They’d been all too eager to take innocent little Silver Gomez. So much so they hadn’t minded it at all when she had been kicking and screaming her way to freedom, despite being a child that was outmatched by monsters bigger than her. They hadn’t cared in the slightest. Nor had John when years later he’d had another child with Elaina – another one that would have met the same fate had he not been a boy.
That poor child still hadn’t made it another year before the O’Malley darkness had ruined him.
Ruined him just like the rest of us and made his name nothing more than a whisper spoken of once in a blue moon.
“You ready to go, lass?” John’s rough voice broke my concentration. “We gotta get going if we’re gonna collect your toys and be home before the Red Diamonds get here.”
Taking what belonged to me required a rather large amount of planning and patience. Sure, it probably hadn’t needed to take me so many years, but truthfully, not all of that had been my fault.
Some of it was hers – the cursed woman.
She’d been occupied with other… things. Things I could not care for, but required her undivided attention for a while. Thingsthat were… well… they were not things I wanted. But she had been busy and constantly forced me to behave. Still, no matter how many pills she took to calm me down, or lies she told to convince herself that I was nothing but a specter, nothing could hold me back forever. It didn’t matter that she said I was just a figment of her dissociative identity disorder she claimed the doctors said was a result of what had happened to us when we were kids. None of her denials would make me go away.
I was still here.
I was still a part of her.
I was the one who came out when the monster had taken us – the one who saved her by taking on the brunt of the pain and forcing her to sleep so I could experience everything wrong in the world. She should have been thanking me. Not pushing me away. But alas, nobody in this world was truly good. Even her.
With all her interference and the Red Diamonds being menaces, it had taken far too long for me to get my Maggie and save her. But not anymore. Now all I had to do was keep pushing with my decades long plans and then I would have Maggie all to myself where she belonged. All I had to do was get her into the basement of a temporary Persephone home, leave her there for a handful of weeks until things cooled down, then transport her to my permanent safe house. One in the depths of the Irish countryside, not a soul in sight for miles and miles, but the trees I owned. It was there that she would remain for the rest of her days, trapped safely within the walls of my land, unable to be tainted and ruined by any more of the Montana bloodline.
It was there that I could finally be happy. It was there that the cursed woman would realize that I was right, and she didn’t need to try to stop me. We were doing the best thing.
All I had to do now was wait – wait and see how my plan worked out.
“Are you ready?” John called out to me again, as I stared over the horizon, watching the way the sun rose against the clouds.
I turned to face my brother, no care in the world for the dangerous man he was supposed to have been. Other people feared him, dreaded meeting him, and slept dreaming of him like the bogeyman that entered homes of a night and ruined lives. I just knew him as John. As the little one who had shared my snacks and followed me around like a puppy.
The boy who had been screaming bloody murder the day my father had sold me and the cursed woman away.
I’d always liked John. I’d never liked Shannon. My sister hadn’t cried about me being missing. She’d never screamed for me.
“I’m ready.” I muttered, as I did my best to calm my mind of memories and thoughts. “Do you remember what you’re supposed to do? Who you’re supposed to leave alone?”
John patted my arm. “No worries, lass. I know what to do.” He grinned that grin of his. The one I couldn’t bring myself to trust.
My brother had never been loyal, or a man who kept his word. He’d always been self-serving and a bit of a menace even when we had been young. My kindness to my brother, and the fact I let him live, was purely down to the fact that he had vowed to kill our parents for what they did to me, and then he had gone on to do it. He had slaughtered them for their sins – he had avenged me, and I appreciated that.
Well, a minor part of him had wanted them gone anyway. His wife had been cheating on him with Shannon… she’d been sleeping away with his own sister, and her husband sometimes too, and killing the entire family allowed John to get revenge against his wife in the same night he got revenge for me.
I had no issues with people who enjoyed the pleasure of more than one gender. Though I could find men attractive and had been more than willing to sleep with one for the last few decades, I mostly found women better. Women were softer, more beautiful – less cruel. Shannon and my brother’s wife, Cecelia, had been perfectly fine to like each other in the general sense, but they shouldn’t have acted on it when married. It was a sin to betray a marriage vow – a sin to step out on the home and family you were building, even if the cursed woman had done the same. It was unacceptable and why Shannon should have died, too, and why Ceceliahadbeen slaughtered with her unborn baby.
It was sheer luck the baby had been born early – that John’s legitimate child with his wife and not a whore, had made a sudden appearance early. Shannon had stolen the little thing away hours before John had done his work. It was a shame for that baby that I had found them – that I knew where they lay their head each night.
With Shannon. With Shannon and her husband andtheirchild.
London wasn’t a pleasant city, but it was useful to go there sometimes and see where my sister was. What she was doing.
What John’s child did.
I wondered if the baby would be just like their father. Or if they would be like me.
I’d seen the child before. Only once but enough – enough to burn that pretty little face into my brain.
I’d be seeing all of them again soon enough because despite Shannon’s attempts to hide from me, I had an ace up my sleeve. I had a puppet about to meet his master, who would give me what I needed to make sure she could never be a thought in my mind again.
“Tell me now what I want to know.” John insisted on talking to me as though I cared to listen to him. “Tell me now and I’ll keep my word.”
