Finally, her eyes focused on me, and I wanted to just shoot her, but it was hard to kill someone. It hadn’t gotten easier the few times I did it, and right now Catherine was an injured, broken woman.
So like a dumb fuck, I let her continue talking while I searched for the fortification to take another life.
“I thought that if I had all the power in the world, I would never be weak to anyone again,” she told me, almost conversationally. “My father … he was a very bad man. Mean daddy,” she added, in a little girl’s voice. “Mean daddy always hurts me. Mean daddy loves me and hates me. Mean daddy hurts me.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
She was gone, her mind existing somewhere back in the horrors of her childhood. She kept talking to her father, over and over, screaming for him to stop hurting her. I was briefly distracted from this when Richard’s head lolled to the side, his eyes closed, and as my breathing turned ragged and harsh, Catherine seemed to snap back into herself.
“I killed Daddy, do you know that?” She was talking to me again. “He was my first kill, and I enjoyed it so much. That high of being the one in control. The one in power.”
I shook my head. “Richard saved you first, and you know it. Without his strength, you would have been nothing.”
Her face was red, black smeared around her eyes, hair in a dark tangle. She looked younger than usual, but also way more insane. “Richard was my angel, but then he was bad too. Always bad men. Always touching me.”
Her sorrowful face turned to her brother. “Graeme was the only one who ever loved me. Loved everything about me. We could have ruled the world together.”
I saw the moment her fury took over the sorrow. The moment the bad memories were replaced with the cold-hearted killer that she was.
Her gun kicked in her hand, and I pulled the trigger on mine in almost the same instant before I felt the slam of the bullet into my chest. Right above my heart.
She cried out as she fell, and I cried out too because the pain was so strong. My head slammed into the table that was behind me, and everything flashed in black and white at me while my chest screamed in agony.
As the darkness started to take me, I swore I heard the sound of sirens, of people storming into the apartment, but it might have all been a dream. Then, as I finally succumbed, I heard the one thing that brought light to my darkness.
“Butterfly!”
I was going home to Sebastian Roman Beckett. My heart.
30
Beck
Imanaged to drag Jasper and Evan out before the third explosion. For a split second I thought Dylan hadn’t gotten out, but then I saw him, a man over each shoulder, as he rescued a couple of Delta employees. Emergency service workers rushed at us, but I waved them off. “I’m fine,” I snapped, “Evan and Jasper need some help though.”
The woman hesitated, running her eyes along the blood trailing down my shoulder. One of the bullets clipped me, the other three ending up in my vest. I’d had multiple reasons for putting that vest on Riley earlier. One being a place for her gun, but two was the fact this was state of the art, top secret, developed exclusively by Delta’s underground division, Kevlar.
It was basically designed to stop any bullet on the market, even armor piercing ones, and I made sure we all had them tonight. These vests saved our fucking lives.
Dylan strode over, rubbing his arm. “They took Riley, we have to find her.”
I was so angry that it was starting to swell in my veins, my vision taking on something that resembled black and red. Death and blood.
“They won’t kill her,” I said, “Catherine needs her to take over Delta. We just have to figure out where she would lay low for a few days?”
We watched as our brothers were loaded into a van, both of them okay but knocked around. Jasper waved me over just before the door was shut. “Don’t forget the footage,” he wheezed. “Use the footage.”
Fuck.
Dylan heard him too, and already he was on the phone, talking to our guys that we’d set up earlier to tap into the Delta offices. I’d had an idea that something big was going down here tonight, and I wondered if we might not get the footage we needed, to take them all the fuck down.
“They got it,” Dylan said. “What do you want to do with it?”
I didn’t even have to think. “Send it to Riley’s lawyer. Make it anonymous. He’ll know what to do with it.”
Dylan nodded and barked out a few more commands on his phone. Police crowded in closer to us, asking questions, detaining people in the area, and I could not spend the next few hours locked in one of their interrogation rooms. I needed to find my girl.
Dylan and I took off, using whatever fucking skills we’d learned over the last two decades to run and jump and evade the police. This wouldn’t work out well for us later, but right now, Riley was my priority.
