“I’m Sarah, my dad told me all about you.”
Sarah was stunning, with long auburn hair full of soft curls. She smiled and strode toward me like a model streaking across a catwalk. Her skin was porcelain pale and flawless.
I gulped down the lump that had cratered itself in my neck. “Dad?”
“Yes, Bob.”
Sarah was tall, slender, but curved in all the right places. With her perfect hair and exquisite face, Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ started drumming in my mind. I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or cry, neither would have been pretty. I stifled the pain and managed to remain courteous.
“Oh, it’s nice to meet you.”
“We have a mutual friend—Georgie. We’re meeting for coffee tomorrow afternoon, why don’t you come?” Her lips pulled into a generous, wide smile, it warmed her face and lit up her crystal blue eyes.
No, I didn’t want to meet her for a coffee. I did not, could not, be around her. It would be like rubbing acid into a gaping wound. I stumbled through my mind, seeking reasonable excuses to decline. Despair, and the feeling of Karson’s cold eyes penetrating my mind, had disabled my cognitive function, because I found nothing. I swallowed heavily and found myself agreeing.
I swept the office door closed and leaned up against it, shutting my eyes and taking a deep breath, fighting tears, fighting the pain, willing it away.
Through the door I heard shouting. I grabbed my phone and ducked my head out.
“What did you do to my father?” Chris was yelling at Karson. His face was red, spittle flying from his lips. He stood a few feet away. His fists clenched into tight balls.
“Nothing, Chris. I do not know what you are talking about,” Karson replied calmly, turning to look at him as if he was an inconvenient bug whizzing around his head.
“You murderingbastard.” Chris grabbed the front of Karson’s shirt and attempted to reef him to his feet. Karson rose,almost leisurely, as if he wasn’t the least concerned. He towered above Chris.
“I know what you are, and I know what you did.” Chris tightened his grip and jerked on his shirt.
Sarah eyes were wide as glass. She stood up but seemed frozen to the spot.
“I would remove those, if I were you,” Karson warned with that dark calm. My heart moved to my throat. Did he kill Jefferson? His slashed body barrelled through my mind. The floor glued the bottom of my feet and the breath left my lungs.
“You killed him, yousavage!” Chris shoved him in the chest and let him go.
“I can assure you I was inside—in the arms of a stunning brunette if my memory serves me correctly—whilst your father was being ripped apart by a bear.” There was not an ounce of compassion in his voice. Son of a bitch. He took a sip of whiskey, and then rested one arm casually on the bar, the glass in his hand. “If the experts are to be believed,” he said, in a tone that said they weren’t.
Chris was so angry his hands shook. He lifted a finger and pointed it at him like it was a knife. “I will make you pay for what you did. You think you’re tough, you’re indispensable, but everything has a weakness, and I don’t have to look far to find yours.” Chris slid his eyes to me. Maybe he’d just noticed me standing there, or was he deliberately threatening me?
If they threaten you, they are threatening me.
No-one threatens me and lives to tell of it.
Sarah gasped, her hand flew to her throat, and she took a step back as if she sensed something was about to happen. Karson’s eyes filled with dark menace. His jaw set. My heart fired through my mouth.
I yelled, “Karson, NO!” as simultaneously, in a blur of speed, he grabbed Chris’s elbow in one hand and grabbed his wrist inthe other, twisting his arm back. The radius and the ulna aren’t designed to bend. His arm snapped like a twig. The cracking sound was horrible.
I stood aghast, mortified by Karson’s cruelty.
Chris grunted—how he didn’t cry out I didn’t know. His forehead crumpled. His face went bone white. He sucked in whistling breaths through his teeth.
“You will be sorry you ever hurt my father,” he rasped. Pain of loss, pain of hurt, pressed hard against his features. He cradled his broken arm against his body.
“I suggest you leave before I break more than your arm.” Karson’s chilled voice turned my flesh cold.
Chris opened his mouth and closed it again, thinking better of the response he had firing around in his mind. He looked broken, like he was trying not to cry. He turned and walked away.
Karson’s eyes, vacant of any thread of humanity, any thread of life, landed on mine.
Disgust laced my words. “He’s just lost his father, where’s your empathy?”
