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Deimos finally stops and his hands unclench, dropping Raph’s lifeless body to the ground. He turns, and when those fearsome, pitch-black eyes from beneath the smudged white and black skull paint lock onto me, I shiver.
But I don’t feel any fear at all.
Not with him.
I cling to him when he scoops me up into his arms. My mouth crushes to his, my arms wrapping around the back of his neck as he carries me out of all the broken glass and blood, away from the horrors and the demons.
Outside, police lights fill the night, and we’re surrounded by New York State Troopers loyal to the Drakos family as well as some federal agents, including Shane Dorsey himself, the NYC regional director of the FBI who’s close friends with the Kildare family.
I gasp when Callie, Castle, Eilish and Gavan come bursting out from behind the police cars, rushing over to us. Ares, Neve, Hades and Elsa follow, and I don’t even realize I’m sobbing until I pull away from all the hugs.
Deimos runs a thumb over my cheek, brushing away the tears before he cups my jaw, pulls me close, and kisses me with all his possessive, reckless fury.
Paramedics come to take a look at my arm, but I shove them aside to rush over to the stretcher carrying Gerard. He smiles weakly, clutching my hand and squeezing as I sob into his chest.
He’s going to be okay.
We’re all going to be okay.
Actually, I take that back. When Deimos pulls me into his arms again, and tilts my chin up, and leans down to kiss me in front of all of them, I know things aren’t just going to be okay.
They’re going to be great.
EPILOGUE
DEIMOS
“You have my eternal gratitude,Mr. Drakos.”
Gerard Dumouchel still looks a little haggard, and he’s still far too thin. But he’s looking much healthier after three weeks in the hospital recovering from his ordeal.
Even by my fucked up, depraved standards, thatwasquite an ordeal.
Raphael ran his mouth, talking a big game about “justice” and “making it right”—but in the end, it was all about money. He was angry with his father for divorcing his mother when Raph was ten. He viewed it as Gerard callously tossing his mom away when it came to light that she had a suitcase full of mental health issues.
But I’ve looked into that chapter of the past, and that’s not how it was at all. Gerard went to Hell and back trying to get help for his wife. It wasn’t just mental health issues, either: there was drug abuse, infidelity, and at least four instances of her trying to physically harm Gerard seriously.
It was when she got high one afternoon and had a manic episode where she tried to tattoo her own son with a sewing needle and fountain pen ink that Gerard finally said enough was enough.
He divorced her and paid for her to be put into a center that could help her. Unfortunately, it was there that she killed herself.
It’s a shitty, sad story, but Gerard obviously did everything he could to help her.
That wasn’t ever how Raphael saw it, though.
So when his father got remarried to Adele Roy, he started plotting. Or, at least he started thinking about it. It appears that it was when he got a good look at the prenup Gerard and Adele had signed that he put his plan into action.
Because Raph didn’t really have his own money. He was just living off his father’s generosity. And under the terms of the prenup, Adele’s money was never going to become Gerard’s money. Which meant it was definitely never going to becomeRaph’smoney.
Once he knew that, he acted. He kidnapped his father, locked him in that fucking basement, and kept him there barely alive for months while forcing him to sign various legal documents asking for a divorce and coming after Adele’s assets. Until finally, when Raph made him write that email, Gerard cleverly slipped in a bunch of forms to spell out coordinates and an SOS.
It was Dahlia who was smart enough to put all that together. But it was Allison Whitley who led me to Woodfield.
In the hospital after the gunman Raph hired tried to kill her, Allison told me about all the times she met with Raph after he “recruited” her. She remembered going to his apartment on multiples occasions, and seeing all sorts of blueprints, building permits, and other financial statements strewn across his dining room table.
And apparently, Raph was so pleased with himself on the historic home in Woodfield, Connecticut that he was having fixed up that he bragged to Allison about it.
It wasn’t a smoking gun for me, but it was something. And through that clue, I arrived in town just in time to watch a man in a skull mask chasing Dahlia into that damn fun house.
