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“Don’t go in there.” Ani turns her head to Daphne. “Don’t let him go in there. Mark is sleeping and he won’t know I’m gone until tomorrow at the earliest. Don’t go in there and wake him up.” She points at the bag. “I have all I need.”
Daphne puts her hand on her sister’s arm, and then her sister’s belly that is no longer carrying a baby. “He’s not going to leave you alone. You said it yourself to me over and over again. He won’t just let you leave.”
Daphne looks up at me and nods her head. I can see it in her eyes that she still wants me to follow through with the plan.
“What are you going to do?” she asks. There’s panic in her voice. “Going in there and kicking the shit out of him isn’t going to do anything but piss him off more. Let’s just go. I can leave the state, maybe. I can just run and hide, and he’ll never find me.”
Daphne shakes her head. “No.”
“What do you mean no?” she asks her sister, clearly not having any idea what Daphne and I both know is going to be the outcome of the day.
It’s raining harder now, and both women are soaked all the way through. “Wait for me in the car. I won’t be long.”
“He’s just like Dad, Ani. You know it.”
Daphne’s words finally are what it takes for Ani to catch on with what’s going to happen next. She shakes her head vigorously and takes a few steps back to the trailer. “No. No! You are not going to kill him. We can’t just go in there—”
I take a step forward so I’m blocking the trailer from Ani. “Wearen’t doing anything. I am. You and Daphne need to go to the car and get warm. I’ll be there soon.”
Ani shakes her head, but then suddenly stops when the front door of the trailer opens and a man wearing nothing but faded boxers blinks against the rain. “What the fuck is going on here?” he demands. “Ani, you get your ass inside here now.” He then squints against the falling rain and sees Daphne. “I told you to stay the fuck away from your sister. I told you that I’d kill you if you stepped foot on my land again, you stupid bitch.” When he sees that Ani hasn’t made a move to do as he asked, he repeats. “Get in the fucking house, Ani!”
I’ve seen the eyes of many people right before they meet their maker, and I’ve never seen the kind of fear like what I see in Ani’s eyes.
Mark glares at me. “And who the fuck are you?” He starts walking down the stairs to confront me.
Stupid, stupid man.
“I’m the fucking Grim Reaper,” I say as I punch him right in the Adam’s Apple.
His eyes bulge as he reaches for his throat with a sickening croak escaping from his contorted lips. He falls back, slipping on the last step and splashing into the mud. His wheezing for air mixes with the sound of the storm. The drops of the rain hit the metal roof of the trailer with more intensity, and I know a torrential downpour is coming and it’s time to act before all these hillbilly backroads get washed out.
I’m happier that he confronted me. He entered this fight and now I’m going to finish it. I didn’t like the idea of killing a man in his sleep, and I didn’t want to act like a silent assassin. No, this fucker walked right up to me and stared directly into the eyes of his killer.
Daphne runs up to Ani and takes her by the arm. “We’re leaving. Now.”
I don’t know if it’s the fact that Ani is too shocked to argue and resist any longer, or the fact that seeing the man who caused her to lose her baby laying in a puddle of mud was the last straw, but she does exactly as Daphne ordered, and the two women leave for the car.
Now it’s just me and this piece of shit.
Mark somehow scrambles to his feet, though I can see that he’s still struggling to breathe. He doesn’t have enough air to scream. He can’t beg. He can’t do anything but gasp through the final minutes of his life.
“You beat my wife’s sister.” I take a step toward him as he climbs the stairs of the trailer on all fours. “You killed her baby. You called my wife a bitch. And youthreatenedmy wife. You threatened a Godwin.” I take hold of his hair and yank him off the stairs, throwing him back down in the mud. “And for that, you are going to die. But I don’t just kill. I kill slowly.”
Though I’ve been trying to be Apollo Godwin ever since waking up from my accident, right now, this very moment… I’m Ares Godwin. And this fucker is about to see what that means.
ChapterThirty
Apollo
Daphne knocks on my door as I finish getting ready to start my day. “Good morning,” she says.
“How is she doing today?” I ask, having checked on Ani myself a couple of times, but she had been sleeping every time. It’s been a couple of days of recovery, and it’s nice to see some of the swelling go down as well as some of the bright blues and purples begin to fade.
“She’s doing much better,” Daphne says. “Her ribs are still giving her some trouble, and she is having nightmares still…”
“Do you want me to have the doctor come back to the house?”
Shaking her head, she says, “No. He said she just needed time to heal. And I’m feeling confident she is. Slowly, but she is.”
