Page 48 of The Last Time You Break Me

“Fair enough. But I definitely see the grim reaper,” I rasped as I licked my lips. The man’s eyes widened as the brown depths swirled in horror. “He’s standing right at your back,” I added before I drove my knife into his throat and cupped his head with my other hand so I could better pull him onto it.

From an outside perspective, it would look like I had him cradled lovingly to my hip, not that I had just driven a knife into his trachea. I allowed him to fall to the ground as the others wrapped up and handled the rest. Reggie was breaking bones, Dalton was amputating limbs and Dylan had the last man standing on his knees with a rusted razor to his throat as my dad loomed above him like death himself.

“Where is Lucas Black?” my dad asked calm and collected as he circled the man, helpless and bound on his knees before us.

A frightful sight of ruthless creatures bathed in blood and unphased by the carnage.

“Fuck. You. Wyelli scum.” Nev, as I recalled him being named, sneered as he spat at my father’s feet and threw himself forward, onto the razor held to his throat until it cut through him and he choked to death on his own blood.

“The fuck was that?” Dalton asked, shocked as his brows furrowed and his lips turned down into a confused frown.

“Somebody loyal,” my father muttered in recognition. He shook his head and pulled at the edges of his suit jacket.

The only man I have ever known to wear a damn suit to a massacre.

“This just got a hell of a lot harder,” Reggie grunted as he and my father shared a look that I couldn’t decipher.

“Yes, brother. It did.”

I wasn’t worried. Everyone was trackable. You just had to know how to do it.

Chapter Eighteen

Lara

Ashes of Eden - Breaking Benjamin

Idug through the old files. Everything we had on Frazier Black. Nothing was worth noting. Nothing new had occurred within his name or in ties with his legacy.

Afterall, there wasn’t supposed to be any legacy left.

Even all the properties that he owned had been demolished. Nothing that man ever touched remained standing.

I came to the conclusion that Fraizer hadn’t known of Lucas’s existence at all.

That the money paid into Wendy Sommentree’s Stage name—Juicy—account was a buy of her silence.

A bribe to keep their affair hidden from his wife. She wasn’t the first, but she had been the last. He spent the rest of his days not knowing that he had an heir, a son and I knew with utter certainty that if he did, he would have killed Lucas without hesitation.

There was a reason that vile man never had a child and it was all because of his greed. He would have hated anyone who could have stolen his throne and his power.

But I had a funny feeling that it wasn’t his long lost father that Lucas was trying to avenge. But the life he thought he deserved. I saw it in his eyes at the tunnels. The same look that stared back at me in the photo of Frazier and Cassie—his wife—that I held in my hand. A cold and numb kind of fury burned idle in my veins.

I was strong in many ways.

But I wasn’t strong enough to run from the pain of what happened to my mother.

Like a moth, I was always drawn back to the torment.

Truth is, I was fixated on her death.

I kept files and images of the Black’s. Of her murder. Everything Techi could ever find I stockpiled them within a sub-space inside my walk-in closet.

“Iris” by Diamante and Breaking Benjamin echoed around me as I stood inside my closet now.

The open space was vast, squared in shape and accented in black and gold designs. It offered opulent shelves and long black railings as well as multiple drawers built into almost every wall. A golden black, with splotches of blood red, island sat in the middle of the room filled with more drawers and a huge mirror engulfed the very back wall. I walked to it before I placed my hand up high, flat against the glass in the top right corner and pushed. The hand scanner activated and the mirrored wall pushed inward and allowed me to step into the narrow abyss before it closed behind me and another wall—a black wall—parted and allowed me entrance into my panic room.

The black wall remained open and my two-way glass allowed me to see back into my closet. I threw the photo I was holding to the side and pulled down another box as I roughlyflicked off the lid. Photos of my mother stared back at me. The first one being a family photo of all of us, even Reggie. It was my eighteenth birthday and she beamed brighter than the sun. She was radiant, glorious even and every time I looked at her it was like I was staring at somebody so angelic, she could have been blessed by the angels.

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