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And how many eyes would you lose if anyone tested that theory on you?
He decided not to go there.
He just kept moving through the evergreens with their icy needles that brushed against his face; he thought about Lacey and how she’d lied to him, cheated on him.
He thought about his own stepbrother fucking his girl.
He thought about his parents, how they’d all abandoned him, how they’d punished him.
Samuel Senior had never stood up for him, not like he did for Sam Junior, his firstborn and namesake, the perfect son who never got into any serious trouble. And Natalie? His own mother? That woman had run from him. Had herself a new family, a perfect family, one without a troubled, scandal-riddled teenager. So she’d discarded her firstborn as easy as if he were rotting trash, rarely visiting, barely acknowledging, never so much as helping him get out of that hellhole that was Banhoff Prison.
What kind of a mother was that?
Then there was Sam Junior himself, his half brother. Sam, apple of their father’s eye, had never once had Jonas’s back. Never once. “Fucker,” Jonas growled under his breath, the night air fogging around him.
And finally, of course, there was Kara.
The basket case.
Her excuse for abandoning him had been her youth.
And she’d let their entire fortune be frittered away by Merritt Margrove and her aunt, that vitriolic sister of Zelda’s. “Auntie Fai,” they’d all called her, but she was a stone-cold bitch who was living inhishouse with her do-nothing musician of a boyfriend. Driving fancy cars. Going on fabulous vacations. Wearing expensive clothes and jewelry. Jonas had learned it all from Margrove, that weasel of a lawyer who was just trying to save his own skin because he, too, had been dipping his greedy fingers into the estate. All that talk about expenses—taxes, fees, maintenance, schooling . . . all horse shit.
He slipped through the gap in the fence around the old house, just as he had as a kid, then he went to the back stoop, reached under the doorframe to that small niche where he’d hidden a key all those years before. Not a key to the front door or even the back door, but a key to the lock that secured the outside door to the woodbin set into a cabinet near the fireplace. It had been his hidden escape route when he’d sneaked out as a teen. The stacked wood had always been an issue, but he’d always been able to sneak out and back in, arranging the kindling and chunks of fir back into the bin so that no one ever noticed, and he’d never been caught.
Rounding the corner of the house, he stopped before stepping onto the porch. Straining to listen, he double-checked that no one was about. The wind was picking up, rattling branches, whispering through the trees, but he heard nothing and saw nothing indicating that anyone was nearby. And who would be?
He walked past the stone wall of the fireplace to the back side of the bin, where there was a definitive line in the siding. Using his key, he unlocked the latch and the door fell open. He slipped inside, crawling through the close, dusty space where cobwebs caught in his hair and slivers from old chunks of fir scraped his hands. Ignoring the irritation, Jonas slid onto the living room floor, just to one side of the grate, and peered around the gloomy interior.
His ribs protested, pain radiating through him, but he ignored it. He hadn’t come this far, spent all those years behind bars to let a few cracked ribs stop him. He gritted his teeth, gutted it out and flipped on his flashlight, the thin bluish beam illuminating, washing over the gray stones and peeling wallpaper and dusty floor.
This is where it had all gone down.
He remembered the blood. The fear. The rush of adrenaline.
But most of all, he remembered the sword, how heavy it was. How sharp. He’d made certain of that because he’d wanted it to do as much damage as possible.
And he remembered Donner in the light from the fire, his eyes rounding in surprise as Jonas had swung, the expression of utter surprise and horror on his face when the blade had made its first deadly slice.
“Jonas! What the fuck! You’re insane!” he’d yelled, jumping back toward the Christmas tree. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he’d yelled, “Stop it! Shit! Stop it! Oh, God! Noooo! Help! Help!”
But Jonas hadn’t stopped and it was too late for help and that traitorous fucker had died, his blood spilling red on the carpet, him stumbling to his knees and eventually his head dropping with a heavy thud.
It should have ended there, he thought now as he crossed the room, recalling that once Donner was down, how easy it was to tangle his hand in the prick’s hair, pull his head back and make the final, purposeful cut across his throat.
Now, reliving that rush, Jonas climbed the stairs to the second floor, hurried down the hallway and paused for only a second at the open doorway to his once-upon-a-lifetime-ago bedroom. As if it were yesterday, Jonas recalled practicing his martial arts moves on the stuffed eagle that had been mounted on the wall, how the head had severed in a flurry of feathers.
Smiling to himself, Jonas hurried to the door to the attic and shined his light up the narrow staircase. It had been years since he ascended these worn steps, he thought, securing the door behind him.
Once on the top floor of the house, he shined the beam of his light over this cavernous space with its high-pitched roof and exposed beams. This attic space was where he’d hidden the cash that he’d stolen from the old man’s secret stash. He hardly dared believe it still existed, but this was his chance to find out.
* * *
Tate drove into the short lane leading to his family’s mountain retreat. The beams of his headlights illuminated the narrow front porch and paned windows of the two-bedroom cottage where he’d spent most of his summers growing up. Built in the 1930s, it was less than a quarter mile from the McIntyre place, and as a kid, Wes had loved it here. Until the night his father had given up his life to save a frantic little girl—this girl, he thought, glancing over at Kara, huddled against the window of his SUV.
Rather than head directly to the house where she’d witnessed the aftermath of her family’s slaughter, Tate had brought her here first, to test her, to see if she could handle being so near the house where she’d witnessed so much tragedy and horror. So far she was handling it, he thought, though she’d grown quieter with each passing mile as they’d driven into the mountains.
“We don’t have to go inside,” he said, but she shook her head.
