His pulse sped up, just as it had that night when the hair on the back of his neck had stood on end. “Something felt off, so we went looking for them. The place was like a maze, and before we even got to the bathrooms, I heard my sister tell someone to get their hands off her, and I looked in the direction of her voice. Kevin had her by her upper arms. It took a second, maybe two, for the fear in her eyes to register, and he threw her back against the wall and locked his forearm against her throat. She was fucking pregnant. I didn’t think, and I didn’t hesitate. I just grabbed him by the back of his shirt and tore him off her. He cocked his fist, and I let mine fly, but he turned away, and I caught him in the side of the head.”

Bile rose in his throat, the sickening crack of bone against his knuckles coming back with a vengeance. “It all happened so fast.” He covered his fist with his hand and lowered his eyes. “You never hit someone in the side of the head. The skull is thinnest there, and there’s an artery…He went down like a ton of bricks, and I knew…” He closed his eyes, tears burning, and blinked them away. “People were fucking cheering me on. My sister was on her knees beside Kevin, hysterical, Michelle was screaming at me, and I couldn’t fucking move.” He felt a crushing weight on his chest as if he were right back there. “I don’t even know how to describe what I felt when the fear in my sister’s eyes registered and he threw her against that wall.” He gritted his teeth. “God only knows how many other times he’d done it, but he was also my best friend, and he wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. My friend was dead, and my sister…” He looked away, trying to pull himself together as he choked out, “I’d killed the father of her child, and she told me flat-out she was done with me. After I was arrested, Michelle put my shit into storage and had me served with divorce papers.”

TEARS WELLED IN Madigan’s eyes, her heart breaking for him. She knew the devastation of losing a best friend, but to be the one who had killed them, even if that best friend wasn’t who he’d thought he was? To carry that burden for the rest of his life? To be abandoned by the sister he’d practically raised and had tried to protect? The wife who took vows for better or worse? What the hell was wrong with those people?