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Griffin Duke's reckoning has finally arrived.
And I am the judge and the jury.
"You've lost your fucking mind," he says.
I smile. "The only thing that should be coming out of your mouth right now is an answer to my fucking question." I move my finger to the trigger. "Did you hire Michel Moreau to kill Mum?"
I'm shouting now.
"You're just like her," he says after a long pause. "Always wrapped up in this fucking narrative you spin in your head. Do you really believe everything she wrote in those journals? They're stories. Fairytales."
My mum loved romance novels.
But what she wrote in those journals–they were the farthest thing from a happy ending. They told the story of a woman who married a narcissist, who ended up trapped in marriage to him because he was powerful and they had children.
And unbeknownst to my father, I had other ways of determining the veracity of what my mum wrote. She wasn't lying, I know that for sure now.
I move closer to him, until my gun is resting in the middle of his forehead. This close, I realise that he's sweating bullets.
Good.
He should be fucking scared.
"Answer the question," I repeat.
He stares up at me.
Instead of an answer, he calls for Ben.
Ten seconds pass.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
Ben doesn't enter, though I know he's right outside the door.
That's when my father really starts to panic. A humourless smile splits my face. I had plans for Ben if he tried to interrupt us, but this is a happy development for me.
"You're alone," I whisper to my father. "Like Alize was when you tried to bribe her to leave. Like she was when you conspired with fucking Laurent to make it easy for him to kidnap her. Like Mum was when she died." My stomach turns just thinking about it. "So, answer my fucking question before I run out of patience."
"What the fuck do you expect me to say?"
"Tell me the truth." My hand twitches. "I deserve it."
Even here, staring down death, my father refuses to be civil.
"The only thing you deserve is a bullet between the eyes like she got," he spits the words with such vitriol they sear my skin. "If I had known you would turn out to be such a pain in my ass, I would have had him to kill you, too."
It's strange.
I already knew.
The evidence all pointed to my father—the fact that Michel is probably one of the few assassins in the world who would killanyone, the nearly endless journal entries detailing my mum’s fear of him killing her if she ever tried to leave him, even his obsession with Alize's heritage.
He hated her because he already knew her.
And he wanted her gone, because he didn't know that I already knew that Michel was Mum's killer. He wanted to get rid of her because he didn't want me to find out about what he did.
