my hand quicker than I can react, forcing me to use my other as I pull the weapon free and try shooting him in the stomach. The bullet misses as he tears from my throat, clearly afraid of what my gun can do, unaware it’s just regular bullets in it.
“All I’ve ever done is try to love you, and this is how you repay me!” he growls.
I will not win this fight. No matter what I do, I can never escape this monster. It was foolish to even try.
Just as his hand grabs onto me, nails clawing into my chest and shoulder, I see movement behind him.
Blood coats me as Marcus swings the knife I’d dropped through the air, removing Watson’s head from his body in one quick swipe. The body hesitates for a moment longer before his knees buckle and he drops to the ground as I stand there in shock.
I don’t know if it was the fixation on me or the bullets to his head, but he never noticed Marcus’s presence until it was too late.
I’m still standing there, gun held tightly, as Marcus grabs me and pulls me into his arms.
“Oh god,” he whispers as his fingers dig painfully into my back, but I don’t even care. He paws at me, grabbing and pinning me to him as he holds me there, refusing to let me go. “Oh fuck… Finn…”
I’m shaking as I reach out to him and grab on. “He’s dead?”
“He’s dead. We’ll fucking burn his body. Send the fucking ashes to the moon if I need to. He’s dead.”
The tension leaves my body as I sink into him and feel like I can finally breathe. I can take a breath for the first time in what feels like years.
“I’m so sorry it took so long. He had the vampires that he turned watching for us and the three of us had a bit of a struggle. But they’re dead and so is Watson.”
“He’s dead.” My nightmare of thirteen years is finally gone but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.
“Whatever you did slowed him down. There’s no other way he wouldn’t have heard me enter the house,” Marcus says.
“I shot him with the special bullets right in the head.”
He kisses the side of my forehead. “Good job.”
“Finn alright?”
I turn to the door to find an exhausted Karsyn and an extremely disheveled Claude. His stupid-expensive clothes are all shredded and bloody.
“I think so,” Marcus says as Claude leans on Karsyn who glances at him but doesn’t promptly shove him off.
“Just because you might have saved me doesn’t mean I have to like you now,” Karsyn says. “I could have easily handled them myself.”
Claude just grins at him.
“Thank you, guys… all of you. Thank you…” I say, meaning it more than they’ll ever know. Words can’t express what I’ve endured. No one will ever truly know the hell this man put me through. He wasn’t happy enough with torturing me, he had to make sure I never forgot him, that I knew he haunted me when I thought I was safe.
And now…
Now he’s dead and I don’t even know how to comprehend it. I don’t know how to wrap my mind around the fact that I’m free. I’m finally free from the oppression. I can finally breathe again.
I tuck my head against Marcus’s chest as he squeezes and kisses me before attending to my wound, and I just let it all go. Every emotion, every fear, every single thing that forced me to live in dread and terror, and just shove it away.
Because he’s dead. He’s finally dead.
“Orin?” I ask in a panic.
I can’t believe I forgot about him with everything that’s happened.
“He was alive when we left him, but he was severely wounded. He was in good hands with Brooks, okay?”
I nod. At least he’s not dead. I already don’t know how Orin will be able to handle knowing that it was Watson, someone he knew quite well, who did this to me. I’m sure he’ll beat himself up over it even though it’s clear Watson had been watching me longer than any of us knew.
“Let’s get people on this and incinerate the body,” Marcus says.
“Yes. Please. This fucker isn’t coming back to life ever again.”
“I promise,” he says.
It’s over.
It’s finally over.
I can finally breathe again.
Epilogue
FINN
Marcus saw to it himself that he could watch the body burn. While vampires can’t come back from having their head cut off, we’d never come across a vampire