CADE
All thoughts of fucking Nikki had been unceremoniously shoved from my mind, and it took a great deal of willpower to keep my breathing steady, even as my heart thumped in my chest so loud I was surprised she couldn’t hear it. She was still caressing the gravestone and had kneeled in front of it, whispering a few words to the man who was her father. A man who could no longer hear her.
He was more than only six feet under her shoes. He was under the surface, in another world, filled with pain, unfulfilled desires, and torture. It was a world full of all the things humans dread to think about and simply hope their images of Hell aren’t true.
They are, for some.
My grip tightened on the basket, the cane squeaking under my fingers.
The man she had told me about, who loved her, looked afterher, and treated her like a princess wasnotthe man I had known.
Garrett Porter.
That wasn’t his real name, only one of his aliases, and apparently the one he had been killed and buried with. He was better known under the name he made famous through cruelty and violence.
Mitch Murphy.
He was no property mogul, no regular real estate broker, or whatever the hell he had told her he did for a living. It was all a lie, a cover. I knew this because I knew the man—intimately—all his history, secrets, and deepest fears. Not once in sharing his memories through the transfer of blood had Nikki’s face come up, notonce, which meant all the memories he had of her were good ones. Things I didn’t need to know because they wouldn’t assist in his torture. I only needed the things that hid in the darkest recesses of his mind, the parts that would torture him when he was forced to be reminded of them.
It was a relief that Nikki wasn’t one of these things.
There’s no way Nikki, the Nikki who loved being a cop, who wanted to fight and help the good guy, who hated corruption, could know who her dear old dad really was when he lived.
I swallowed, my throat dry. “You have different surnames.”
She nodded, her back still to me. “When Mom married Dad, I didn’t take on his name. I have my Mom’s maiden name which she changed when I was little after she divorced my birth father.”
“Oh.” It was all I could manage to get out, and my throat felt like it was closing up. The bile in my stomach was making itself known, and I wished I hadn’t eaten such a large meal.
There are a handful of crime syndicates in this city, but the largest by area and employees had been Murphy’s. He had many rivals and even more enemies.Of course,he had been murdered. Men like him rarely lived to die of old age. Hell, he probably evenmade enemies within his own ranks. He was a cruel man with cruel intentions.
What do men with power crave?
More power.
He harbored little to no guilt for his actions, and so his torture in Hell was mostly based on physical pain rather than psychological. But demons can still learn a lot from humans by tasting their blood—we’ll get their memories, and it builds an image of a person that can only be trumped by being inside their mind.
But one thing was clear.
Nikki didn’t know who he was.
Clenching and unclenching my hands, I stared hard at the gravestone, knowing that under the stone and dirt were the balls of the man who I had made scream with long, drawn-out, painful deaths over and over again.
And what of the daughter he doted on?
What did Nikki do to spark such a soft side within him?
Because I know for a fact, he didn’t treat her stepbrother the same way, not before Nikki came into the family and certainly not after. It didn’t surprise me that he didn’t bother to keep in contact with her. She was an intruder in the family who he’d have forced himself to be civil around for the sake of a powerful and violent man he called Dad. She got the attention, the love, and the upbringing he should have had all along.
And I thanked God her stepbrother had simply opted to not contact her rather than taking out his resentment on her.
Fuck.Was her stepbrother part of the family business? Was he carrying it on?
What was it about Nikki that made Mitch soften so? Did she remind him of someone? Was it purely her looks all over again? Her soft, beautiful, angel-like features and hair. Surely not. Did she look like her mother? I had never asked. Maybe he trulyloved the woman, and perhaps she had broken through into some side of him that hadn’t seen the light in many years. The only way to know would be to ask him, and I had vowed never to return to Hell, so that was out of the question.
Why he treated her with such reverence was irrelevant. But now Nikki sought the person who had killed him, and now I knew who her father was, I had no doubt she was correct, his death was no suicide. Did she know that she could potentially be going after some dangerous people trying to find who was responsible?
Sighing, Nikki turned to face me, the little red flush in her cheeks a bit brighter and her eyes shining with tears she was holding back. But she was smiling, and I knew that smile was for me. It pleased me to know that my company had made this day easier for her, and I shoved the horrifying realization of her father’s identity aside because while I was with her, I wouldn’t let it taint our time.
