Ordinary hands.
Capable of repairing broken things or lending aid. Efficient at turning pages and writing notes.
David’s gaze trailed to the fissure in the granite between his hands, the one his father had never bothered to repair.
Of course, his hands were also capable of grasping weapons. Shooting a gun. Ending a life.
How could his hands be so clean and yet so, so dirty? How could they gleam almost white gold in the pendant lights above yet be so stained with blood?
Images of the last few hours scattered across his consciousness. No amount of money owed justified what his father had forced that man to do.
Or rather, whatDavidhad forced that man to do. Because his father hadn’t lifted a finger. He’d uttered a command, andas usual, David had obeyed. If his father was a predator, then David was his fangs.
A wave of sick rose, and he sucked in one slow breath through his nose. His eyes fell shut, but the vision of that man sinking a blade into his only son’s stomach wouldn’t relent.
Over and over and over.
Blood gushing and tears pouring.
No! Dad, stop!his son had screamed, but the man never did.
The most horrific part was the ease of it. So little energy expended to make the man succumb. It had been as easy as breathing. Just a proffered knife and a few sugared words—Keep going until his heart stops—and the man surrendered to David’s command the way everyone did. Unflinching and inevitable.
No one could withstand his voice, not when he spoke in just the right way.
The bullet in the man’s brain afterward had been a mercy, really. Judging by the grisly shock and icy grief saturating the emotional core inside him, the man would have ended it himself if David’s father hadn’t handed David the gun.
He’d been forced to kill his own son.
“This is what they get when they don’t pay up,” his father said, clapping a hand on David’s shoulder. “My prince of death.”
“I should wear a crown,” David murmured, still staring at the pool of blood oozing from the son’s knife wounds. The guy couldn’t have been older than David himself.
His father chuckled.
David hated that chuckle. The sociopath chuckle. Laughter in the face of human tragedy. It had lodged itself in his brain like a jingle for bubblegum.
A slamming door brought David back to the present, and he snapped his head up. Rapid footsteps tapped through the tiled entry hall, far too light to belong to a man. On silent feet, David made his way toward the commotion, freezing at a voice that echoed through the empty spaces.
“Xandra!”
Could she mean his mother, Alex? Leaning slightly to the right, David just barely caught the profile of the woman who had somehow entered his father’s highly guarded home without a pile of security guards stopping her.
Was that…Sean Archer’s aunt?
What the ever-loving fuck was she doing here? And why were her emotions smothered in anxiety? David could almost taste the sour tang of them.
“Xandra!” she yelled again, glaring up the entry stairs. “I know you’re here!”
“Are you insane?” his mother’s voice hissed from further in the house. “You’re lucky Garrett isn’t home.”
“Sean is missing,” the aunt said without further explanation.
A spike of curiosity lodged straight into the center of David’s brain, chased by a waterfall of hope. Was it possible that Sean had met a gleeful—er,tragic—end in a ditch somewhere?
From the sliver of the entry hall in David’s view, his mother gripped Sean’s aunt’s hand and dragged her into a nearby sitting room. He did the noble thing and slithered closer to eavesdrop.
“What do you mean he’s missing?” his mother whispered.
