brother, so he shouldn’t be treated as if he is, but I’ve always been more emotionally responsive than impersonal.
Cole’s lips curl at one end when I dip my chin. “Yet, you still chose our father over her. I wonder how she’ll handle the news?”
Confusion twists through me when he clicks his fingers together two times. I assume one of the many men surrounding me will yank the bag off India’s head so I can see her disappointment as readily as I feel it, so you can imagine my surprise when they draw back the curtain separating the royal-size dining room from the crystal ballroom on our right. India is standing on the other side, uninjured and wide-eyed.
How can that be? She can’t be in the ballroom and seated in front of me. She must be a doppelgänger. I can smell her heated skin lingering in the air. The bulletproof glass separating us wouldn’t allow that. Cole must be playing tricks on me. He’s fucking with my head as well as the years he was missing screwed our father’s mind. He couldn’t forgive himself for giving in, even when he would have lost everything if he didn’t, so he drove himself mad to fix the injustice.
He destroyed anyone who played a part in Cole’s demise, yet it still wasn’t enough. He wants every man responsible to be held accountable for their crimes—himself included.
Now I understand why we’re here, and how my father was taken down minus the bloodshed I’m accustomed to.
This isn’t a takeover bid.
It’s a mercy kill, a beg for forgiveness. Even if he ends up dead, he’ll be freed from the torment that’s been eating him alive the past four years. He will finally be free.
Refusing to let my family’s legacy die without so much as a fight, I disarm the man holding a gun to my temple before turning his weapon onto Achim. It was foolish of me to do. I forgot blood is no longer thicker than water to Cole. He fires at our father a mere second after I gun down the man stupid enough to put himself between Achim and me. Cole doesn’t just discharge one bullet, though. He pops three into our father’s chest, ensuring there’s no way I can mistake how he’s hoping today’s battle will end.
It’s a pity he underestimated his little brother. After knocking over the blonde my hazy mind still believes is India to drop her lower than the line of fire, I take cover behind one of the massive concrete pillars holding up the top story of this compound.
From my vantage point, I take down another three men without injury. India isn’t as lucky. A howl roars from her throat when her shoulder catches a wayward bullet. It isn’t a kill shot, but the sob of pain tearing from her throat does have me leaving my hidey-hole.
Like a real-life motherfucking mafia kingpin, I walk straight toward my death, firing my gun as if bullets aren’t being shredded through my stomach, my chest, and my shoulder. Even when my knees buckle beneath me, and blood pools in my mouth, I don’t give up. I continue firing until my gun runs out of bullets, and the blood streaming from my body joins India’s on the floor.
I can’t see anything through the wooziness of my head. Her screams, though, they will never leave me, they’ll haunt me through the botched surgery to remove six bullets from my body, through the shudders of an infection when forced to recover in the equivalent of a dungeon, and for the endless amount of torture Cole puts me through, having no clue the years he was missing were just as torturous for me as they were for him…
They are even with me now. They’re just too quiet to break through the thud of my pulse in my ears. It’s thumping nonstop, only ripped away when the pulse fading under my fingertips is torn from my grasp just as brutally.
Nero tackles me so fiercely, I splinter the drywall behind my bed when I crash into it with a bang. The ripple of pain my collision with the wall causes my body has nothing on the convulsions K’s body makes when it fights to fill her lungs with air. She shudders all over, fighting to live with a will I thought she would have lost months ago.
“What the fuck, man!” Nero glares at me with icy, ready-to-kill eyes, looking prepared to wallop me as I want to pound