never imagined this was the secret Dirk was keeping. But after the first shock passed, she accepted it with nothing more than a blink. It made sense. It had to be something momentous. Something life altering. While she’d never killed anyone herself, she knew those who had. Sometimes killing was justified, and until she knew more...she wasn’t going to judge.
* * *
Dirk considered what to add to the bald statement that he’d killed a man. “Nearly twenty years ago now. I was sixteen. He was a year older. We had a...a history of animosity.” That statement didn’t even come close to describing the hostile emotions on both sides that had led to their final confrontation.
“What happened?” The quiet, nonjudgmental way she asked the question immediately reminded him of his court-appointed defense attorney from twenty years ago. And it allowed him to answer with a semblance of detachment.
“Bree was fifteen. We were... I guess you could say we were in love, as much as teenagers understand love.” Words couldn’t begin to encompass what he and Bree had felt at the time, so he didn’t even try. “Lyon Blackwood was...” A spoiled rich kid who thought he was entitled to take whatever he wanted.
“We’d had confrontations before,” he continued after a few seconds. “But what really started the whole thing was I caught him sexually assaulting a friend of Bree’s. The girl didn’t want to press charges, even though Bree and I begged her to—she didn’t want the stigma that would have accompanied it. Minnetonka—Minnetonka, Minnesota, where we lived—isn’t a small town, but something like that gets around. And high school kids can be particularly cruel when a not-very-popular girl accuses the star of the football team of sexual assault.” He grimaced. “The general consensus would have been that she only cried rape because I discovered them together.”
“That’s not unusual,” Mei-li said. “One of the many reasons women the world over don’t report sexual assault.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t report it, but Lyon didn’t get off scot-free. I beat the crap out of him the next day. He was a couple of inches taller and a few pounds heavier, but I...I wasn’t about to let him get away with what he’d done and brag about it, as he was already starting to do with some of the guys on the football team. It wasn’t anywhere near what he deserved, but...” He clenched his jaw. “That’s when Lyon decided to get his revenge on me...by assaulting Bree.”
He stopped abruptly, because recounting this ancient history was a lot tougher than he’d imagined it would be. Mei-li waited silently, and Dirk realized she was using the same tactic on him she’d used on Vanessa that afternoon...waiting for him to become uncomfortable with the silence. And he mentally gave her bonus points as an interrogator.
“That night...the night it happened,” he finally said, “it was a beautiful evening in May, unusually warm for Minnesota, and the AC in my old beater of a car didn’t work. I’ve often wondered...” Back then he and Bree had thanked God for the warm night, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been driving with the windows rolled down. Wouldn’t have heard...
“Lyon must have stalked Bree for weeks, must have known she always went to the library on Wednesday and Friday nights, the nights I worked. I was supposed to be working that Friday, too, but my manager asked me at the last minute to switch shifts with another pizza-delivery guy who needed the following night off—I don’t remember why. I said sure and headed to the library to meet up with Bree—I thought I’d surprise her, take her to the movie we’d planned to see on Saturday.”
Dirk vividly remembered the rest of that night as if it had happened yesterday. “When I got to the library, the girl at the checkout counter told me I’d just missed Bree. So I hopped in my car and started for her house.” His pulse kicked up a notch and his breathing quickened. “There was an elementary school along the way. That time of night, the school yard was deserted, but as I drove past I heard what sounded like a scream. I stopped the car to listen and heard it again. Definitely a scream. And I knew it was Bree. I don’t know how I knew... I just...did.”
Fear had gripped him, but instead of paralyzing him, it had given his feet wings as he dashed from the car toward the sound of Bree’s last, desperate, choked-off scream, which had emanated from the parking lot behind the building. When the sound stopped, fear had turned to terror.
“When I found them, Lyon had Bree down on the ground, a knife to her throat as he tried to rape her.” He shuddered at the rage sweeping through him now, just as it had then, and his hands formed fists. “She wasn’t screaming anymore, but she was trying to fight him, despite the knife. When I pulled him off her, he turned his knife on me. We fought. He had hatred going for him, and the memory of the beating I’d given him the last time. And he had a weapon. But I’d seen what he’d tried to do to Bree. I had fury going for me, and a determination that—”
He broke off, and after a moment Mei-li touched his arm. “Then what happened?”
“We struggled for possession of the knife,” Dirk rasped, “and I killed him in self-defense.” He paused and took a deep breath. “At least...that’s what Bree testified to at my murder trial, and the jury believed her—they acquitted me.”
“If it was self-defense, why was there even a trial?”
“The police took me into custody that night—they pretty much had to, because Lyon was dead at my hands. And I’d had a few run-ins with the law the year before. Nothing major, just the usual teenage stupidity—staying out past curfew, getting into fights, stuff like that. It might have all come to nothing, but Lyon’s multimillionaire father, Terrell Blackwood, had political connections. He maintained I had it in for Lyon—he pointed to the fight we’d had before as proof.”
Dirk made a gesture of frustration. “I’d been arrested for that at the time, but Lyon had refused to press charges despite his father’s insistence. Even though the charges had been dropped, however, the arrest was still on my record. And the prosecution didn’t hesitate to use it against me. But, as I said, I was acquitted at trial. The judge announced I’d been exonerated, and—” his voice turned bitter “—I was leaving the court without a stain on my name.”
He waited, but Mei-li didn’t react at all, just stared at him with that same expression comprised of patience and compassion. “And?” she prompted.
Dirk didn’t know why, but he wanted to shatter her composure. Wanted her to know the very worst about him so she wouldn’t look at him that way. Compassion wasn’t pity—he’d been on the receiving end of enough of both after Bree died to know the difference—but he didn’t want either from Mei-li. And the reasons were as complex as the totally unexpected emotions she’d triggered in him two weeks earlier.
But he wasn’t quite ready to reveal all his secrets. “And Terrell Blackwood tried to kill Bree and me when I walked out of that courtroom a free man. Came damn close to doing it, too,” he said grimly. He slid a hand inside the unbuttoned collar of his polo shirt and tugged until the scar he carried over his heart was visible. “The surgeon said if the bullet had been an inch to the right it would have been game over for me. As it was, I spent three weeks in the hospital recovering, but it was worse for Bree. She was gutshot.”
Nineteen years and the rage was still there—directly, both internally and externally. First Lyon Blackwood attacking Bree twenty years ago, then his father, Terrell, shooting her right after the acquittal. And last but certainly not least, he himself. Every bad thing that had happened to Bree, including what she’d suffered at the hands of the Blackwoods, had been due to him in one fashion or another. “She developed a bacterial infection, despite the best the hospital could do. They were so sure she wasn’t going to make it, they called in a priest to give her last rites.”
But Bree had shocked them all by living. They’d wheeled a seventeen-year-old Dirk into the ICU at his insistence, and with tears running down his cheeks, he’d begged her not to leave him. Bree had always claimed she had no memory of those three days when she’d fought for her life, her temperature spiking to dangerous levels as the hospital staff pumped her full of antibiotics, but Dirk had remembered. They’d