“I—I don’t understand it. I just.. I don’t understand,” she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, holding back a sob. ”How could you—how could you live after doing that? How could you spend hours planning every intricate detail of a man’s death?”

Jackson watched as she struggled. Her watery eyes flicked from one side of the room to the other, but never looking directly at him. Her cheeks and forehead had grown beet red, and it drifted down and bloomed from the base of her neck and across her chest.

“His little girl has epilepsy,” she whispered thickly. “She’s only four. She didn’t deserve to loose her father so young. And his wife—oh Hanna—she’s pregnant with twin boys. Oh my gosh—! I—” Rachel broke into a sob, tears trailing down her cheeks and slipping over her fingers. She took a few steps until her back hit the wall and slid down until her knees hit her chest. “I should’ve known. I should’ve done something—should’ve stopped him. But I didn’t and now he’s dead.” Her sobs had turned into full-fledged wails as the sight of Ryder a few moments before his death haunted her eyes.

How he held his hand out, stopping Rachel in her tracks despite everything within her screaming for her to run and pull him out of the fire. How he smiled at her; his final ‘farewell’ and an ‘I love you’ in one fleeting expression before the roof had collapsed. All of it made her sobs louder, made her even more gutted than she was before.

Her best friend—no, her brother was dead. All because she couldn’t wangle herself into disobeying his one wish: to protect his family.

If only she had listened to Ryder those days before. His persistent warning.

“She’s not who she says she is.”

He knew. He knew, and she had just brushed it away like it was nothing.

“He’s dead,” she swallowed as she stared painfully at Jackson as he crouched before her. “He’s dead… and it’s all my fault.”