Steel turned his attention fully on Kelly. “Your father knew of the theft and ordered Eoin to take care of the problem. Eoin did, torturing and killing Mr. Castriota. However, rather than take care of Mr. Baldwin himself, Eoin ordered his henchmen to do it. A fatal mistake that has now landed all of you in your current predicament. Because if Eoin had killed Mr. Baldwin himself, he might have shown restraint. He might not have pulled the trigger when Mr. Baldwin was walking down the street of his college campus next tomy daughter.”
Kelly didn’t even blink, not even as his middle son continued to choke on the burning cigar Steel had shoved down his throat.
“Now,” Steel continued, looking over at the other sons. “You might be thinking I’m full of shit, that I’m making all this up. Maybe I was hired by an enemy, and this is all some big elaborate scheme to take down you and your family. Because your father couldn’tpossiblybe so stupid. And none of your brother’s men have been killed recently, which would be the appropriate response after fucking up socolossallyaskilling an innocent and bringing unwanted attention to your organization.” Standing, Steel pulled out the picture of Melanie. Starting with Seamus on Kelly’s left, Steel made a slow circle around the bound men, making sure each of them saw her smiling face that would never grace this world again. He buried his anger down. It wasn’t time yet to let it loose. “My daughter.” He watched the faces of the thugs as he passed them, trying to determine their guilt when faced with their crime. When he finally got to Kelly, he held the picture even closer to the man’s nose, but spoke to the room as a whole. “Do you understandnowwhy you are all here?”
Happenstance.It had all been happenstance. A mere coincidence, an accident, a quirk of fate. Melanie hadn’t died because of Steel’s enemy. She hadn’t been murdered to send him a message or because he’d aimed the crosshairs at her. Melanie had died because of poor timing. She was walking next to the wrong person down a public street.
Learning this did not lessen Steel’s pain. The sheer agony that had been assailing him since the moment he was told of Melanie’s death had tripled. He was barely able to contain the anger and hatred at both himself and the universe—because the truth of the matter was hecouldn’thave protected Melanie from her fate.
He couldn’t predict the unknown, no one could. The little bits of time, space, and opportunity that could be good one moment and bad the next. What was life but a kaleidoscope of coincidences?
Steel wasn’t a god. He wasn’t omniscient, wasn’t all-powerful. He couldn’t change Melanie’s fate any more thanhe could change the color of the sky. And that powerlessness, that knowledge that nothing could have been done to save his daughter from being gunned down in the street over a drug theft she hadn’t even been involved in, caused more pain and agony than words could describe. Steel would rather suffer through open-heart surgery with no anesthesia than live with that knowledge.
But unless he took a bullet to his brain, there was nothing he could do to forget.
Vengeance wasn’t the only reason he hadn’t eaten a bullet. Steel had no plans of dying, of ending the torture he was barely living through. He owned it, felt it. He burned because he deserved to.
Fate should have takenhim.
When Jenna first received her diagnosis, Steel had known his fate. He would fight like hell to help Jenna, to keep her alive, and when that battle was finally lost, he would join her in death. Be that Heaven, Hell, or the oblivion of absence, they would be together.
He hadn’t felt guilt about his decision. Call it suicide or a sacrifice of love, Steel didn’t give a shit. He would not live in a world where Jenna did not exist.
And so he burned. Every breath a trial, every second a new agony, because what sort of father did it make him that he couldn’t say the same vow about his own daughter? The fact that hecouldlive on without his baby girl, the fact that hewould…because he still had Jenna.
What sort of man did that make him?
He’d been faced with the ultimate test, the unknown answer of the impossible choice. If forced to choose, who would he save? Steel was not so much an egotistical masochist that he believed he’d somehowchosenfor Melanie to die over Jenna. However, that did not change the fact that he now knew the answer.
He could survive, burn alive for the rest of his existence, plagued with guilt and sorrow, so long as he had Jenna.
Staring down at Melanie’s picture, he forced himself to breathe. He was only human. He made mistakes, got knocked down and forced to get back up, had to live in a world of darkness while trying to keep his head above water. He’d thought he was a good father. He’d thought he was a good husband.
Yet when faced with the horror of losing a child, Steel learned he was neither. He wasnota good father, nor was he a good husband.
But as Jenna was fond of saying recently, the fight wasn’t over with. Steel was not dying; he just had to fight to live. And if there was one thing Steel was good at, it was the fight. The grit and the determination to take justone morestep.
Steel was a Marine. He did not know how to quit.
He would live. He would burn. And he would spend every moment left of his life being a man, father, and husband, his family could be proud of.
Rubbing his thumb over Melanie’s still smile, encapsulated forever on flimsy paper, Steel knew he had to set things right. He wasn’t the only one who would burn for Melanie’s death.
“Tell me who pulled the trigger.” Steel didn’t speak to anyone in particular now. He didn’t care who answered, so long as it was the truth. “Tell me who took my daughter from me.”
Rodney Baldwin was a son too. He was a person with a family who mourned him, but Steel couldn’t find it in him to care about the loss of his life. Melanie’s was all that mattered, the innocent in this equation.
Steel heard grunts and groans from behind him, no doubt the peons trying to point the finger at each other. But neither Kelly nor Eoin said anything. Eoin had made some hacking sounds, but that wasn’t an admission of guilt.
Finally, Steel tucked the picture away. Both to protect it and so Melanie didn’t see what happened next.
“Cut their gags,” he ordered to anyone who felt like listening. “I want to hear them scream.”
The sharpsnapof the cigar cutter caused the man in front of Steel to flinch, though no part of him fell to the floor. Only another cap of processed tobacco leaves. Steel felt sorry for the Oscuro Maduro currently housed in Eoin’s stomach, but it had effectively shut the man up—that was, until he started to vomit. So while the rest of the captives were being ungagged, Mercer, aka the other Ghost and Phoenix’s Knightmare, had shoved a gag into Eoin’s mouth, forcing the mobster to swallow back down his own vomit or suffocate.
Seamus was the oldest son. Steel knew from Keys that he was forty-two, never married, and ran the chop shop portion of his father’s enterprise. From a money transfer Keys found, there was also a more than likely chance that Seamus had been the one who ordered his uncle a new pair of shoes.
Kelly departmentalized his business so much that he essentially pitted his five sons against each other to win favoritism from him. Doing so had caused division within his family, meaning that no son helped or rooted for another. When Eoin’s portion of the business was in trouble, he never would have reached out to his brothers because they would have seen the theft as weakness and worked their own angle to gain favor with their father.
