the door, he saw the scar on her cheek.
The crescent-shaped knife cut that the Moonlight Strangler had given all his victims.
There were marks on her throat, too. Scars from the piano wire that had sliced into her skin when the killer strangled her.
“Yes.” Paige touched her fingers to her neck. “It’s healed now. For the most part.”
She was wrong. It would never heal. Never go away. Not in his mind, anyway.
“But clearly you’re not dead,” he snapped. And he didn’t want her to be, but he damn sure wanted some answers. “I’ve been through hell for the past year. Hell,” Jax emphasized. “You didn’t just put me through this, either. Matthew went through it, too.”
Even though his son had been only a year old when Paige died, it’d broken Jax’s heart to hear his son call out for his ma-ma.
“Matthew.” Her breath hitched, and tears sprang to her eyes. “I did this for him. For you.”
“You didn’t do anything for me.” There was no way for him to rein in the anger in his voice or any other part of him. “You let me believe you’d been murdered.”
She nodded, came even closer. So close that he caught her familiar scent. But she also glanced around again. “Because if I hadn’t let you believe that, the Moonlight Strangler would have come after me again. And I was afraid he’d use Matthew and you to get to me.”
He cursed again, dismissing that. “I’m a deputy sheriff.”
“And that didn’t stop him from getting to me,” Paige reminded him just as quickly.
Good grief, she might as well have slugged him with a two-by-four. Because it was the truth. And it was a truth that Jax had struggled with for the past year.
He hadn’t managed to save her.
But someone obviously had.
“What happened?” he demanded.
She paused, gathered her breath. Maybe her thoughts, too. “By the time the San Antonio cops got to the crime scene, I was barely alive. In fact, the first cop on the scene did report me as dead. That’s the report that went out to you and everybody else. But the paramedics managed to revive me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I knew if word got out that I was alive, the killer would just come after me again.”
He mentally went through all the details and saw one big question at the end of that explanation. “Who helped you come up with this stupid plan?”
“I came up with it.” She glanced around again. “And I convinced a cop at SAPD who knew about me to go along with it.”
Jax didn’t miss the glancing around, nor the hesitation in her voice.
“Who helped you?” he pressed.
She dodged his gaze. “Other than the cop, Cord Granger helped.”
Jax would have cursed again if he could have gotten his jaw unclenched. Cord Granger, a DEA agent. Also the biological brother to his adopted sister, Addie.
Cord and Addie’s father was none other than the Moonlight Strangler himself. Though the law didn’t have the actual identity of the vicious serial killer, they knew from DNA comparisons that both Cord and Addie were his biological children. Children the killer had abandoned when they were a little more than toddlers, and neither had any recollections of the man.
Too bad.
If they had a name, then they could find and arrest the piece of slime.
Something that Cord had made his top priority.
Jax had never cared much for Cord. And this wouldn’t help. Because Cord was much more concerned about catching his birth father than he was with the safety of the people around him. Jax wouldn’t have put it past the man to actually use Paige to draw the killer out. And now he’d apparently put Paige up to lying to him.
Not just any old lie, either.
But one that’d crushed Jax and the rest of his family.
“You were a fool to trust Cord,” he finally managed to say. Jax shoved his thumb against his chest. “You should have trusted me instead.”
She huffed. Not an angry sound, but more like stating the obvious. “We weren’t exactly in a good place, Jax.”
That was the wrong thing to say. A new wave of anger came. “You’re sure you didn’t die because you didn’t want to face the divorce?” Or maybe because she hadn’t wanted to face him?
Her eyes narrowed when their gazes connected again. “No. It was to save Matthew and you.”
Jax didn’t have time to figure out if he believed that or not. Because he heard something he didn’t want to hear.
Belinda’s voice.
“Jax, are you all right?” the nanny called out.
Belinda was on the back porch, peering into the garage. She could almost certainly see him, but probably not Paige. Paige kept it that way by stepping into the shadows.
“Tell her to go back inside,” Paige insisted.
Jax opened his mouth to ask why, but because he was watching Paige so closely, he saw the urgency slide across her face.
And the fear.
“I’m fine,” he told Belinda. “Just checking a few things before I head to the office.”
He waited to see if that’d be enough or if he truly would have to tell her to go inside. But thankfully, it worked. Belinda went back in and closed the door.
“What happened?” Jax asked Paige. And he didn’t need his lawman’s instincts to tell him that not only had something happened...
Something had gone wrong.
“What made you come back now?” he pressed.
The fear in her face went up a significant notch. “I think the Moonlight Strangler is on his way here to draw me out.”
All right. That upped his concern, too. A lot. “And how exactly would he do that?”
Paige’s mouth trembled. “The Moonlight Strangler is coming after Matthew and you...tonight.”
Paige stood there and waited for Jax to react to the news she’d just delivered.
And he reacted all right.
He turned, ready to bolt inside the house. To protect Matthew, no doubt. But Paige took hold of his arm to stop him.
“Just listen to what I have to say,” she insisted. “I don’t want to give the
