It seemed like something he would enjoy.
Rising from my chair, I walked over to the small safe hidden behind a bookshelf. I placed Sapphire’s letters inside, ensuring they would be easily found when the time came. Beau’s letters, however, I hid in a different spot—inside an old wooden chest in the attic, a place where he often played as a child and kept all the childhood memories he couldn’t bear to part with when he grew. I knew Beau would find them when he was ready, when he needed them the most. I was sure of it.
Instead of returning to my desk – or to the rest of the empty house – I grabbed another glass of alcohol and sat in my old leather armchair. A camera on a tripod had been set up earlier on, and now I was finally ready to use it.
To record my last words that I could share with the world.
I wanted to tell my children that they were the only reasons I was alive. Without them, I would have taken a gun to my head the minute Lucia stopped breathing. I would have been buried with her in the ground, our bones rotting into the same earth as we embraced. But my children deserved more than being orphans. Beau deserved more than an absent, then dead father. Sapphire deserved a parent remaining by her side.
They were who I had lived for, and now that I would die for them, I felt nothing but relief. Nothing but peace at the prospect of seeing my wife again and finally being buried in the same grave as we’d always promised.
Death may have been the great unknown, but I would not fear it. Not if there was even the slightest chance that I could find the woman I loved and see her smile once more. There wasnothing I wouldn’t give up for that. Just one smile. One laugh. A single kiss against her lips as I whispered all the ways I loved her years after her death.
Lucia would be waiting for me, and I would happily find her. That alone was reason enough for me to not be scared.
Coughing, I cleared my throat and sipped my drink. Sitting in silence as the camera kept ticking away its minutes seemed easier. But I had no choice but to force myself to speak. No choice but to start the long list of confessions and plans for the inevitable that were wrapping around my neck like a noose.
A good catholic confessed their sins before death and I was speaking the worst of them all.
The ones that would kill me not to see the outcome of because I couldn’t handle knowing if Sapphire hated me. Resented me. Wished I had never shared the truth at all.
“Well, I guess I should cut to the chase.”I spoke in Spanish for my daughter, preferring to talk the same way she and my wife always had.“If you are watching this, angel, then I am dead and there was no other option but for you to finally find out the truth.”
Chapter One
As the gunshot still echoed in my ears, long after Widow hung up the phone, I was running back into the house. Hell, it was before I even thought about the potential danger that I could face. It was just a reaction.
It didn’t seem to matter to me that there was death or monsters lying in wait - that it was more than likely a trap, the worst sort of trap, just waiting to capture me. The only thing that occurred to me was that I had to go first. To push through the front door of the little English home that had been perfectly safe and fine until I’d come along and ruined it, and make sure I was in front of my men.
The guys were following me; I knew that. One or two of them had grabbed Ares’ friend - Beni - and brought him inside too. I presumed it was Logan, seeing as he was the smartest with first aid. That, and Kody, Price and Lincoln all crowded around me a second later as I watched Misha stride past me, making abeeline for the sobbing, blood-soaked little girl, standing beside the kitchen door, big blue eyes wide with terror.
And worse. The worst thing of all because I knew how it felt even if I wasn’t personally invested in the current death that stained the air… I just felt my old grief and fresh guilt.
Shannon O’Malley wasn’t my friend. She was a stranger who’d been polite and not a monster like the rest of her bloodline. I wasn’t going to shed a single tear for her specifically because… because she was nothing to me. As nasty as it sounded. Yet my eyes burned with sadness and pain and all manner of things that I had no time to let out for one undeniable reason.
It wasmyfault she was dead.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. But itwasmy fault. She might have pulled the trigger - of the shotgun on the ground that Kody quickly snatched up and made safe - but it was no doubt something to do with me. I was the reason she was lying there, missing half of her damn face.
I was the reason that her children had no mama. The reason why Hades was inconsolable as Misha did his best to mutter words that, whilst kind, would do nothing to calm her.
I knew they would do nothing. It didn’t matter what he said, or how soft he said it, I was aware it made no difference. Losing someone you loved was one of the worst things in the universe, but to watch it? To see their head explode, and feel their blood splatter your face? That was indescribable agony, and it would never go away. It would stick in the back of your brain, and that was how you would picture them each time you dared to remember a fond memory. That was all you would think about until the day you died, no matter how many times you tried to push the thoughts away.
Hades was covered in blood. Her clothes, her pale skin, even her hair. I could see how the redness of her curls was taintedwith the deeper hue of her mother’s insides andfuck… I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. I couldn’t even see her.
I saw me.Me. Me. Me.
It wasn’t Shannon on the floor, missing half her head. It wasn’t her brains splattered on the walls of her family home, dripping down to the floor in clumps of ickiness with hair attached.
It was my mama.
Mine.
Then it was my daddy. Malone. All the people I’d ruined and slaughtered even if I hadn’t always been the one to pull the trigger.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.And once more, it was all my fault.
“Something’s going on outside.” Price’s voice reached my ears, but I didn’t fully register it. I was too busy dancing the line between freaking out, reliving my trauma, and trying to be the sensible boss I was supposed to be.
