Page 53 of Broken Queen
“She was never supposed to die!”
“You choose to bring her there. To ‘teach her a lesson.’”
“And when I walked into that room, Zira was holding my dying wife.”
What room was he talking about? A sigh shuddered through me as I dropped the brass knuckles on the nightstand, mulling over my other options. I couldn’t take much more of this shit.
“Your sister. Zira was holding your sister. They were covered in blood. And when I asked Zira what had happened, she refused to tell me. But she knew. She was the last person in that room, but information is key, and even at that age, Zira knew she had power over me by withholding that truth, just like she has power over you now.”
My hand hovered over the hook blade, the same one Zira had used to kill the Dentist. A knife was more indulgent, but it wasn’t as final as I wanted right then.
“Zira might have killed your sister. You understand that, right? By withholding the truth, she could be protecting someone else, or protecting herself!”
The more he spoke, the more agitated I became, my fingers twitching, like a faucet dripping that would never stop. In the back of my mind, I knew that there was some sense to Ernest’s words. Zira used people. She openly used me.
And if information was the key to having power, then it was the last thing she would have over me. If he was right, she was playing me better than I was playing her.
Had I let Zira play me like that, or had I known all along that she would do this to me?
“Bottom line, Hazard,” Ernest whimpered. “Zira knows the truth. Please believe me.”
I held my father’s pistol in my palm. “Shut the fuck up,” I growled.
“Face the truth. Stare it in the eyes and see what’s there. Even if Zira didn’t kill Gabby, she knows what happened. She’s keeping that a secret from you.”
I ran my finger over the trigger. That nickname stilled everything inside of me. She was supposed to get a fake name with her marriage contract, but Ernest thought he had the right to call my sister ‘Gabby.’
“You were supposed to give her a fake name,” I said.
“That’s not important anymore. Listen?—”
“You called her ‘Gabby’?”
“I am not your enemy. Zira is!”
I pressed the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. The bullet shot through his head, the noise ricocheting through my skull. Blood dripped down his forehead in a clean line. Silence fell over the room.
I had never thought I would like the stillness, but right then, I let out a breath. Finally, some peace and fucking quiet.
But it didn’t last. His words rattled in my head like a wild tiger pacing inside of a cage. Was Zira fucking with me?
My phone rang. Zira’s name lit up the screen. Shit. I had promised Zira that we would kill Ernest together, and now his corpse was on the floor.
Carter must have told her I had Ernest now. I had to get rid of his body before she showed up.
My phone kept ringing, but I ignored it, working as fast as I could, using my hatchet to chop up Ernest into smaller pieces. I threw the chunks into black garbage bags and got into my truck before Zira undoubtedly showed up unannounced.
I distributed Ernest’s body bit by bit, shoving him into the dumpsters behind different shops and diners in Oakmont, making it harder to put him together that way. But I couldn’t let go of the things Ernest had said. Zira, as much as she hated to admit it, cared about the women that were involved in the secret society; they reminded her of her mother. She wouldn’t kill my sister.
But Ernest might have been right about some part of it. There was something strange about the whole thing. If Zira did know something, then she was using me, but in a way that I hadn’t expected. She was one step ahead of me. And when it came to my sister, the one thing I wanted, I didn’t like being played like that.
I had given Zira leeway because I thought she didn’t know the answers, and I had trusted that one day, she would eventually find those answers for me.
But she had lied, saying she didn’t know anything. I always knew that Zira could lie to me, but this was a blow to my gut. At least, now, I had information over her. I knew that she was hiding a secret from me.
I was done being her pawn.
CHAPTER 15
