Page 102 of Cruel Kiss

"Stop," I say. "Please, just?—"

"I can't blame him; if I were in his position, I'd do the same. So would you. You'd kill the witness. You'd use your resources to get him vulnerable and then you'd end his life before he could expose you." She straightens up and squints at me. "Maybe Ronan thinks he's safe. But murder isn't a thing your marriage protects him from. You can't be forced to testify against your husband? Fine. But there's no privilege on earth that covers ordering a hit on your ex. If this holds—ifanyof this holds—yourhusband spends the rest of his natural life in a federal cell, and no wedding certificate will stop me from putting him there."

I stare at the map. At the little dots that follow my husband around like a shadow, on every night I could name.

"You think Ronan killed Todd," I say.

"That's exactly what I think," she agrees. "The question I'm asking right now is… What doyouthink?"

She picks her coat up off the stool where she'd draped it and retreats toward the exit.

"For what it's worth," she says from the mouth of the hall, "I know it's hard to swallow. It's almost too good." She pauses. "But you'd know better than anyone: The prettiest lies are the easiest to swallow."

Then she lets herself out. The door closes with a soft, heavy thunk, leaving me alone in my kitchen with a folder full of my husband's worst crime yet.

Upstairs, I can hear them. Isabella's voice, high and delighted. Ronan's, amused, answering, coaching her on patience, the one thing he knows best.You can't rush it, brave girl. It happens when it happens.

I don't move for a long time.

Then I do the only thing I've ever been any good at.

I get my laptop.

I sit down at the island once again and I open the founder's dev instance. Using the folder that Mercer left behind, I start to feed it.

The burner's tower pings—I type them in. The dates. The locations. Ronan's known movements, which I have, because I have login credentials to a tracker app that watches my whole world. I can pull his history right alongside the burner's and lay them next to each other.

The payment trail. The shells. I have those, too. I have The Akov Firm's whole public footprint mapped from six weeks ago, sitting in a folder markedReceiptslike everything else.

I feed it all in.

My hands are shaking. The cursor blinks. I hate that little thing. It's the most honest thing I know. It doesn't flatter you and it doesn't lie, and right now, I hate it with everything in me because I know it's going to tell me the truth, whether I want it or not.

I have to know.

… Or do I?

I could close the laptop. I could take Mercer's folder and put it in the trash, then go upstairs and get down on the floor by the shoebox with the two little people I love more than my own life and the man who reads them books about the bottom of the ocean.

I could choose not to know.

Old Cali might have.

Old Cali made herself small and looked away and called it peace.

New Cali runs the numbers.

I hit go.

The engine chews on it. It doesn't take long. It never takes long; that's the horror of it. Eighteen months of my marriage rendered in a clean timeline in the time it takes water to boil. Todd's whole affair snapped into place in an afternoon.

And now this, the last question, the one I don't want the answer to, resolving while I sit here with my hands over my mouth.

Did my new husband kill my old one?

The dashboard loads.

Correlation. Confidence intervals.