Page 134 of The Beast

“You don’t understand how the world works, Isabella. You never have.”

“Then explain it to me.” I keep my voice steady, even though my heart is hammering. “Explain how torturing Gabriel was protecting me. Explain how shooting him and leaving him for dead was for my benefit.”

Something flickers across his face. “That was never supposed to happen. I wanted him convinced that staying away from you was in his best interest. The men I hired went too far.”

“And you just let them.”

“By the time I found out, it was too late.”

“You could have stopped it. You could have saved him.” My voice cracks. “You could have done the right thing for once.”

“The right thing.” He laughs—hollow, exhausted. “Gabriel Grimm was going to destroy everything I’d built. And you were going to hand him the keys.”

“I love him.”

“Love is a weakness.” He says it like he’s reciting a fact. Like it’s something he learned long ago and never questioned. “I thought I taught you better.”

I stare at him—and for the first time, I see him with perfect clarity.

“You taught me nothing,” I say quietly. “Nothing except how to pretend everything’s fine when it’s not.”

His jaw tightens. “I didn’t bring you here to argue.”

“Then why did you bring me here?”

Silence. The warehouse creaks around us. Pigeons coo in the rafters.

“The FBI has a warrant,” he finally says. “My accounts are frozen. My allies have abandoned me.” He meets my eyes, and I see something I’ve never seen in him before. Fear. “Forty years, Isabella. Forty years of building an empire. And it’s all crashing down.”

“Good.”

He flinches. Actually flinches, like I’ve slapped him.

“I’m your father.”

“You’re a monster.” But even as I say it, something twists in my chest. Not grief for him, grief for the father he could have been. The one who might have come to my school plays. Taught me to ride a bike. Told me he was proud of me without expecting anything in return.

That father never existed. Maybe he was never even possible.

I let the grief wash through me. Let it hurt.

Then I let it go.

“Gabriel is going to find me,” I say. “And when he does, I hope you’re ready. Because the man I love has spent five years wanting you dead. And I’m not sure I want to stop him anymore.”

Something hardens in his expression. The fear crystallizes into calculation. The look of a cornered animal deciding its next move.

“Then I suppose we’d better make sure he doesn’t find you.”

He nods to the men flanking me. Before I can react, hands grab my arms and drag me toward a door at the back of the warehouse.

“Father—”

But he’s already walking away.

The last thing I see is his back. Straight. Rigid. The back of a man who’s already decided I’m expendable.

Then the hood’s back on, and I close my eyes in the dark and pray for Gabe to find me.