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The lights flicker off again, and when they come back on, Gordon is on his feet, his eyes wide, directed at the gun in my hands. He lurches toward me, and that’s the last thing I see before the lights go out again.
I pull the trigger blindly.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
My whole body is tense and shaking, wondering where he is in the room. I yawn and work my jaw, knocking the muffling from my ears, and though I can hear sounds again, I don’t hear Gordon at first.
For a good minute and a half, I’m trapped in darkness, waiting for pain to strike out of nowhere.
A buzz comes with another flicker of light, dimmer than before, and I find Gordon slumped against the wall, his hand pressed to his stomach, which bleeds out onto the concrete floor beneath him.
“Ah, shit. This sucks,” he says, his strained voice colored in a small bit of amusement.
Pounding at the door draws my attention, and I keep the gun on hand, just in case Gordon’s men come bounding through it.
“Damon? Damon, are you in there?” At the sound of Ivy’s voice, my muscles sag with relief.
“Yeah! I’m in here! I’m all right? Are you all right?”
“Yes. Looks like the generators kicked on. Okay, there’s some debris in front of the door! I have to clear it away to open it. Just sit tight, okay?”
“Sitting as tight as ever.” As much as I don’t think Gordon is a threat at the moment, I keep the gun trained on him, anyway. The man didn’t build his ruthless reputation by laying down and dying, after all.
“Man, she sounds like a firecracker. If you weren’t a priest, I’d call you a lucky man.” Even with a mortal wound, he manages a wily grin and a wink. “Then again, you never let that priest shit stop you, right?”
With a groan, I shake my head. “Piss off.”
On another cough, he shifts, wincing, and blows out a hard breath. “Could’ve been great friends, you and me. Had barbecues together. Gone out for beers and swapped stories about our wives.”
“Fuck you.” Even I have to admit, there’s an unsettling feeling to finding out he was the bad guy all along. His charm and likability is probably the most dangerous thing about the man. “Why? Why you?”
“It breaks your heart, doesn’t it? When you find out the monster isn’t such a bad guy.” With a shrug of his shoulders, he shakes his head and coughs. “He just does bad things. We’re taught in life and in the church that evil is obvious. The devil is this beastly thing with horns and a tail and a forked tongue.” He raises an excessively bloody hand, gesturing at his head and mouth to emphasize his point. “And yet, we forget that he was an angel before all of that.” He blows out a breath and lights up a cigar that he pulls from the front pocket of his shirt. “We all have our demons inside of us. You and I? Are we that different?”
“I never murdered innocent children.”
“And yet, if my son were here right now, wouldn’t you murder him in front of me? To force me to feel your pain? I killed your wife and daughter. Surely, you’d be forgiven by God for wanting me to suffer alongside you.”
My jaw shifts with the grinding of my teeth, because he’s probably right. Maybe I would murder his son in front of him. Or maybe the last few months have been nothing but a waste of time. Perhaps I’m just a man who needed the distraction of coming down here, believing that I was capable of taking out a criminal like him. “I still have the gun, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“It isn’t about killing an innocent child. It’s making another human being understand themagnitudeof what was stolen from you.” A casual puff of his cigar, and he goes on, as though his wound isn’t robbing him the last bits of life. “Summer of seventy-two. I had an internship down in Mexico with the company I planned to work for someday. I wanted to build cities. Watch them grow and thrive. But I laid eyes on a pretty thing sitting alone at a restaurant. Suddenly, I was staring at everything I wanted more.” His eyes seem spacier than before, and I wonder if death has begun to creep over him. The white pallor of his skin confesses he’s lost too much blood. “Like the idiot I was, I’d gone and fallen dick in the dirt over a dangerous man’s woman.” With a chuckle, he shakes his head and puffs his cigar. “I had dreams of this woman and what we could be, though. And she wanted it as much as I did.” In the pause that follows, his eyes are lost to unseen thoughts. “Twenty-six minutes was all it took for that dream to become my nightmare. For the man to sell his soul. In twenty-six minutes, two men raped and murdered the love of my life in front of me, then my daughter, and scarred my son.”
His brows come together, and when he sniffles, I realize this man is pouring his heart out, just like the blood oozing from his wounds. It’s an agony that’s all too familiar for me, and I have to push thoughts of my own wife and child out of my mind.
“I’ve been in pain every day since. And no matter how many people I’ve killed, it just grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger. You almost took my grandson from me. Not because you hated me. But because your pain was bigger than your will.”
“Your son raped an innocent girl. One who might be dead, for all I know.”
“And the wheel, it spins and spins and spins. Her family carries pain, I carry more pain. Pain fuels the engine, and we don’t bother to stop it. We can’t.” He tips back his hand, seeming to examine his wound, and flinches. “You wouldn’t think that a three-year-old boy would remember watching his mother die. But my son watched it every day in his head. Just like I did. I couldn’t forget. Neither could he. Took his own life at the age of forty-five.”
“Tell me where Ariceli is, and I won’t blow your brains out right here.”
A cough sends him forward, the pressure pushing more blood through his wound, and he grimaces. “Planning for college, I’m guessing. Shit, you think I could hurt Ariceli? She’s like a daughter. Like the one I didn’t get to raise.”
The door swings open, and Ivy storms into the room, her eyes on Gordon as she rounds his body on her way over to me. “Oh, my God! Damon! What did they do to you?” She plants careful kisses to my cheek, before falling to my side, going to work on my binds.
