I lean down and set my lips near the nasty slug’s ear. “If you touched my sister, I swear to God no power on earth will keep me from peeling your skin like an orange. I want your blood under my fingernails.”
He doesn’t respond to me, instead begging Mattie to get her crazy brother off of him, playing her with a smattering of crocodile tears that spring from his eyes as he pulls against my lock. Such a piece of work.
“Don’t listen to him, Mattie. He’s a liar and a,” I pause, choosing a different word so I don’t scare her. “Freak.”
Falk finishes his conference with Clara, his phone ringing as his hazel eyes weigh each of us. After a quick call, he nods to the other guards, who I let band my hands only after they do the same to Bryce. I know without saying we’re all going to my father’s office. I can’t say I like not getting to kill the bastard before we’re punished.
Hopefully, my father feels similarly murderous.
When we get to the door of the office, the guards try to block Clara’s dad from joining us, but his vocal frustration unsettles the brittle quiet that usually lives at this end of the house. My father leaves his throne behind the desk to explain what he expects to happen.
“I’m sorry, but this is a Westerhouse family matter. I’m sure you understand,” he says.
But Clara got her smarts from somewhere. Her dad’s dark eyes spark with restrained worry as he stands up to my father. “The only Westerhouse I see here besides you is your daughter. Those two are legally McElroys, and last I checked, Mason doesn’t start with a W.”
My father loses his composure, his rage burning through his body like the ripple of a shockwave. “Be careful how you choose to continue, Michael. When it comes down to it, who is a jury going to believe: a pillar of the community with a spotless legal record or a former street kid who earns his keep slinging liquor to the poor?”
Watching the confused shock drop over Clara’s dad reminds me how deep we are into all of this. Everything can twist to make us bend at his feet. Nothing about it is shocking.
But my father lets the other man into the office, a vicious smile curving at his mouth, and once again I’m thrown. What the hell is going on here?
He begins his interrogation, and what comes out makes bile burn in the back of my throat and Clara’s face turns ghostly white.
Bryce has been dating my sister for nine months. Nine fucking months.
Bryce fucking Mason, a pedophile—an abusive, stalker, poser-ass—has been dating my fifteen-year-old sister.
And what makes it even more horrifying is how Mattie begs for him, how often she says she loves him as she pleads with our father, how she looks and acts like she means it.
“Thank your team for bringing this matter to my attention,” Father says, nodding at the increasingly green-colored Clara, his words making no sense to me. “Now, I’d planned this differently, of course, but I think we can work with what we have. This is too clean of an opportunity not to take advantage of it.
He nods at Falk, and the man steps forward, his only sign of strain a slow exhalation.
“If you wouldn’t mind taking the shot. I’ll call for an ambulance as soon as you finish. We don’t want the organs to get cold.”
Mattie realizes what’s going to happen at the same time I do, but she’s closer. As he takes aim at Bryce, strapped to the same chair I’ve bled in, Mattie dives for the guard’s legs.
Clara rushes forward, to do what, I’m not sure, but I’m just so far away. Too far away.
For the second time in two months, I can do nothing but watch as a gun gets pointed at the woman I love. Mattie screams as first one gunshot sounds, then another, before the gun in the room goes off, wide, missing Bryce, Mattie’s goal achieved. But it’s easy to see from the trajectory exactly where it’s going.
Exactly who it’s going to hit.
My Crash has already dodged one bullet meant for her.
Fate is a greedy bastard.
I roar, breaking free from the guard who holds me, diving toward her, hoping to knock her down, but knowing that at this close of range I’ll be too late.
A flash of black and a crumple of bodies on the floor.
Blood.
Why is there always so much blood? Why is a room that should be full of books and thoughts so often the site of my worst nightmares?
Mattie’s still screaming, but she’s got the letter opener from my father’s desk that she’s wielding like she would her rapier, rushing to Bryce while keeping the guards back. I wiggle the last bit across the floor to Clara, desperate for myarms to be free, to hold her, to touch every inch of her skin and make sure she’s okay.
Today was the day everything was supposed to be fixed.
