Page 93 of Between Dusk and Dawn

I hesitated to look over at Madison, but I rotated slowly. Her eyes bulged out of her head with the truth that I was finally unleashing after all these years. "I begged her to go home, to not find me."

"But my baby girl had a heart of gold," he snarled at me.

"She did," I encouraged. "She was a good person and did nothing wrong. She was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, kind of like what you're doing now."

"I was there," Madison chimed from behind me. "I was there the night she went miss— died"

Madison looked at me, her face softened. "I can tell you truthfully, and I know my words may not mean a lot to you right now, but he didn’t hurt her."

"Oh, yeah?" Georgie’s weapon was now cocked, aimed right at me. My beautiful wife’s breathing intensified behind me, and I needed to get this fucking thing over with so I could go be with her. The faster I could get to her, the better this would all end up…for all of us.

"He didn’t. He tried to warn her to leave."

"And where were you?" Georgie spat at my wife, and I almost clocked him right then. In fact, the step forward I took had everyone quiet around me, but it was her voice that stopped me.

"I was not able to save her," Madison confessed. After what she’d told me last night, I knew the truth. She feared the fire. "I left because I couldn’t be there. I was scared of what was going to happen. I was weak?—"

"No, you were not." I snapped my head in her direction, not caring I had literally turned my back on the guy who had a gun on me.

She offered me a sad smile. "Listen, Georgie, I know what it feels like to lose family members. Walsh knows what it feels like to lose a family member. It’s a type of grief so great it consumes you. Look at you? Five years later and you’re still hunting for revenge. I’d imagine that you have spent every single day plotting and planning this."

Georgie said nothing, but the corners of his lips flinched, as if her words somehow struck a nerve. "But it doesn’t have to belike this. You can acknowledge your pain and not have to let it consume you. Do the right thing."

"Drop your weapon, Georgie. We’ve killed all your men. You know you have no way out of this."

Georgie scanned around him, but when he saw the shadows of my men surrounding him, realization flashed in his eyes.

"Now listen, you have another daughter at home, don't you?" I asked, approaching him and lowering my weapon.

Georgie nodded.

"We are going to come up with a solution. I have a man who is ready to marry Cairn."

I took another step closer.

"Drop it," I said, grabbing the barrel of his gun and putting it into the back of my pants. "I am going to let you walk out of here. We are all going to pretend this was a grave misunderstanding."

Enzo coughed behind me, likely to cover the shock in his voice. Because the big bad wolf was doing…a good deed? This was out of the ordinary, but something about needing to save Madison lit a switch in me. I wanted to show her I was a better man—no, that she made me a better man.

"I let your daughter get caught up in something she never should have been. Don’t put your other daughter in the same line of fire, knowing she will not have a father to come home to and she’d have a target on her back."

The moment Georgie declared war on me, I knew the Irish and the Italians would go head to head in a battle. This same realization Georgie seemed to understand, as he nodded in my direction and agreed.

"You are a lucky fucking man, letting you go with just a warning. You fucked me up, and I should shoot you." I wanted to, but this whole trying-to-do-better act was proving to be more difficult and against the norm of what I was taught, which was shoot to kill.

"How do I get home?" he asked. Gone was the man who thought he had the upper hand, but my kindness only went so far. I was about to speak when my beautiful wife slid next to me, and I pulled her to me so we were hip to hip. Equals in every way.

"I think our kindness has reached its limit there. We are allowing you to leave the gates of this house unarmed, but how or where you go from there is beyond our concern." She spoke with such confidence it surprised me as much as it did anyone else. The silence amongst my men and Georgie’s was so loud and telling.

"We will talk business at a later time," I assured him before he nodded and walked toward the front gates. None of us dared move until those gates opened to let him out and then closed again. The only indication that Madison was still breathing was the way her thumb circled my lower back.

Just as the guard at the front of the house gave us the signal that the gates were closed and he was well out of the way, I turned around and stared at everyone.

"Leave," I commanded with a lethal tone. Enzo attempted to talk to me, but I held up my hand. "Now."

I wasn’t fucking around. My men knew it, and as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I turned toward my beautiful wife.

"Get on your knees."

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