out. I didn’t even want to know what he’d been through to consider that a weak blow. “No way he was out cold enough.”
“Whatever,” I mumbled as my father groaned.
Jeremy kicked his foot and then growled, “Get up.”
My father actually seemed startled, that cool confidence gone as he shakily rose to his feet. Antonov didn’t seem at all concerned with the consequences if we failed. I wasn’t sure what Jeremy had to lose, but I had a whole fucking lot. For some reason, the thought didn’t fill me with dread as it once did.
“You’re making a deadly mistake,” my father warned when we entered the house.
“Seriously?” Jeremy mocked. “The decades you spent as Thirteen’s father is about to end painfully, and the best you can come up with is a fucking cliché?” Antonov peered at the back of my father’s head. My gut told me he was thinking about putting a bullet through it.
“We need him,” I reminded Antonov as we herded my father toward his office.
“I don’t, but you do.”
I silently swore because he was right. The only way I could convince Antonov to help me was to hand over the recording I took of my father confessing to killing his predecessor and his plans for Thirteen. I thanked my lucky stars that I remembered to record him that day in his office. Learning Wren had been shot had almost made me forget all about it. The recordings were all the evidence Jeremy needed to kill my father with immunity and take his place. I hadn’t wanted to hand it over this early, but Antonov had effortlessly outmaneuvered all of the precautions I’d taken to keep him from gaining the upper hand. Now I was reduced to relying on his fragile sense of mercy.
Or so he thought.
“Cut off the head of a snake, and another grows in its place,” I told him. “There’s no guarantee that head will be yours.” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jeremy’s jaw clench. I’d finally struck a nerve. “Right now, Crow and Fox are my father’s problem, but unless we deal with them too, they’ll just become competition.”
Antonov was silent as he shoved my father into his desk chair. We then tied him to it. My father had treated that chair like a throne only for it to become his coffin. “And what about you?” Antonov asked once we were done. My father was noticeably silent.
“What about me?”
“Are you competition?”
My heart thundered in my chest, even as I forced myself to remain nonchalant. “Are you looking for an excuse to kill me?”
“I don’t need one. Answer the question.”
Loud and clear, I could hear the threat woven into his demand. My father seemed smug and not at all fearful of watching his son being killed right before his eyes. I bet he thought my death would get him out of this. How wrong he’d be.
“I don’t want this,” I assured Jeremy while holding my father’s gaze. I felt my lips curl at the lack of remorse in them. My next words were directed at him. “I never did.”
I could only assume that Jeremy was appeased since I was still breathing.
“That’s a relief and not because I’d have to kill you, which is kind of a disappointment, but because you’d be shit at it.”
It was debatable whether Antonov had meant it as a compliment. The doubt didn’t stop the black stain eating away at my heart from fading just a little. I felt hope that he was right—hope that I wasn’t capable of unleashing horrors on innocents flared in my stomach. I turned and started for the door, not bothering to look back.
“That is a relief,” I quietly agreed.
Upstairs in my bedroom, I quickly filled a large duffel bag with clothes and whatever I couldn’t bear to leave behind—which, sadly, wasn’t much. When I was done, I slowly turned in a circle, staring at the walls and the photos covering almost every inch of space. I contemplated leaving them but knew that I never could. They’d been a balm some days and the sharpest knife cutting deep on others—a gift from my father to keep me shackled. It took some time to take them all down. When I was finished, I stuffed them inside an old folder before shoving it inside my bag.
Downstairs, I found Jeremy waiting for me in the foyer, his eyebrow raised.
“Make sure he’s ready.”
It was all I bothered to say to him on my way out of the