Some of my wires cross when portions of my past merge with the present. Not since a hummed lullaby unearthed the truth have I seen Cleo as Cleo. She is my mother in all meanings of the word, and try as I may, my brain won’t acknowledge any different.
With Megan lost of a reply and a psychosis racing for me faster than I can contain it, I shift my focus back to Nick—except he’s no longer Nick. He is my father. My tormentor. The man who is to blame for every single fucked-up thing I’ve done.
“You knew she’d fail, but you still made her do it. You just wanted an excuse to kill her, and my test gave you the green light.” My back molars smash together so firmly, they crack. “I’m not letting you do this again. Killing her will be more humane than what you’ll put her through. She could die over and over again, but you still won’t let her go, will you?”
When I push Jasper out of the way so I can line up my gun with my mother’s head, he races to my father’s side like he won’t be the cause of years of pain. I stumble on unsteady feet when my father tugs Jasper behind him in a protective stance before he attempts to place himself between the bullet earmarked for my mother’s head and me.
He’s never protected her before.
Not once.
I stare at Nick, confused as to where he came from when he mutters, “Megan…”
“Don’t talk to her!” I snarl, my mood not so unhinged I’ve forgotten how badly he treated her. “She needed your help, but instead of helping her, you chewed her up and spat her out. You cared about no one but yourself.” My words dart out of my mouth with a ton of spit. “You could have saved her, you could have saved us, but instead, you put yourself first.”
I’m taken aback when my father’s face blurs with Nick’s when he replies, “You’re right. I could of. But I was young—”
“That isn’t an excuse!”
“I know. I know,” he shouts when his deflection shifts my focus back to Cleo. “But I was never given a chance to fix it.”
Both Nick’s icy blue eyes and the dead cold eyes of my father snap to mine when I shout, “Don’t look at her!”
He licks his dry lips, shifts his eyes away from Megan, then mutters, “She doesn’t look well.”
“She’s sick,” Jasper whispers from behind his father’s leg at the same time I say, “She’s fine! Now. No thanks to you, though.”
Nick swallows before bobbing his head up and down. “I’ll admit, I could have handled things better back then.” I make a ‘duh’ noise. “But by the time I realized the mistakes I had made, she was gone. No one knew where she was.”
As my mind balances on the edge of the sharp cliff of a debilitating psychosis, I mutter, “Because your brother locked her way.”
“No.” His brisk head shake adds to his short denial. “We hadnothingto do with it. We didn’t know who took her.” He says ‘we’ like his brother is hiding in the shadows. From what I’ve read about Isaac Holt, he probably is. “But now that she’s back, I can fix my mistakes.”
I laugh in his face. “It’s too late. Look at her.” When he jumps to the command in my tone, I work my jaw side to side. I hate the remorse in his eyes when he locks them with Megan. I fucking loathe it. “She can’t come back from that.”
The pride in my voice doesn’t match the seriousness of my reply. Megan is fucked in the head, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If we were all born the same way, life would be real boring.
“Lucky for you, she doesn’t want to come back from that.” I shift my gun from Cleo’s head to Nick’s. For some stupid reason, he looks relieved that the focus is on him. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll let you off easily. It’s gone too far to pretend nothing happened.” I roam my eyes over his body before shifting them to his empty hands he’s holding out in front of himself in a non-defensive manner. “Where is it? Where’s the device?”
“I’m just reaching for the micro-SD,” Nick promises when his digging hand almost sees a bullet hole lodged between his blond brows. “They’re all on here. Every image you sent.”
“Including…” I swish my tongue around my mouth, hating how dry memories of my past make my throat. “Including the one I sent directly to you?”
Megan’s glassy eyes shoot to mine when Nick dips his chin. Even with Nick breaking our invisible connection with unrequired words, they’re full of awe and admiration. “And Isaac’s security team destroyed any trace of it. No one willeversee it.” After tossing the SD card to my feet, he adds with a stutter, “N-now you need to let my son go. That was the deal.”
I shake my head. Our trip to Ravenshoe was hatched solely to get back the image hours behind a monitor couldn’t locate, but that doesn’t mean his penance is over. He hurt Megan, and as much as my head screams at me that one man can’t be trialed for the injustices of another, I refuse to listen.
Nick isn’t my father, but his crimes were just as ruthless. They hurt women I love, and for that alone, they must die—both of them.
My compression of the trigger suspends midway when my name is murmured. It didn’t come from Cleo or Nick, nor the woman still bound in the trunk of her sedan parked at the back of the warehouse with hidden tunnels that will conceal our escape for hours. It came from the woman at my side, the one who’s usually mute unless she’s walking the gallows of hell.
When Megan peers at me with pleading yet almost lifeless eyes, I shake my head. “It’s not enough. He isn’t sorry—”
“I am.”
The lies stop spilling from Nick’s mouth when I notch the trigger almost all the way back. “You’renotsorry. You can’t even say the word!” I nudge my head to Cleo, who’s so quiet, I’m beginning to wonder how I ever confused her with my mother. “She knows that better than anyone.”
Unlike my father, I didn’t pick my targets based on their purity rating. I wanted women like my mother—hotheaded Spaniards who’d fight for equality almost longer than they’d resign to the fact it would never happen with a man as governing as me.
