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I’d never in my life felt fury like I did in that moment, and I’d had enough pissed-off moments to last a lifetime, butthistook the prize. Him calling what happenedboringand then telling everyone to skip over my father’s last few moments alive to get to thegoodpart made me want to ripeveryonein that room apart. I wanted to leave no survivors aside from Luna, Justin, and the helpless staff in the back who were forced to watch this, as powerless against the Demon as I was.
The hand holding the phone pulled it away to skip it forward as he’d been asked—like a good little bitch.
“Oh! Is that Temperance in the back row?” I looked up from the phone at Damian as he looked over a paper in his hand. I couldn’t see what was on it, but I could see lines and other shapes. “I just found a seating chart. It is! And that’s yourfathersitting next to you. How sweet.” He looked over at me and showed me the paper. “Seating chart. See? It’s all here, sweetheart. You should have left. I still don’t know what this is, but judging from your face and crocodile tears, it must be pretty good, right?”
“Damian!” Asher yelled as he fought to the front of the crowd. His entire body was tense, and there was rage in his voice. “This is bullshit. You don’t know what you’re doing. Stop this.”
“Hey, buddy!” Damian said. “Mr. Landry let you leave? Damn. I might have to get my money back. Clearly, he doesn’t follow instructions.”
Damian paid a teacher off to keep Asher out of the way!
“Besides… there’s nothing to stop. It’s too late. Everyone has the link and is watching on their phones. I couldn’t stop it now if I wanted to—and I don’t. I don’t like being lied to, and it seems like littleTempehas been lying to everyone, you included, for quite some time. I said I’d get answers, and I got them.”
An explosion sounded out, and my eyes were pulled back to the phone. Screams erupted from the phone, and I watched as body parts flew in several different directions. Another explosion went off as the next claymore detonated in the pews, followed by another. Bodies were thrown all over. Everyone in the back of the church ran, and anyone left alive in the front ran to the exit.
My dad helped me stand, and he climbed over a pew, then over the next one so we could avoid the crowd. He pulled me along with him. There was an exit in the pastor’s office, and I had no doubt he was taking me there, where no one else knew to go.
Something black sailed across the church from the back and exploded somewhere behind us. Dad and I were thrown forward several feet, and I landed hard in the middle of a section of destroyed pews and dead bodies.
That must have been when I was impaled, I realized.
Gunshots rang out from the front of the church by the exit, and everyone screamed and ran back, scattering throughout the church to find another way out. Three men in head-to-toe black moved in, a woman in the center of them. Two more men came from the back of the church, which explained where the other explosive had come from, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.
My eyes widened as I recognized the woman.Mom!
She hadn’t been in the church at all when the initial explosion went off! The detectives had found her car parked there, so she’d gone there on her own, but I now wondered if they found her before she could come in.
Chills ran over my body as I realized this wasdefinitelya setup. We knew it before, but this definitely confirmed it for me. The question was: why? Why would a good man like Rick be the target of something like this?
It was one of two things. Either he was a good man who wouldn’t bend to someone else’s will… or the opposite was true. He was a bad man who’d made enemies, and karma had come back to bite him in the ass.
The thought of Rick being bad shattered my heart into a thousand pieces, and I couldn’t even think about it right then. I refused to believe it was true—not when we’djuststarted to really grow our father-daughter relationship.
I looked over at Asher and saw his eyes wide as he watched his phone in horror. I couldn’t blame him. What the hell else was he supposed to do? Fighteveryonein the room for me?
Whatdidshock me was the person standing next to him. Harper.
She looked up from the phone, her eyes locking with mine. Hers were wide, with a look of absolute terror in them.
When I took her on a drive to discuss the hatred and bullying after I’d wound up walking naked through the entire school, I’d told her a version of my story that would resonate with her. I put her, her mother, and Rick in a similar situation—one she could identify with. They didn’t go to church, but they went shopping a lot. So, the tale I told fit her and the lifestyle she’d been used to with Rick. But I made sure she suffered all the finer points.
She’d teared up that day. She’d been angry and didn’t like my little story time, but I knew it made a point. Now, seeing the way she looked at me, she was reliving that story I told. And with the emotional damage of losing Rick and her mother because of her behavior, she was feeling it on a deeper level than before.
In less than a couple of heartbeats, her expression of pity and fear turned into a scowl at me before she turned back to the phone to watch.
Those five men walked through the building, shooting people indiscriminately. They spoke, but I couldn’t hear their words over the screams and the flames now shooting up the walls in the back of the building.
My dad’s hand came up over the back of a pew, and he pulled himself up just as they shoved my mother out in the middle of the aisle, away from themselves. They took several steps back, and my eyes watched with panic coursing through me as my father climbed to his feet and somehow found the energy to run in front of her.
Instinct forced my eyes shut only a fraction of a second before I heard the firstpop. There were collective gasps and whispers all around me, and I waited for what felt like forever before I heard the last loudpopecho throughout the cafeteria hundreds of times.
Tears spilled down my cheeks like a faucet had been turned on, my entire body going weak against my captors. Avoiding the phone, I opened my blurry eyes and slowly moved them to look forward. Ineededto see it. Ineededto see the humor in his eyes. The amusement. Thevictory.
But when my eyes locked on Damian’s, his jaw was slack, and his eyes were wide as he stared at me, absolute shock on his face.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled out. “Temperance is Rick Avery’s kid!”
My gaze turned back down to the phone as everyone started talking behind me. The video footage from the church was gone, and now there were papers, pictures, and other things Detective Abbott had shown me when she told me Rick Avery was my father. They even had the DNA reports in there.
