Page 41 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

“Or”—I tilted my head, eyes wild—“you can tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave your family alone and give you a nice, quick death. You decide.”

“I can’t…” He shook his head mournfully. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

“I’ll give you to the count of five.”

“Listen…”

“Five.”

“Their organization runs deeper than you can imagine.”

“Four.”

“If I give them away, they’ll come after my family. Even if I’m dead.”

“Three.”

“You don’t know what they do to women and children.”

I gave a throaty, venomous laugh. “You don’t know what I do to women and children.” My finger slipped over the trigger, ready to pull. “Two.”

“Mercy. You have to have mercy.”

“One.” My finger began to pull on the trigger.

“Magnus Cartwright!”

Abram sighed in relief when I lowered the gun.

“Who is Magnus Cartwright?”

“The new chief of police,” Sully answered for him. “Fucking bastard of a man if you ask me. Dirty as they come.”

Abram nodded.

“Why would he want to cover up my mother’s death?”

“Because whoever wanted it to look like a robbery set him up for life,” Abram rasped. “I can see it now.” He smiled sadly. “You look so much like her it’s uncanny.”

“The only time you saw her was when she was dead on your table,” I snarled. The doctor nodded solemnly and huffed a sad breath.

“Whoever killed your mother,” he told me. “It wasn’t a robber.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the wounds were too personal.” He hiccuped. “Someone without attachments to her would have stabbed her or shot her and gotten it over with. Whoever killed your mother went into a fit of rage doing it.”

“You had everything I wanted. Everything. Why couldn’t you just lose for once in your fucking life?”

Another memory. Another mirage of the past. A woman’s voice cutting through the haze of memories I’d locked away.

“What else did you lie about on the report?” My father gritted his teeth, hand clenched tightly around his gun. His knuckles were white, the tendons of his neck taut as he held himself back.

“Cartwright wanted the report to reflect that it was a man who’d killed her,” the doctor divulged. “But it couldn’t have been. The blows were too weak to be a full-grown man.”

“What about an older gentleman who walks with a limp and a cane?”

Abram shook his head.

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