“Let go of the controls.” Bel raised her gun. She was a good shot, and everything in her screamed to shoot him. His daughter. He’d killed his own daughter. “Tell me Ariella was an accident,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t mean to brutalize your own flesh and blood.”
“I didn’t want to kill her!” Heartbreak coated his features, and despite the monster before her, Bel saw the truth. He’d loved his little girl. That realization only fueled her anger.
“My wife had taken the Ambien,” he continued. “My daughter was safe in her bed, or so I thought. I followed Ondine to the party that night, and I waited for the chaos. She was the one I wanted, always coming to my house and flaunting herself. She would make the perfect mermaid to add to my collection, and I wanted her so badly that, no matter how hard I tried to resist, I couldn’t stop myself.”
At his confession, Bel realized why Ondine had gone missing without a trace. Their theory had been right. She’d known her kidnapper, only it wasn’t her boyfriend. It was her best friend’s father.
“I’m the one who called 911 on a burner phone that night,” Triton continued. “I’m the reason the police showed up. I planned to use the chaos to take Ondine, but Ariella was there. In the dark, I mixed them up. I grabbed my girl instead, and when I realized what I’d done, it was too late. She saw what I was doing. She knew what I was. She was scared of me.”
“So you choked her to death?” Bel’s voice faltered. She thought of her father, of her boss, who was more dad than sheriff. She loved those men. Trusted them with her life. How heinous would they need to be to look her in the eyes and close their fists around her throat while she fought and pleaded for salvation?
“I couldn’t let her go!” Triton pressed another button, and the machinery whirred faster. Olivia started shouting. Ondine and the tattooed girl screamed and thrashed in the pool, but Bel didn’t hear them. They faded away as her hands shook. Peter Pann’s memory flooded her mind. Eamon had snapped his neck instead of arresting him because some men couldn’t be allowed to live. Some monsters were incapable of redemption, and if left alive, they’d find a way to repeat the cycle. They would kill again and again. They would choke their own children to death.
“She would’ve hated me!” Triton shouted over the girls’ terror. “She would’ve gone to the police. She saw what I was. She knew I was a predator. I had to kill her. You don’t understand; I had to do it.”
“She was your daughter!” Bel screamed, the machinery growing louder and louder with its unsettling grind, yet she didn’t hear it. She was aware of nothing but the monster hovering out of reach on the catwalk.
“It doesn’t matter!” Triton said. “I can have another child. I can pick a new identity and leave Bajka. I can start over, but I couldn’t save Ariella. She would’ve turned me in. She would’ve ruined me. She had to die.”
“Your daughter was nineteen!” Bel shook, the blood dripping in her eyes turning the world red with rage. “She was still just a child—a beautiful little girl with her whole life ahead of her, and you put your hands on her throat and watched her choke to death.”
“Better her than me. She would’ve told her mother. She would’ve gotten me caught, so better her than me. I loved her. I really did, but she couldn’t live. And in the end, she was perhaps my favorite kill of all. She was the only death that made me truly feel alive.”
Bel choked on his confession, her entire body violent with rage and nausea. She’d had enough of men like this. Of men whocame into her town to torture and kill women. To torture and destroy her. To lock her in a basement. To make her run down a snowy mountain. To hit her over the head until she bled, or drug her, or shoot her, or try to blow her up. She was tired of fathers who savored the murder of their own children.
Everything faded away. The screams behind her. The machinery’s threatening whir. Olivia’s panicked words. Eamon took over her body. The predator. The Impaler. Rage. She was rage. She was the beast. She didn’t care anymore. Men like Triton didn’t deserve to live. They deserved to have their necks snapped. Prison was too lenient a sentence. As long as they were alive, they’d find ways to defy nature and kill again. Men like this abhorrent father deserved to die.
So, with blood soaking her vision red, and the young women’s screams fueling her rage, Bel lifted her Glock with perfectly swift aim and shot Triton between the eyes.
Blood sprayedthe catwalk as Triton’s head snapped backward, and with the resounding crash of his heavy body hitting the metal, Bel froze. Her spirit hollowed out as her muscles grew numb. What had she done?
What had she done? What had she done? What had she done?
She’d killed a man, shot him in a fit of rage.
What had she done?
“Bel!” Olivia shouted behind her, and the life drained from her limbs. Her partner had just witnessed her murder a man. She’d pulled the trigger instead of arresting him. She’d shot him between the eyes when she should’ve wounded him to stop themachinery. But she hadn’t wanted him to live. She wanted him to die. Men like him didn’t deserve mercy.
“Bel!” Olivia repeated, and she dropped the gun on the walkway with a shattering clang. She wouldn’t fight it. She didn’t want to fight it. She was guilty, and with shaking fingers, she began to lift them over her head.
“Bel, grab the controls!” The urgency in Olivia’s tone electrocuted Bel’s paralysis. “Turn it off. Hurry, please! Turn it off!”
Bel bolted forward, trying and failing not to stare at the crimson hole between Triton’s unseeing eyes, and dove for the controller. She pried it from his dead hands and stopped the cage threatening to drown the mermaids.
“Help me!” Olivia’s desperation rattled the air, her reaction far from the one Bel had expected. “Move!”
Bel didn’t realize she was moving until she was next to her soaked partner. Olivia had somehow managed to open the enclosure's gate. How? Bel didn’t know. She’d been so deaf in her rage that she’d registered nothing beside her hatred for the man who killed his own child.
“Help me!” Olivia repeated, her entire body straining against the half-submerged cage, and with numb limbs, Bel collapsed to her knees. She hadn’t noticed it before, but Ondine’s leg was caught in its chain. It had dragged her through the water as the cage lowered, forcing her throat inches away from the machine’s gears. If it had been left running for one more second, the girl would’ve been decapitated. If Bel hadn’t shot Triton when she had…
“Bel!” Olivia’s shout yanked her out of her trance, and she climbed into the pool with her partner. Together, they fought to untangle Ondine, and then they pulled both naked mermaids from the pool’s dangers.
“Oh my god!” Ondine flung herself at Bel, wrapping her arms around her neck as she sobbed uncontrollably. “You saved me. You saved my life.” She buried her face in Bel’s throat, her slight body curled against Bel’s soaked clothes, but Bel couldn’t return her hug. She just sat there, hands shaking.
What had she done?
“Hey.” Olivia wiped the blood from her forehead and cupped her jaw. “Hey, look at me. You’re okay.”
