Clothed in shadow, I stood over my father as he slept. The temptation to cut his throat before he could wake grew so strong, I trembled. I clenched my fists to halt their shaking, knowing anything might wake him up. My rage alone might make him feel me beside him. Should he wake and find me standing over his bed, he’d kill me.
Not if I killed him first.
I couldn’t. No matter what, Arnaud was my father. Not much of one, granted, but still of my blood. Patricide just wasn’t in my genes.
When my trembling subsided at last, I carefully, silently, picked up his key ring from his dresser’s top. Closing my fist around them to halt any potential jangling that would alert Arnaud, I crept from his bedroom. Once I’d made an impression of the key I needed, I’d have to return them to the exact same place.
Hyper alert, Arnaud would know immediately if his things had been touched. In the past, he’d fired housekeeper after housekeeper for the simple crime of not replacing his possessions back precisely where they’d been. He wasn’t just anal-retentive, he’d devolved into a full-blown psychosis.
Down the hall, I quietly closed the bathroom door, then switched on the light. Taking the block of clay from my pocket, Ipressed both sides of the keys I’d need into the clay. One to the main house itself, the other to the room I suspected he’d stashed all his illicit blackmailing evidence.
After returning the block of clay to my pocket, I washed all traces of clay from the keys. No sense in letting him know the moment he picked them up that someone, me, intended to make copies. I sucked in a deep breath and stared at my reflection in the mirror.
I hadn’t shaved in a few days, thus my cheeks and jaws looked like those of a grunge artist. Lines of stress from the last few days had me looking older than my twenty-eight years. I shook my head at myself, then shut the light off.You really should have left him a long time ago.
Standing still to permit my eyes to adjust to the darkness, I sucked in deep breaths to calm my nerves. Taking the keys back was just as dangerous as taking them in the first place. At last, I paced silently back down the hall, and peered at my sleeping sire.
With a snort, he rolled over, clutching his blankets to his neck, then settled. When his light snoring became slow and regular, I stepped cautiously inside. At his dresser, I slowly set his keys back in the exact same place I found them, in the same position.
Except I inadvertently tapped one key against another.
The faint sound ripped through the darkness like a gunshot.
Snorting again, Arnaud woke. His head came up off his pillow. “Huh?”
I had nowhere to run. No place to hide.
I dropped to the carpeted floor, on my belly, as close to his bed as I could get.
Arnaud rolled toward me, his bed sagging under his weight, no doubt peering toward the source of the sound. Ibarely breathed, didn’t move, and waited, frozen in panic. If he found me, I’d fight. I’m stronger than my father. I’d knock him out cold, then run. Go dragon. Fly across town, free Jade from her prison, demand that she also run, leave the country.
All those thoughts crossed my mind in a split second.
Arnaud grunted, perhaps still staring into the darkness, not seeing anything amiss, and obviously not sensing my presence a foot from him. If he chose to swing his legs from the bed to stand up, investigate further, he’d step on me.
I waited, listening, unmoving.
After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably a minute or less, Arnaud rolled back over. He tossed around, getting comfortable, then sighed. Within a few minutes, he snored again. Still, I waited, ensuring his sleep deepened before I eased my way from his bedside.
I stood, glancing at his sleeping form, and wished I had the guts to simply kill him. I’d do the world a favor, he wouldn’t be missed, his empire would crumble, the poor sots being trafficked into the country might be safe.
Or so I hoped.
I didn’t kill him.
I escaped his room without waking him.
***
“She can’t escape,” Arnaud informed me when I suggested Jade might. “I have two guards in the building. She tries anything, they’ll be on her before she can whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”
I sat with him at his dining room table as he ate his breakfast the next morning, sipping my coffee while watching him eat with all the manners of a starved wolf. His cook, a thin, silent woman who served him with her eyes down, had stepped back into the kitchen to fetch the coffee pot.
“I’ll go check on her,” I commented.
Arnaud shrugged, stuck three strips of bacon together and took a huge bite. I looked away from his greasy lips with a shudder and considered going on a diet. I doubted I could ever eat bacon again. “Have you heard from her old man?”
“Not yet. He will though. He won’t risk me killing her. And a single tape of her screams will be enough for him to think twice about double crossing me again.”
