How badly I wanted to step forward, slide my fingers around his rancid throat and feel the fight drain out of him beneath my grip. I could picture it clearly—the widening eyes, the useless clawing at my wrists, the sudden panic when he realised this time there would be no bargaining.
My fingers flexed at my sides.
That wasn’t the plan.
The liquor would erode what little function his liver still clung to, and the drugs would finish what years of neglect had already begun. He was a weak man, and weakness would be his downfall. I wasn’t here to grant him drama. I was here to close a chapter.
Would Ella cry for him?
The question lingered longer than I liked.
Did she know about her mother’s death-in-service payout? About how quickly grief had been converted into cash and then into oblivion? About how much of her childhood had been collateral damage to his self-destruction?
My jaw tightened.
My fingers itched again.
I turned away from the bed and moved toward the window, pushing aside the curtain just enough to let the moonlight cut through the stale air. Silver light filtered past the trees outside, laying pale bars across the floorboards. For a moment, I let my breathing slow and focused on something else—on the grainy black-and-white image saved on my phone. The blurred outline of a head. The flicker of a heartbeat we had all leaned toward like fools.
The baby.
Something real.
Something that wasn’t tainted or harmed by evil.
It wasn’t that Alec or Rowan didn’t want their hands dirty. They would have stepped forward without hesitation if I’d said the word. But this was mine to settle. Not because of pride, and not because I needed the thrill.
Because I understood this particular kind of damage.
I enjoyed what I did. I never pretended otherwise. Business, protection, personal—the category didn’t matter. If someone needed to be eliminated, I did it without flinching. The clarity of it soothed something in me that had been restless since childhood.
But this piece of shit was bloodline.
And bloodline spreads if you let it.
I refused to let that rot seep any closer to our future than it already had.
I would never revert to that terrified child who counted the seconds between footsteps in the hallway. Anger had burned that weakness out of me years ago and forged something harder in its place. What got me through those years wasn’t hope. It was calculation. It was learning where to stand, when to move, when to strike back, and what to protect at all costs.
Back then, I had protected my brothers.
Now, I protected Ella.
And what she carried.
This kill did not feel like indulgence. It felt like correction. Like sealing a crack in the foundation before it spread. One more wrong in the world quietly erased so that our family could stand without shadow.
Our children would never learn to read the temperature of a room before entering it. They would never flinch at raised voices or wait for the sound of a belt sliding free. They would not grow up measuring love in apologies.
They would be protected from the kind of men who mistook weakness for entitlement.
Ella, however, would still enjoy a bite of pain.
She came too hard when one of us tormented her just enough. There was fire in her that refused to die, even when she pretended to resent it.
My lips twitched despite myself as I stepped forward to James’s bed and took one final look at him. He stirred slightly, muttering incoherently, already reaching toward his bottle without opening his eyes.
He would finish this himself.
