fucking Danvers.
"Make him bleed, Kate," he murmured in a darkly seductive voice. "Make him pay."
I looked down at my beautiful holographic knife, then gritted my teeth and looked back to Samuel.
"Why pretend to be my father?" I asked him in a hollow voice. "If you knew from the moment my mom told you she was pregnant, why not leave her then?"
His expression morphed into a sneer. "Because Debbie wasn't as smart as she thought she was. I’d met Katerina; I knew full fucking well that family was hiding something good. They were too damn quick to accept my prenup. All I needed to do was wait it out. Fifteen years of marriage and one child, then I was entitled to half of everything in Debbie's name."
My brows flickered up. "But she was murdered before you'd even been married for twelve."
"Exactly why I kept you around, my little meal-ticket. You inherited everything. I just needed to work out how to transfer that ownership to me. Trouble was, Debbie had suspected something was happening before her death and went to some serious lengths to muddy the water." He scowled at that, like he was still pissed off at his dead wife. "Eventually I worked out that no matter what I did, your estate wouldn't pass to me because I couldn't prove I was a blood relation, so I cut my losses."
Anger burned through my veins like acid. "You sold me."
He didn't even look apologetic. "For fifty-two million. A damn sight more than I ever thought you were worth, Madison Kate."
Ouch. Even knowing he wasn't my father—and never had been in the ways that mattered—that comment still stung because it totally summed up his whole attitude toward me my entire life. I was an asset with an assigned value. Nothing more.
It made sense, though. He’d sold me while I was still seventeen, likely when he'd exhausted all other avenues to get his hands on my money. If I'd turned eighteen, he'd have lost the power to marry me off and lost his chance at clearing his bad debts.
I looked down at the knife in my hand, then up at Samuel. It was hard to reconcile this revolting man with the one who'd forever been the head of the Danvers household. When I’d been a child, or even a grief-stricken teen, he’d been someone to be respected and awed. Never loved. But now? Now he was simply better off dead.
"What are you going to do with that?" Samuel taunted with a laugh, eyeing the pretty purple blade in my hand.
My gaze rose, locking with his as I released the blade with a practiced flick of my wrist. I was rewarded with a flash of real fear across his face.
"Well," I said with a shrug. "Someone told me recently that I deserve to take my pound of flesh from you. After all, I deserve vengeance for being sold in a slave market. Now that I’ve heard how you treated my mother, how she came to you after being raped and you refused to help her?" I took two steps closer, letting the silence thicken as Kody and Steele moved in on Samuel's chair from either side. They locked his wrists and ankles to the chair with handcuffs before he could struggle or try to run.
Samuel finally seemed to understand. The danger in this room wasn't from Kody or Steele; it wasn't even from Archer. No, this time it was all from me. This was my story to tell and my revenge to seek.
"Now, Daddy dearest, I think I might take that turn of phrase literally." I bent at the waist, bringing the tip of my blade to rest on the fabric of his suit pants, just above his knee. Only then did I hesitate.
Could I seriously do this? Could I deliberately cause so much pain simply for my own gratification?
Kody shifted in the corner of my eye, and I knew he was silently offering to do it for me. But I gave a small headshake, denying him. I needed to do this. I needed the closure this bloody act would bring, even at the cost of my uneasy mind.
Drawing a breath, I plunged the knife down into Samuel's leg.
He howled, thrashing against the handcuffs and dragging my blade all over the place as I held tight. Idiot. Blood spurted everywhere, but I closed my mind to it and focused on my task at hand.
Several moments later, I lifted a handful of severed flesh and inspected