Delilah slides down my body, sounding bored at her mother’s screaming. “Don’t be insolent.” She leans into her face. “Don’t be dramatic, Lizbeth. You always were such a silly girl.” Without looking away from her mother, she holds her hand out. “Can I have your bat, please?”
“Get your own. This one’s mine,” Daigon says.
Using two fingers, he presses against Delilah’s shoulder until she moves out of his way. I hook my arm around her neck and lead her to Harkin.
“You gave them part of you?” He weakly laughs. “They’ll never let you go now.”
“Ah, you see, I don’t give a fuck,” I say easily. “This woman is worth all of my limbs. That is something you will never understand. Keep laughing, because my intelligent wife is going to make this your own personal hell.”
Delilah holds up the hard drive instead of taking one of the knives laid on the floor. Her smile carries through her voice as she explains, “Do you remember whipping me when I told you to get Kane out of prison after I showed you the videos Asher made? I made copies, but that clip wasn’t the only thing he recorded.”
Harkin pales as his wife stops screaming.
My beautiful fucking wife smiles wider without any trace of fear. “One thing no one ever understood about Asher is how deep his arrogance ran. He wasn’t filled with confidence because he believed in himself. It’s because he would collect everyone’ssecrets. Mine was loving Kane so effortlessly and without condition I would do anything to make sure he was safe. Yours? Well, that wasn’t so noble, was it?”
“There’s nothing on it. I destroyed it,” he lies to himself. It must be a Leroux trait to delude themselves into thinking the world is as they want it.
“Did you destroy your negotiations over the children in your hospitals overseas? How you were boasting about it being so easy to snatch them up and deliver them to Rowan? Or what about the meeting you had with Helene when you took Asher on a hunting trip to introduce him to his grandmother?”
I grimace at the foul stench coming from him and I don’t need to see the brown puddle forming on the cream seat pad to distinguish the liquid. Filthy fuck, he shat himself. He actually shat himself. I bury my laugh in Delilah’s hair as she takes a step back.
“What would happen if I let you live only for the information to be made public?” she asks. “How many countries would be looking for the perpetrators? I’m sure there’d be a few who could pool their resources to find the island. So, your choices are: give me the location or I put it all out there. Either way, you all die and I get to live.”
“You wouldn’t.” He trembles.
“Fucking dare me,” she spits. “Why would I want to see you suffer for a few hours when I could watch it play out in the court of public opinion? That’s the one you care about. I do not give a fuck about myself. I have no respect or dignity;youmade sure of that. So I will stand there on national television, telling everyone in disgusting detail how the revered Dr. Harkin Leroux is nothing other than a filthy pedophile who raped his daughters. I will tell themeverysordid detail, from my childhood in this house to that fucking island you’re protecting.” She gracefully picks a knife up to carve into his chest.PEDO. “Or you can diewith everyone thinking you were good. I’ll let you, so Ruby and Scarlet aren’t put through the torment of reliving the shit you put us through. It’s your choice. Unlike you, I’m giving you one.”
Daigon steps back, lifting his bat as he says, “I’m not.” He swings with so much force the air whistles before the metallic clink of it slamming into Lizbeth’s skull makes me flinch. Blood, brain matter, and bone fragments spray from the impact, painting the wall on the other side along with his face and Delilah’s hair.
He’s not even out of breath as he turns with his bat held between his thumb and forefinger, asking, “Do you still want to use it?”
She takes it with a smile. I pull her back, so she has enough distance while he coaches her. “Plant your feet. Hold it with both of your hands stacked.”
She gets it wrong, so I adjust her hands then step back. “Get momentum by swinging your arms back, pretty girl.”
Her full concentration is on the bat as she nods, slowly bringing her arms back to test the weight. Nodding again with determination, she pulls her arms back and sends the bat into her father’s shoulder. She nearly falls from the swing, so I grab the back of her hoodie to keep her on her feet as the bat clatters against the floor.
“You’re not very good,” Daigon mutters as he collects the bat from the floor.
With my hand on her hoodie, I use my feet to adjust her stance. “Like this. Keep one foot behind you.”
He hands it to her again, looking in her eyes as he says, “Don’t let go of it this time.”
“It was the first time. I’m allowed to make a mistake.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m sure torture has a learning curve.”
“It doesn’t,” I say at the same time as him.
He nods knowingly, given our shared history of The Dollhouse, then gestures for Delilah to try again. She gets better at beating her father and manages to stop herself from hitting him in the head to prevent him being useless like his lifeless wife. But she tires too quickly and drops the bat.
My giant brother-in-law huffs in complaint as he steps back, surveying the expensive furniture. Scraping fills the air as Daigon drags the large dining table into the hallway. “Troublemaker, move out of the way.”
Delilah steps to the side with a small crease between her brows as I pull her into me. Ruby married a fucking crazy person. He unties Lizbeth’s dead body then drags it around by her hair like she’s a puppet. My wife is also insane, demanding, “Kiss your wife, Harkin.”
Daigon slowly turns his head in horror. “You peoplereallylike touching each other.”
But my girl, my strong fucking wife, doesn’t let him get away with shit as she tilts her chin in the air. “No. It was a rule when we were kids. We had to kiss this perverted bastard whenever we left the room.”
“We?” he says, eyes darkening. “Ruby too?”
