How his uncle could have been so foolish as to take Emmaline and her father to his own home was beyond Alex. Then again, the words his uncle had just spoken in the cellar below were also beyond his comprehension.
“We need to get down there before—” Sebastian hissed under his breath, trying to get past Alex’s arm which barred the doorway of the cellar. From his vantage point at the top of the stairs, just out of view from the cellar, he could hear everything as his uncle’s voice bounced off the stone walls.
“You… you set the fire?” Emmaline gasped, her voice barely audible compared to Frederick’s.
Alex had been there at the top of the stairs for long enough. He had heard practically everything, Frederick’s coveting his wife, his greed and jealousy, his boasting. Alex had long seen the dark side of his uncle but never in his wildest dreams could he have imaginedthis.
“Yes,” Frederick said, and Alex had to fight his emotions in order to stay right where he was. Luckily for him, his time as the devil had equipped him for keeping his cool in tense situations, though in that moment he would have liked to run down those stairs and rip his uncle’s head clean off his shoulders. Even he wasn’t that strong.
He pressed his index finger to his lips, silently begging Emmaline’s brothers to remain quiet. He knew how his uncle acted in these situations. He had seen him at the heart of his schemes one too many times and how his uncle loved to boast.
“Would you like to hear how it happened?” Frederick asked, true to his character. “Would you like to hear how I squeezed the life out of my brother, my hands wrapped tightly around his throat as he lay abed in the middle of the night, how I threw a candle upon the bedsheets afterwards to cover my tracks?”
The man’s laughter was nauseating. Worse were the images he conjured in Alex’s mind. He remembered his father, his bedroom, the place he was speaking of all too well. Imagining the scene was just too grotesque and yet Alex’s mind was traitorous. It played everything out as if it were happening right before his eyes.
“My only regret is that the rest of them made it out alive.”
That was it. Alex could take no more. He removed his arm from the doorway and inclined his head, gesturing for the brothers to go on ahead. For a second, they glanced at each other, looking hesitant.
“Do you want to help your father and sister or not?” Alex whispered.
At that moment, Frederick asked, “What was that?”
“Damn it!” Alex snarled. They had been discovered. The hammering of boots on the stairs below told him so.
“Look out!” Victor cried as Tiny came barreling through the door like a bull. Even without horns, he was far more deadly, though Alex had been prepared. In the seconds before he came through, Alex stepped sideways and reached into his jacket pocket for the brass knuckles he always kept there, one of the few gifts his father had given him that he would always carry close to his chest.
When Tiny spun on him, Alex was ready, aiming a blow at the side of his face, hoping for the temple but missing his nose by inches.
It would all be over in seconds, Alex knew. Nobody had ever beaten Tiny in the ring. He was even deadlier out of it.
But then the heavy twang rang out across the kitchen and Tiny went down like a sack of potatoes, eyes rolling into the back of his head.
Standing behind him, arms raised with a cast iron pan held tightly with both hands, stood Victor. The man quivered violently, his face pale. He, clearly, had never knocked anyone out before.
Alex, on the other hand, had and the second Tiny started to try and rise again he made sure his second swing counted.
“Victor, if he so much as opens an eye, hit him again,” Alex ordered and though the man looked terrified, he nodded, lowering the pan so it was ready at waist height if Tiny tried to get up.
“Tiny! What is going on up there?” Frederick yelled.
Alex wasted no time. With only a quick gesture for Sebastian to follow, he charged down the cellar steps.
His foot had barely hit the stone floor when Frederick snarled, “Not another step!”
Alex froze immediately, hands raised, Sebastian almost stumbling right into him. He remained one step up, catching himself on the rail.
Bile rose once more into Alex's throat when he saw the scene before him. Standing at the back of the cellar was his uncle but he was not alone. He had his back pressed against the mold infested wall but pinned against him, locked in place with his arm across her chest was Emmaline.
“How… how did you know?” Frederick demanded. The blade he had pressed to Emmaline's neck gleamed in the candlelight and the way it danced told him how shaken Frederick was.
“You were clever, I'll admit. You never thought I'd find out in time to stop you. You thought you could come back here, and nobody would ever think to look because the great Frederick is always so smart… but you didn't count on one thing,” Alex said, taking a half-step forward before pausing when Emmaline winced at the way Frederick pressed the tip of his blade into her throat.
A bead of blood trickled crimson down her snow-white neck. It was anger inducing but Alex barely kept a lid on it as he continued, “Lorraine.”
“That good for nothing, foolish, fanciful girl. What did she have to do with any of this?” Frederick spat.
He squeezed Emmaline's chest tighter.
