Page 110 of Coup De Grâce
I squeezed her hand, but it was going limp. If the ambulance didn’t get here soon, there would be nothing they could do.
“Sweet girl, don’t leave me. Don’t—” I choked on the words as tears streamed down my cheeks. I could already see the light fading from her eyes. She was slipping away too quickly.
“Baby…please…”
But she didn’t say anything else. Her breath rattled in her chest one last time and then her eyes faded in the distance as she left this world. I clutched her body to mine as I cried into her chest. There was nothing more I could do, no way to save her. I had ruined everything.
For all the good I tried to do in this world, it had spun out of control, and when I tried to rein it in, it was already too late. Nothing I did made an ounce of difference, and my family ended up paying the price. My daughter, Cash and Rafe, Claire…everything that had happened was because I had been unable to stop something that had been put into action over twenty years ago.
“You could have saved her, you know.”
Dagger’s shoes came into my line of vision, the gun dangling from his hand a clear sign of his intentions.
“He killed her,” I mumbled, my voice nothing more than a whisper.
“You know why.” He sighed heavily. “You can’t stop what’s already in motion. We made a plan.”
“It’s an old plan. A terrible plan.”
“You don’t get to decide that. You tried to change things, and now you’ll pay with your life, just as she did.”
There should have been some fight running through my body, but there wasn’t. My sons had each other, and I knew they would keep fighting, but with my wife in my arms, I just didn’t have anything more to give. She was the best of me, and now she was gone.
My beautiful wife had been tormented for years, and that was my fault. I deserved nothing less than a bullet to the head.
But even as I held her in my arms, I knew that if I didn’t fight back, my daughter would still be in danger. They would bury everyone I loved just to prove a point. I couldn’t have their deaths on my head.
I felt the press of steel against my back and knew what I had to do. If I could be fast enough. But then another set of footsteps came in from the back of the house, and a second set through the front door. I was surrounded, but that didn’t mean I was going down without a fight.
There was no way for me to reach my gun in time, not with the three of them watching my every move. And that’s when I remembered the gun that had been under Claire’s body. If there were any bullets left, it might be my only defense.
Pressing a kiss to Claire’s head, I whispered, “I love you.”
I took a deep breath, then my fingers found the gun and I fired.
33
CASH
A rough rockingmotion woke me from the most fucked up dream of my life. Large mice were running around, giving me orders as Fox—a literal fox—performed the most screwed up version ofThe Phantom Of The Opera.
And what made it all worse was when I woke up, “Think Of Me” was playing somewhere in the room.
It took everything in my destroyed body to pry my eyes open and look around the bright room. I instantly wanted to go back to sleep and pretend I didn’t see what I just had.
But that wasn’t going to happen with Fox sitting in bed beside me, rocking back and forth as he hummed along to one of his favorite musicals. Groaning, I forced myself to sit up in bed, grimacing at the scent of meat covered in Funyuns.
“Fox, what the fuck are you doing in my bed?”
His jaw worked hard as he grunted and gnawed on his horribly smelly concoction. “Mm! You’re awake!”
“Of course I’m awake. How the fuck am I supposed to sleep when you’re rocking the whole bed?”
“Ha! Good point. Shawarma?” he asked, holding out his plate to me.
“No, I don’t want any fucking shawarma.”
He actually looked hurt that I didn’t take his offering. Sighing, I snagged the smallest piece I could find and slipped the meat into my mouth, though it was the last thing I wanted to do.
