. I chained him up, gagged him, and locked him in the hold.
Caleb was next. I snatched him from his truck in a dark lot behind a strip joint in Pensacola after disabling their exterior security cameras. I went through the same drill with him as I did with Eli, gagging him and chaining him up in the hold of Chad’s boat, theGulf Reaper.
Chad was last. I snatched him from his house in Robertsdale at 3:00 in the morning. I disabled his security system, chloroformed him, gagged and bound him, and drove him to Orange Beach to join his brothers. By dawn, all three were chained up in the hold of theGulf Reaper, which was a 40-foot sport fishing boat with a history of electrical faults I’d confirmed through hacked marina records.
I let them sweat in the hold all day long, waiting until well after midnight before I eased the boat out of the marina and headed for Perdido Pass.
I piloted us twenty miles offshore under night’s cover, the Gulf’s black waves swallowing sound, their muffled pleas from the hold a grim chorus. The air reeked of salt and diesel, a sky full of cold stars twinkling in the sky above us. The moon was full, giving me plenty of light to see by as I set the GPS lock on the trolling motor and cut the engine, letting silence fall like a guillotine. Then I slipped the mask back onto my face – it almost felt like I was dirtying it by using it for this, but… wasn’t that why I’d started with the mask in the first place?
Dragging them topside, zip-tied and gagged, I started with Eli. I tore off his gag, pressing my knife to his tattooed throat. “This is what masked vengeance looks like. It’s your turn to taste the fear and hopelessness. Stonewood Manor. You chased my mother, Victoria, through the foyer. You gunned her down after Thayer killed my father. Why?”
Sweat poured down his face, eyes wild.
“It was a robbery gone bad! Your family wasn’t supposed to be home?—”
“You knew us,” I snarled. “Knew my father was defending his family. You policed your brass, made it clean. You slaughtered them and didn’t even take whatever you came there to steal.”
My blade opened his throat, blood spilling hot across the deck as he choked and collapsed.
Caleb was next, thrashing as I yanked him up.
“You sat in the car while they died,” I said, knife pressed to his gut. “You knew my nineteen-year-old little sister Ava was there, you knew they were going to kill my fucking baby sister, and you drove them away from the scene of the crime like it was nothing.”
He sobbed, shaking his head.
“It was all Thayer’s idea… and when the plan to steal that tech from your dad’s office went sideways and Thayer shot him, we fucking panicked…”
