coming from the room around the corner. I want to run, but the creaking floorboards will give me away. Instead I walk slowly, so fucking slowly, too slowly, trying to hold it together.
I don’t have much of a chance here.
I know that.
A sword and me against a gun or two, against my father, against a trained assassin.
This is a suicide mission.
The only hope I have is that my father might hesitate in having me killed.
That hesitation might save the both of us.
I put my back flat against the wall and look around the corner.
Jones is standing right in front of me, back to me.
He’s just outside another room, where I think my father and Gabrielle must be, though I can’t see them, keeping watch or perhaps waiting for his turn.
I don’t know how these sick fucks operate, but I’m not going to find out either.
Inside the room, I can hear my father whispering something to Gabrielle. I can hear her struggles and muffled cries.
I feel only vengeance.
Now I understand exactly what was driving Gabrielle all those years.
She’s passed the torch to me, and I will gladly wield it.
I don’t even have to think. I just act.
And I act fast.
Jones is in the middle of turning around, sensing me, when I’ve reached around him with the blade of the sword at his throat. My hand grabs his jaw for leverage as I slide the blade across his neck.
Slitting someone’s throat is harder than it looks. You have to press hard. You have to cut through the windpipe and cartilage.
I fail at that, making only a superficial cut, but it’s enough for him to cry out, to try to fight me, for me to lower the sword and for him to play right into it.
I drive the sword deep into his chest.
This time I press hard. I won’t make that mistake again.
Jones falls to the ground, crying out and sputtering blood as he holds his chest, the red seeping through his fingers.
“Jones?” I hear my father cry out from the other room. “Jones?”
I step over Jones, who is writhing in a bloody mess on the floor, and head into the room.
My father is on the floor, pinning Gabrielle down, her shirt ripped half off her, breasts exposed. My father looks up at the doorway, and before his eyes turn to the shock of seeing me, I see the lust in them. The malevolence. The pure, oozing evil.
This man must die.
He’s not even a man at all.
Not even a father.
He’s a monster.
“Pascal,” he says, clearing his throat. “I didn’t think you had it in you to show up.” He glances back down at Gabrielle, who is staring at me with such hope and sorrow and shame in her eyes that it breaks my heart while steeling my resolve to kill him. “I guess you mean more to him than you do to me. A disposable slut. A little treat, a pet who you dump on the streets when you’re done kicking them around.”
Jesus.
My hand is holding the bloodied sword so hard that it’s starting to shake.
“Get. Off. Her,” I say through a grinding jaw, rage pulsing in my temple. “Now.”
My father smiles and almost rolls his eyes. “Or what? You’re going to stab me with your sword?”
“Yes. Just after I cut off your dick and gouge out your eyes.”
His brows raise. “My, my. Sometimes you say things that impress me, son. This is one of those times.”
“I am not your son,” I say, coming forward, trying to see on the other side of him, wondering where the gun is. “I will never be your son.”
“It’s too late for regrets, Pascal,” he says. “You can’t change who your parents are. You can’t change who you are. It’s not even worth trying.”
He grins down at Gabrielle and kisses her.
She whimpers, trying to fight back.
I spring into action, running forward, sword extended.
Then he slips over so he’s sitting up, one arm wrapped around Gabrielle, hand over her mouth, the other pulling a gun up from the other side of him and holding it against Gabrielle’s head.
I freeze.
“You come closer, and I’m blowing her brains out right in front of you,” he says. “I did say I had other ways of making you suffer, didn’t I? I didn’t think I’d have to use them, though. I didn’t think you were that stupid, that naive, that . . . in love. In love with her? She’s trash. And she used you, Pascal. Just as you used Marine. Karma