“It wasn’t a dream. Victor Montgomery is dead.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “It was so awful.”
“What was awful?”
“I…I saw Victor. He was…dead.”
“You walked in after he was killed?”
Emily took a deep breath. “Oh God, it’s true. It’s all my fault.”
“Why do you say that?”
Julia tensed, touching the window with both hands. “No, Em. No.” But she remembered that Dillon was on the side of the defense this time. He wouldn’t be testifying against Emily. Still, she ran through all possible scenarios. Maybe having Emily committed, at least temporarily, would help. Protect her. Legal precedents churned in her head and she almost missed Emily’s next words.
“I planned it. Exactly like that. I thought of it, I pictured it in my mind. But it was so much worse, so much blood.”
“Oh God,” Julia said, blinking back tears. She turned to Connor. “Don’t let her confess.”
“She’s not,” he said, not taking his eyes from Emily’s face.
“How-”
“Shh.”
Dillon looked Emily in the eye. “Did you kill Victor?”
She shook her head violently. “No, God no. No. But I wanted to! I wanted to so bad. You don’t know what it was like living with him. And I thought about it, about killing him. About him being dead. About how it would feel to take away his power over me.”
Dillon took Emily’s hand and squeezed. “Emily, this is important. Did you ask someone to kill Victor for you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Were you threatened in any way? Did someone threaten to hurt you or someone else if you didn’t let them into the house?”
Her expression was confused. “You mean did I let someone in to kill Victor?” She shook her head vigorously. “No.”
“If you were threatened, I promise around-the-clock police protection. No one can hurt you in here. We have a guard outside, this room is secure.”
She kept shaking her head. In a small voice she said, “I didn’t let anyone in yesterday. No one threatened me.”
Julia’s heart dropped. It would have been a good defense. No jury would convict a teenager who was scared and let in a killer. And as she thought it, she knew it couldn’t have happened. Santos’s men would never have left a witness alive.
“Did you try to kill yourself last night?” Dillon asked.
Emily’s jaw dropped and she looked at Dillon directly for the first time. “Kill myself? Absolutely not. Never. I didn’t-Why would you think that?”
“You took several Xanax on top of a substantial amount of alcohol.”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t-I hate that crap. I took Tylenol.” But she averted her eyes. Why was she lying?
“Before or after you drank a pint of rum?”
“After.”
“And?”
She closed her eyes, bit her lip. “I was drunk. I didn’t try to kill myself. Believe me, I didn’t…I didn’t want to. I was-I don’t know. I just couldn’t believe what I saw. I was scared but numb. Like I wasn’t in my body, that everything was in my head, but I knew it wasn’t. I’m not explaining this very well.”
“What did you see?”
“I-” She stopped.
“Tell me from the beginning, if it’s easier.”
“Yesterday afternoon is so fuzzy.”
“Tell me how you remember it.”
“I got home from school, but I didn’t go into the house. I just sat in the garage. For over an hour. Just sat there.”
“Why didn’t you want to go in?”
“Victor was home.”
“But you have to be home because of your probation, correct?”
She nodded. “I have to be inside by six p.m. And on Wednesdays my mother is out late and Victor is home early…”
Her voice trailed off and Julia knew what she was going to say. Her stomach dropped and her fists clenched. “That bastard!” She almost hit the window, but Connor’s hand shot out and grabbed her fist. Held it. His hand was hot and dry.
Emily’s lip quivered and Dillon asked quietly but firmly, “When Victor and you were alone at the house, what happened?”
“He-” She stopped, cleared her throat, her eyes rimmed with tears. “He made me give him oral sex.” Her voice was flat.
“Did you tell anyone?”
She shook her head, averting her eyes. “I was scared.”
“That’s why you ran away three years ago?” Dillon asked.
“Y-yes.”
“It’s been going on for over three years?”
She nodded.
Dillon’s voice was soothing. “What did your stepfather do to you?”
She didn’t look at Dillon, but Julia knew she was telling the truth. Her cheeks were red from embarrassment, humiliation. Her hands twisted in the bed-sheets. “Six months after he and Mother got married I saw him watching me swim. It freaked me out, but he went away. Then it happened again. And again. And I couldn’t go in the pool anymore unless I knew for sure he wasn’t at home.
“One day a couple months later, I was in the pool house showering. I thought I was alone, completely alone because it was a Wednesday and the servants had the day off. I opened the shower door to grab a towel and he was there. Naked. I screamed and he slapped me. He raped me. Right there on the bathroom floor.”
Next to Julia, Connor squeezed her hand, his own anger radiating from his tight body. “I’d have killed him,” he said, his voice a low, vicious rasp. “He deserved what he got.”
Julia couldn’t disagree, though she was the last person who believed that anyone should take justice into their own hands. She wondered what she would have done had she known Victor raped her niece.
Julia would have turned him in. Had Victor Montgomery prosecuted and thrown in prison, where maybe he would see what it was like to be raped. Three years ago, Emily had been under fourteen, which meant special circumstance sexual assault. Montgomery would have been locked up in maximum for ten-to-twenty and required to register as a sex offender.
But Julia knew what the victims went through. They were scared, true, but more than that they were deeply humiliated. The hurt didn’t end with the physical pain. They suffered emotionally for the rest of their lives. On top of that, Emily would have had to talk to a judge, possibly take the stand and testify. Her word against a respected jurist. And now, three years later, any physical evidence was gone. No proof. Even a mediocre attorney could rip Emily’s story apart.
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” Dillon asked Emily quietly.
“I don’t know. Who’d believe me? And…I tried to forget. I didn’t want to think about it. Ever. And then, a month later, he was there, outside my bedroom when I was leaving for school. He told me I was a good girl because I kept my mouth shut, and so he knew I’d liked it.” Tears streamed down Emily’s face. “He said he’d have a surprise for me when I got home from school and not to be late. That’s when I ran away.”
Dillon said, “When you came home after you ran away, when did your stepfather start hurting you
