My Husband Saved Her Cat While My Father Bled to Death

The smell hit me first.

Candles. Lilies. Something underneath it all — sweet and wrong, the way a room smells when it's trying too hard to hide something dead.

St. Augustine's was packed. Every pew filled, every face turned toward the front of the nave where Julien Herrera lay in a mahogany casket lined with white satin. The priest was still speaking. I couldn't hear the words. All I could hear was my own breathing and the low, steady pressure of Clyde's hand on my back, steering me down the center aisle like I was luggage.

I hadn't wanted to come. I'd told him that. Three times.

"Clyde, please." I'd grabbed his sleeve in the car. "He tried to rape me. My father shot him to save my life. I can't go in there and — "

"You'll go in." His voice was flat. Final. The voice he used when a conversation was already over. "You'll pay your respects. And you will not make a scene."

I stared at his profile. That jaw. That cold, perfect jaw I used to press my lips against. "Pay my respects," I repeated.

He didn't answer.

Now we were inside, and the Herrera family was watching us from the front row. I felt their eyes like something physical — like fingers pressing into my skin.

Estelle sat in the center. She wore black lace, her dark hair pinned back, her eyes red-rimmed and luminous. She looked fragile. Breakable. She looked like a woman drowning in grief, and when she saw Clyde, her chin trembled and she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth.

Clyde's hand tightened on my back.

I watched him look at her. Something moved across his face — soft, certain, resolved — and my stomach turned over.

He believed her. He still believed every single thing she told him.

"Clyde." I kept my voice low. "Whatever she told you about that night — it's not true. There was a witness. A girl who saw everything. She can testify that my father was defending me —"

"There is no witness." He said it quietly. Almost gently. Which was somehow worse. "Raymond looked into it. The girl recanted. Her family left the city."

The floor shifted under me.

Raymond. His enforcer. A broad, silent man with pale eyes who had been standing near the church entrance when we arrived, hands folded, watching the street. I'd noticed him and told myself it meant nothing.

It meant everything.

Raymond Holt had found her. That teenage girl who had been standing on the corner that night, who had seen Julien's hands on me, who had seen my father raise the gun. Raymond had found her family and done whatever Clyde's men do — and now she was gone, and my father's only defense was gone with her.

Dad was in Rikers. He'd been there for eleven days. Eleven days in a maximum-security facility for a crime he didn't commit, because the man standing beside me had made