That isn’t Cleo. She’s demure. Bland. So fucking under her ‘master’s’ command, I doubt any decisions she makes are her own.
She’s nothing like Megan.
Megan jumps on queue like a good little pet, but she’ll also gut anyone who dares to tell her she’s wrong for following my command.
She’s not a wallflower. She’s a fucking imp, and now that the error I made when I sent a picture of her delicious cunt to another man has been rectified, I can teach her exactly how black the veins weaved around her heart are.
“Are you sad you’re not as strong as her?” I’m staring at Cleo, but I’m speaking to my mother. “Or was the ‘victim’ act your ruse all along?” My brain rattles against my skull when Itskher with a dismissive head shake. “You could have walked away, but you were as sick as him.” When strands of dark hair fall into Cleo’s eyes when she denies my claim without words, I shout, “Yes, you were, or how did I become this?” I whack the butt of my gun against my temple. “He fucked with my head, but you made me this way because not an ounce of his blood runs through my veins.”
“He lied to you, Dexter.” My eyes snap to the gravelly tone interrupting our reunion so fast, Nick’s son disappears into the shadows edging the warehouse along with Cleo before I can swing my gun in the direction they went.
It’s fine, though. Megan’s tormentor is still in front of me, and now his brother has joined us for the final showdown.
With Isaac’s jaw ticking in sync with the spasm in my top lip, he shifts his narrowed gaze from Nick to me. He tries to wipe the riled expression off his face. He shouldn’t have bothered. I can smell the annoyance festering out of him. It is almost as enticing as the fear pumping out of Nick. “Every single thing your father told you was a lie.” He holds his hands out in front of himself before gesturing that he’s reaching for a piece of paper in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “You were conceived six monthsafteryour mother disappeared.”
I shake my head. “No—”
“Yes,” Isaac argues like I don’t have a gun pointed at his little brother’s head before he folds out the paper to reveal a missing person’s report for a woman who looks oddly similar to my mother. It’s dated fifteen months before my father cut me out of my mother’s stomach. “This is you,” he mutters before he taps on a much smaller image of a dark-haired baby with a lightning-shaped scar down his forehead in the far corner. “And these are your grandparents.”
His ruse is over.
“My mother was in foster care. She was a drug addict who ran away so she wouldn’t have to abort me.”
“No,” Isaac argues again, his tone more sympathetic this time around. “Your mother was taken during an exchange program in her final year of high school. She was very much loved and wanted.” He locks his eyes with Megan who appears as unstable as I feel. “As was your mother. And although she was sick, that was only because she didn’t have the right people helping her. She could have gotten better, and so can you, Megan. Do you want to get better?”
My vindictive chuckle bounces around the almost desolate warehouse when Megan shakes her head. I’ve told her numerous times she no longer has to pretend. She can be anyone she wants to be—even a deranged psychopath.
“What’s your game plan now?” I ask at the same time a commotion at my side gains my attention. It isn’t marshals barging in with the hope they’ll take me down before I kill Nick. It is Megan howling in pain as she folds in two while clutching her stomach.
“What’s wrong with h—”
“Nothing! Nothing is wrong with her.” With my gun bouncing between Nick and his big brother, I crank my neck back to Megan in just enough time to see her stumble forward at a rate too quick for her feet to keep up with. “Megan…” I growl out a second before she faceplants with the dirty concrete floor.
My pulse rings in my ears when I kick her with my boot, and she doesn’t rouse in the slightest.
“She needs help—”
“She’s fine. She’s just tired.”
Strands of blond hair flop into Nick’s face when he shakes the mop on his head. “No, she’s not. She’s bleeding, and her cheeks are really pale.”
“What did you do to her?” I scream when my endeavor to roll Megan over sees my boot covered with her blood. Usually, I’d relish the thought of any part of my body wearing her blood, but there’s too much coating my boot to believe it’s from a little nick to her thigh.
“This wasn’t us—”
“Bullshit!” I scream, my mood so unbalanced, I’m torn between dragging Megan to her feet by her hair or falling to my knees and begging God to take me instead. “She was fine until she saw you. You did this to her.” With my gun shaking from the shudder rolling through my body, I lower it to Nick’s chest so my aim doesn’t have to be perfect to take him down before I bob down to roll Megan over.
“What the fuck…” Nick murmurs under his breath when he spots the cause for the redness on my boot.
The cuts in Megan’s stomach have oozed through both her bandages and her dress. The murky blood flooding out of her is angry and red, but it has nothing on the rage that fills me when Isaac says, “If you don’t get her help, she will die.” He ignores the rapid shake of my head. “Her body is going into shock. Most likely sepsis. First dizziness and disorientation, then vomiting…” I recall how Megan ran to the bushes when I forgot to warn her about the deceased bodies in the trunk of the substitute teacher’s car. She usually handles gore better than that, but something has been off with her tonight. “Now—”
“Say it again and I will kill you.”
Like a man not in fear for his life, Isaac mutters, “Without urgent medical attention, shewilldie.”
“No. No. No. No.No!” For each screamed denial, I rip at my hair. “She’s fine. She’ll be fine. She’s—”
I stop rambling when Nick mutters, “Not breathing.”
