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“This could have been so different,” he said in a ragged voice. “I didn’t want it to come to this. If you’d given me time to ease you into it, to show you everything…”
As if there was anything he could have shown me that would have convinced me that killing kids out of a delusional sense of divine justice was a-okay. But I kept my mouth shut, knowing that one twitch of his finger would add me to his list of murders.
One of my knives was just inches from where my hand lay. If I could just get him distracted enough to give me the space to make a move—if I could get him to withdraw his gun just a tad…
“I don’t want to do this,” he went on. “It was a miracle to have you returned to us.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” I dared to say, shifting my fingers a smidge to the left at the same time.
Damien gave no indication that he’d noticed. He leaned more weight onto my chest with his knee, the pressure turning my breath shallow and sending an ache through my previously-broken ribs. His hand trembled, but he kept the gun pressed right against my skin.
“We wanted you to join us, but we’ve been doing this for too long to let you destroy our legacy now,” he said. “Blood doesn’t matter if you can’t fulfill our calling.”
“I thought blood was everything to this family,” I said. “Is it so different with me just because I was gone for so long?”
“It has nothing to do with you being gone,” he shouted. “You’ve desecrated everything we stand for with your dismissive words and the violence you’ve brought here. If I have to kill my only daughter to keep our legacy alive, I will do it.”
He clearly meant it. I relaxed my body as well as I could to give me a wider range of motion, but I let my voice come out taut with hurt. “You kept me in the dark for so long. What was I supposed to think when I stumbled on the evidence? You have to know how it looks. To believe in some kind of higher power guiding all this… You never really gave me a chance to understand.”
His gun-hand shifted just slightly. “I’m trying to now,” he rasped. “If you’ll join us, if you’ll open yourself to the energies and the mysteries we celebrate and the mission we’re fulfilling, it’ll be even better than when you didn’t know. All you have to do is show you’ll give it a chance.”
I latched on to that opening with everything I had in me. “Of course. I didn’t see at first how devoted you all are. There must be something more to it.” Damien’s hand wavered while I spoke and then dipped to the side, away from my head. I kept talking, my words covering the faint rustle of my clothes as I slid out the knife. “I’ll do whatever I can to make up for the things I said, to show you—”
Relief spread across his face as my fingers tightened around the hilt, and in that moment, I didn’t feel the faintest trace of regret. I slammed the blade upward, raising my voice into a yell. “—to show you there’s no fucking way I’ll ever buy into that insanity!”
The knife dug into my father’s throat before I’d finished my defiant exclamation. I wasn’t sure he even heard all of it.
Blood gushed down over me from the artery I’d severed, and Damien sputtered, his body already going slack with the life rushing out of it. As his body sagged, I shoved him off me. He lolled on his back, his eyes hazing as even more blood pooled beneath him. Then he was totally still.
There was silence all around me. More bodies littered the ground—every member of the Malik family who’d joined this confrontation. Julius, Talon, and Blaze stood among them, breathing hard and with a few small scrapes here and there, but nothing concerning.
Of course not. My birth family hadn’t known how to fight a crew of highly trained hitmen. Their typical opponents had been literal children.
I stared down at my father’s corpse, the blood that’d soaked my shirt and hair cooling against my skin with the breeze. Somehow I wanted to feel at least a tiny stirring of guilt, a reminder that I was still human. But all I could think of was those pictures of the children, mutilated far beyond anything I’d done to him.
The only thing that mattered now was finding Garrison. Making sure they hadn’t given him the same treatment.
My gaze jerked toward the barn, where that sudden sound had come from. The building the family had tried to cut us off from.
I motioned to the crew, praying all the while that my instincts were leading me right. “Come on. Let’s get our man back.”
