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“B-Bo-Bozhe,” he sputters as I pull the blade to his spine and rip it up the middle of his back. Blood pours from him like a shot barrel as his limbs go limp, and he sags into me. “Bo-o-o-ozhe.”
“I told you. There’s no God here.” Holding his face to mine, I pull the blade from his flesh.
Heaved breaths, gurgles, and the drip, drip, drip of his blood onto the concrete floor fill the room.
Drip, drip, drip…
The viscosity of blood makes the sound louder and weightier. In the dank dimness, it echoes around me. My own personal hell. And there isn’t a single drop of ice that can pull me from it this time because this hell is better than the one waiting for me out there. Without her. My precious swan.
Drip, drip, drip…
Letting him fall back into the chair, I stand back, listening to his hoarse, gurgling groans And watching the long gluey threads of his blood dribble in the muted light as he shivers so violently that it’s almost a convulsion.
This was meant to make it better. Him over me. It was meant to atone for something…anything…everything I’ve done. The weight of the air in my lungs squeezes my insides as the fear-stricken look on Georgina’s face comes back to haunt me. That deer-in-the-headlights expression she marked me with when that backdrop collapsed. That same fucking wide-eyed, nose-flaring terror she greeted me with at the hospital. All I wanted to do then was hold her, steal some of her warmth. I wanted to bury myself under her skin.
I should’ve gone for her. I pride myself on my word, and I went back on it. I as good as lied to her, something I’ve never done. Or maybe it’s all I’ve done this entire time.
Soft light breaches the dimness of the room, and when I look back, Leo stands in the doorway.
“Fuck.” The curse leaves his lips as he walks inside and pushes the door shut behind him. “What the fuck have you done?”
“It was him or me.” I shrug, cleaning the blade of my knife on my trousers. Meanwhile, he stops beside me, staring in that way of his where he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s judging you. I don’t have to look at him to know; I can feel it as I study the blood that’s still crusted on my blade from his grandfather. Out of all of us, he’s the baby, the one who was brought in as a replacement because his brother got killed in the action.
“Fred,” he rumbles, calling my attention but not daring to come near me.
He knows. Leo knows that I’m a landmine-riddled wasteland right now. One wrong step and I’ll blow. I don’t care who he is or what we are. I’ll fucking destroy it all. I don’t have anything left to lose.
“Freddie.”
“What’re you doing here, Leo? How did you even kno—”
“Cass’ car,” he tells me in the most solemn tone I’ve heard from him in a while. With his stare narrowing on the knife in my hands, he adds, “You know how much she loves that thing.”
“She made you track me.”
“Yeah, you bet.” Although there’s a slight scoff to his reply, his fixed glare doesn’t stray from the blade in my hand. After a deep breath, he says, “Thanks.”
“He wasn’t going to talk, and he would’ve ended up in a fucking coma. Napping until they gave him the good stuff so the bastard could slip away. I don’t think so.”
“We looked for him for so long. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone the way I wanted to see him pay for everything he did. Kit…Cass…but tonight…” A breath hisses through his teeth, whistling over the fading gurgles. “After all that time, I only wanted to see him die. All the energy we’ve put into all this, the focus and never-ending hours, it didn’t seem worth it in the end. The more I looked at him, the more I saw Kit, and I’m never going to get him back. So it was all pointless.”
Turning to look at the mess in front of us, Leo nods wordlessly at his own thoughts as he takes a step forward to get a closer look. It takes him longer than I thought it would to look back at me. Before I can say anything, he reaches into the front pocket of his hoodie and pulls out his gun.
“I just want to move on. To make the most of what I do have because it’s more than I deserve. More than I’ve ever wanted. I want to marry Cassie and give her a good life. That’s all. And saving my grandad only to kill him again eventually…what a waste of time.”
Looking over the firearm in his hand, he continues thinking to himself. All the while the only thing going through my head is how his grandfather murdered mine. Or at least he helped. We’ll never know who was fully responsible for bringing his helicopter down, but Kingsley was the one my grandfather was in a rush to go see because he knew how corrupt we’d become.
“I know it’s not the same for you or Christopher. Fuck, I’ve asked myself a million times since what Cassie would think, and every time, it all comes back to the one simple fact that she deserves to be the only thing that matters. My only focus. My only wish or want. I had to let go and be done with it.”
“Kingsley killed my grandfather, and he killed Christopher’s kid. It was never about what he would tell us, not for me and not for any of you either. It’s why you had to let go, isn’t it? Because when you saw him, all the self-righteous little lies you tell yourselves didn’t cut it. Did they? When it came down to it, you wanted revenge. You wanted justice for your brother.”
Not a word leaves his lips as Leo looks, rolling his lips between his teeth as he gives me an agreeing blink. We are who we are, and we do what we do with valid reasoning, but we’re also human. Something that makes us inadvertently selfish, vindictive creatures. It’s all in our nature, except we’re lucky enough to be able to tamper with the wider consequences. Ironically, the most insignificant ones in the grand scheme of things.
We hold immeasurable power in one hand and intolerable loss in the other.
As he continues holding my stare in the dim light, I tell him, “I didn’t do it for you. Really, I didn’t do it for any of you. I killed him because it’s what he deserved. Poisoned blood for innocent blood. I did it because he sent this bastard for Georgina, and no one fucks with me. No one touches what’s mine and walks away.”
“Freddie…”
