I grind my jaw. “She’s not your wife. Not anymore.”
He shrugs a little. “Maybe not. But she won’t be yours either. Not if she’s dead. So what choice are you making, Nix?”
I stand there for too long – I know I do – while I try to make a choice. And Noll? He stands firm behind me too, waiting. I know he’ll back me up either way, but he’ll expect more from me, and so would Charlie. If I let him get away, he’ll just move the business elsewhere, possibly to a whole other country, and countless more men and women will be forced into this life. She’d want me to save them over her.
And if I kill him? Another snake will take his place.
I don’t know what Nathan sees on his face, but he must see my decision, even though it’s killing me to make it.
Countless lives over one. I gave the same advice to Charlie, and I hate that I’m taking it now.
“I won’t let you take me in,” he growls. The sound is pathetic.
“You won’t have a choice,” Noll grits out. “Put down the knife, and come quietly.”
I level the gun at his head and breathe evenly in and out of my mouth. No emotions. There’s no place for them here. I repeat this in my head as he laughs out loud.
“There is always a choice.” And then he raises the knife so fast that I almost didn’t catch the movement. The knife plunges into his chest, and a look of shock takes over his face before blood starts seeping down his shirt.
“Fuck,” Noll barks before rushing forward. He’s too late to catch Nathan though, and he drops like a rock to the deck, gasping for breath with the knife poking out of his ribs. I stay rooted to my spot, gun poised as he splutters his last breath.
Noll rubs a hand over his head and then looks at me with a scowl. “What a bastard.”
I don’t respond. I stir to action and open the sliding glass door as cops begin to run up the deck. “Charlie!” I shout into the home. I stand in the ornate living room, trying to listen past my own adrenaline-laced, labored breathing, but I hear nothing.
As cops reach Nathan’s body, Noll tells them that there is a victim inside, but I’m already running toward the front of the boathouse. There seems to be a few rooms down here, and I have every intention of going through them before making my way to the second floor.
My pulse thumps heavily in my neck when I find the first room empty of a living soul. Then the second. And once I reach the third, I can smell it. The blood.
I shove the door open, and fear nearly cripples me atwhat I find. Naked and suspended from the ceiling by her feet is Charlie. A pool of deep, red blood spreads out on the tile below her.
“Mama,” I whisper as I step into the room, my shoe slicking with her blood.
Her eyelids are closed, but they flutter at the sound of my voice.
Noll comes in behind me and whispers a string of curses.
“Get her down,” I demand as I head to Charlie. I grab her face and tap her cheek. “Charlie, stay with me. Eyes on me. Wake up. Don’t go to sleep. Charlie!”
In the next moment, she’s being lowered to the ground, and cops are starting to enter. One of them calls for the paramedics on his radio while I take off my suit jacket, rip the sleeves off, and tie them around her sluggishly bleeding wrists. I fashion them as tight as I can, but there’s nothing I can do about the blood seeping into my clothes, slicking down her back as she lies in it.
I murmur things to her as she makes strangled little moans, and I don’t know how long time passes, but it feels like an eternity before the paramedics come in.
Body numb, I get shoved to the wall as they get to work on her, and for the first time in a long time, I feel something. Something inside. Some kind of internal shift. Fear. Crippling anxiety. A genuine agony that this will be the last time I see the woman I love alive.
Because that’s a lot of blood. And now? Now she isn’t responding.
Chapter Forty-Two
Feenix Blaylock
The ambulance lights are flashing off the water, but all I see is blood. Her blood. All I hear is her ragged breathing. All that flashes in my mind is her violated, naked, and suspended from the ceiling, rivers of red below her.
Rage consumes me. Pure rage so white hot that, before I know it, I’m shoving past Noll and marching back out of the boathouse. The next second, I’m standing over Nathan’s body, gun poised to shoot him straight in the head. He may be dead, but he isn’t dead to my standards.
He hasn’t paid nearly enough yet.
The cops outside have cleared away, but not before leaving crime scene tape everywhere. They wouldn’t see if I obliterated his face. That’s a memory I want etched into my mind: his face completely gone. A mess of flesh.
