Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
I went and snatched up the picture of Brady Murphy. This was the bastard who had taken her. I had a face. The goddamn ghost wasn’t faceless anymore.
“While the Murphys are Irish, Travis Mitchell was a Southerner. Spoke with a Southern accent. Seems Brady Murphy can do more than just change his name. I’d venture to guess he can do many different accents and speak several languages. It would make sense. No one can live in the shadows as completely as he has been whispered to. He’s been walking in daylight all along, just as a range of different people.”
That made this more difficult. Fuck!
“You sure you don’t want to look through this file?” Blaise asked, holding it up.
I shook my head. “No.”
He shrugged. “It’s your choice, but it doesn’t hurt for a man to know the woman he loves.”
“She can tell me what she wants me to know about her past,” I told him. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her life with Eamon in pictures. That was a torture I could avoid.
“All right, I guess you know most of the younger years anyway. The uncle of hers that she was questioned about by the police—she said you were at home that night, helping her with homework,” he said with a smirk. “I’m assuming he did something worth you beating him to death with a bat.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You think it was me?” I asked.
It had been. When Salem had told me that her uncle had touched her inappropriately and her father allowed it, I’d been so blind with rage that I tracked him down and took my bat with me. His death wasn’t an accident. I’d gone there, wanting to kill him. A neighbor saw me enter the house and described me. A few days after they found his dead body sprawled out in the living room, I was taken in for questioning. I denied it. Salem backed up my story. There was no proof—they never found my bat—and I had been left alone.
Blaise looked amused. “That was revenge and rage. I know it well.”
He dropped the folder on the table. “I’ll leave it with you to destroy then. We have what we needed.”
I stared at it, not wanting the temptation there, but said nothing.
“Things would have played out differently for the two of you if it hadn’t been for the miscarriage, I imagine,” he mused.
“Miscarriage?” I asked, not sure what the hell he was talking about.
“I mean, I assumed it was yours. Maybe you shouldn’t go through that file after all.”
I was at the table, jerking open the folder and scanning the pages for medical history when my eyes locked on doctor’s notes from an emergency room visit one month after I’d shattered my soul and set her free. She’d been admitted for blood loss. It was the cause of a miscarriage. She’d been almost ten weeks pregnant.
I placed both palms flat on the table to keep from my knees giving out. Grief punched me in the chest with a force so heavy that I needed to sit down before I collapsed.
“I don’t think he knew about that,” I heard Liam say.
I grabbed the nearest chair and sank into it, then buried my head in my hands.
She’d been pregnant—with my baby—and she’d lost it. Alone.
Wave after wave of anguish and horror hit me. Had she known when I broke it off with her? Had she been sick? Fuck! She’d have been terrified. How had she paid the hospital bill? Jesus, I’d fucking abandoned her.
I could hear the other men talking, but they were drowned out by the roar in my head.
How could she have forgiven me for that?
And the shit with Nixie! Motherfucker!
She still thought Nixie was pregnant with my baby. That had to be tearing her up inside.
Yet she hadn’t said one word about the miscarriage. How I’d left her to deal with it all alone.
Tears stung my eyes, and I fought the emotion strangling me. I had to fucking find her.
Dropping my hands, I stared straight ahead at the wall. Devastation clawing at me relentlessly.
“When we find her, you can spend the rest of your life making it up to her,” Liam said.
“She thinks Nixie is having my baby,” I replied. “Fuck, I’d been at a goddamn doctor’s appointment with her. Doing the shit I hadn’t gotten to do with Salem, and she didn’t get angry or hold it against me. She never even told me.” I paused and tried to take a breath, but my chest hurt so bad that it wasn’t easy. “It is ripping me to fucking shreds.”
The door to the bar opened, and my gaze swung to see Marlana Newbury walking inside. Her gaze shifted from Liam to me, then stalled on Blaise. A flicker of recognition in her eyes.