"What?" he asks when I shoot him a glare. "You said drop it."
I ignore him, laying my end down and moving to the grave. I stomp on the dirt. "A couple of days old, but it should be fine," I say. Abel heads back to the Mustang to grab the rest of the shovels and I turn and look at Brax.
"Don't start," he says quietly.
"Just checking on you." I reach into my back pocket and withdraw a cigarette pack, slapping it on my palm once, twice, three times before I rip it open and dig out a smoke.
"You shouldn't do that here," he says as I put the end between my lips.
"I'm not going to smoke it yet," I say. Though I want to. Real fucking bad. This night has been a fucking shit show. In the nearby distance, I can hear Abel cursing softly to himself as he climbs the hill again. The clang of metal banging against metal echoing after him.
"You should tell her," Brax says.
I look at him. "Tell her what?"
He glares.
I sigh. "It won't do any good. She can't do anything about it. I want more details before we say anything."
"She deserves to know."
"I never said she didn't."
"Someone called that motherfucker." Braxton's voice deepens with his anger, a note of something slightly unhinged entering his tone. "Someone warned him that she'd be coming back. He was waiting for her in that house."
As Abel makes it to the top of the hill and heads our way, I slowly turn and look at Brax. "Let her sleep tonight, man," I say. "Just give her that much. We'll figure the rest out in the morning."
"We're going to make them pay," he swears, keeping his eyes level with mine.
I pull the cigarette out of my mouth and stick it into my back pocket. If it gets crushed, it gets crushed—I just needed something for a moment. "Yes," I tell him, "we will."
Because he's right; before Roger Murphy died by Avalon's hands, he'd told us the truth. He hadn't acted alone. Someone had known she would be coming back. It was also the reason why any and all lingering anger at Avalon had dried up. Because someone had fucking set her up. I’d let myself be overtaken by my jealousy. I’d been more than stupid—I’d been the trigger for her latest trauma and I wasn’t dumb enough to think that it was the only or even the last. Oh no. This wasn’t over by a long shot.
Someone had known exactly what buttons to press to piss me off and I’d known exactly what to do to send her running. All of that had only ensured that she would be set up, drugged, raped and, if things had gone Roger's way, murdered.
Avalon Manning has someone on edge that is willing to do whatever it takes to get rid of her, and we’re going to find out who. Starting with Luc Kincaid and Kate fucking Coleman.