He spits in the dirt near her feet. My blood feels like it’s draining out of me. “I’m surprised Wyatt didn’t say something, or hell, one of his boys. They all knew, Sam. They all knew I was your father.”
His eyes pierce into mine, and it’s disturbingly like looking in a mirror.
“Just another inch,” I whisper. One more fucking inch, and I’ll be able to hit his eye.
He might think his confession would make me change my mind about killing him, but all it does is fuel the rage already boiling inside me. Not only did he abandon my mother and me, he’s been living here within a few hours of me all this time, and he never made an effort to be in my life.
“He’s lying, Sam. I didn’t know. Maybe Pops did, but you’re a better man without this scum in your life,” Holden says.
Sweat drips down my forehead.
“I wanted to make contact, now that he’s finally dead. He paid me off. He’d give me money so I stayed away from you.”
I tune him out. I don’t want to know why. I don’t need details that will make me question the man who raised me.
Matthews wasn’t there, ever. That’s all I need to know.
I grit my teeth, tilting my hips just a fraction to the left.
Duke has seen me hit a deer twice as far away right in the eye. But this is different. Missing this far has much steeper consequences.
“You can do it, Seymour. You can hit him,” Sterling whispers.
“I need another inch.”
“Keep him talking, Holden,” Duke murmurs.
“You think Cain was innocent, huh? Just like I’m sure you think you and the boy you convinced to do your dirty work are too.”
Sweat beads on my forehead. The strain of holding the bow taut for this long is making my arm cramp up. Hunting bows are powerful weapons, and the strength it takes to shoot them isn’t something every man has.
“Just another inch,” I say again, peering down the arrow.
He’s spewing some kind of hateful words, but I tune him out. I try to blur her in my vision, focusing only on his visible right eye. Her face is still only two inches from my target, but if he senses I’m about to shoot, he could jerk her to the side, and it would hit her.
I can’t risk it.
His arm tightens around her again, eyes darting from me back to Holden.
“I want y’all to leave! Go back to the house. I’ll let her live if you give me a chance to escape. She can walk back. I swear, I’ll let her go. You can’t kill your own father, son. You’ll never be able to forgive yourself. Just like I don’t forgive myself for abandoning you.”
The brothers and I don’t answer, and it’s clear that Matthews is already a dead man. Any one of us would sever his head from his body if we had the chance right now.
“Okay. Ha-ha. Okay then. Well, I’m just sorry Stanley isn’t here to witness this. Because he deserved to see his father’s death be avenged by the death of the bitch who?—”
My eyes focus back on Dolly. She’s staring at me like it’s the last chance she’ll ever get to. I make a subtle movement with my head, hoping she’ll understand what I’m trying to tell her before my arm muscles give out and I can’t hold the bow for another second.
Her eyes focus on me, and she moves quickly, throwing her head back and whacking his jaw with it. His grip on her neck loosens, and she ducks down, giving me the window I need.
I let the arrow fly. I hit my mark, dead center on the bull’s-eye of his right eyeball. Blood spews out of the wound, coating Dolly with it. She screeches, jumping away from his body and rolling to the side over the sharp rocks. I hold the bow up for a few seconds to make sure he’s actually dead, my heart nearly pounding out of my chest. He doesn’t move.
Duke jumps in and starts wading across the river. I drop the bow and dive into the icy water. I swim across quickly, beating him as I crawl up to the shoreline where she’s trying to stand. My arms sweep down around her, relief washing over me. I reach down, scooping her up in my arms. She sobs into my neck, her body shivering with adrenaline and the freezing cold night.
“It’s okay, baby. I got you. You’re safe now. He’s dead. He’s gone.”
Duke checks his pulse to make sure he’s really gone. I look down at his body one last time, the arrow still protruding from his eye, his mouth slacked open. I feel nothing aside from relief.
All this time, he was so close, just a few hours away living his life. My emotions feel distant and numb, like I’m floating outside myself. All I feel is relief and the aftershocks of adrenaline.
