“I never should have let you leave me last night. I should have pushed for you to stay. It was probably waiting for the chance to get you alone. I just don’t understand where it came from. Why is it here?” He pauses as a thought occurs to him. “Do you think it’s because I brought the boys—?”
“No,” I state firmly, refusing to let him put this on my boys.
Marcus shakes his head. “It has to be something. I’ve lived in that house my entire life and I have never seen that thing. I must have done something to put you in danger—”
“It was me,” I blurt, no longer able to stand the deceit. “I summoned him.”
The back end of the Escalade fishtails on a patch of ice with the hard slam of Marcus’s foot on the brakes. I pitch forward, caughtonly by the belt across my chest. The entire vehicle skids to a stop in the middle of the empty highway with only the setting sun and a tiny house a pinprick in the distance as witness when the man in the seat next to me spins to face me.
“What have you done?”
I wait for guilt or even shame, but I meet his murderous gaze with a defiant tilt of my chin.
“What I had to.”
Eyes the gun gray of an approaching storm lift at last and spear through me with a fury that would have made a lesser man cower, but I will not be swayed.
“Why?” The cabin echoes with the smack of his palm into the horn. It blares violently in the silence. “Why would you do something so stupid?À quoi tu pensais?”
My own temper slams through me with the force of a raging bull.
“I was thinking they needed to die!”
“And I told you I would deal with it.” He spears five fingers back through his disheveled hair. “I told you I would do it. But you went behind my back and … what even is that thing?”
My eyes narrow as I stand metaphorically toe-to-toe with the only person left in my world. “Thatthingdid what you couldn’t.”
His head jerks back as if I’d smacked him. “What are you talking about?”
I’ve said far more than I’d meant to. Maybe I feel like I need to justify my actions. Maybe I need to explain myself. Whatever the reason, I find myself telling him the truth.
“Etienne Duval is dead.” I stare up into his stunned expression, fighting back the pride and elation bubbling up my throat with the bitter tang of poison. “He’s dead.”
The horror on his face is there for only seconds. A flicker of shock that quickly returns to fury. His hands capture my upper arms, tight enough to cut bruises, but I don’t flinch.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Maybe!” I snarl back. “One of us needs to be. One of us needs to show them who the Usher Family is. What will happen if they come for one of us.”
“Yes, but that thing isn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart, Linny. He’s a fucking monster. He’s going to hurt you.”
“He won’t,” I say with an absolute confidence I shouldn’t have. “That’s not how it works.”
I have no idea how it works.
I asked no questions. I simply accepted the conditions I was given, agreed to anything as long as I got what I wanted. But those are concerns for later.
“Petit, tu dois arrêter.S’il te plait.”
His pleading cuts through me, cuts into that fresh wound I’m desperately trying to weld shut. That tiny shred of humanity I don’t know why I’m still clinging to.
“I can’t stop,” I tell him, grind it out through my teeth. Through a wall of tears I hate myself for feeling well up inside me. “I won’t stop. I will die before I let them breathe another day when my … when my boys are…”
I’m pulled out of my seat and across the console into his arms. Into the hard wall of his chest. I’m suffocated and mashed together like he thinks that will fuse my broken pieces back into place.
“Stop. Please. Please, I am begging you,” he growls into my ear in jagged French. “I will do this.” His palms capture my wet cheeks, and he stares into my eyes, his dark with misery. “I will fix this. I swear to you,mon p’tit. Please. No more.”
I break out of his hold. Nails gouge holes into the palms of my hands.
