Page 90 of Taken

“Dorian?” I called.

I then spotted the back of …

“Bradley?” He turned around, holding the carved-out end of our missing dagger.

Well, fuck.

I stared at him; confusion clouded my senses, and my heart pounded hard against my chest. “Oh, you guys found the dagger?” My question was stupid. No, that’s not what this was, especially after seeing the hardened expression that Bradley was giving me.

His face read hatred and disgust.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, swallowing down my nerves and attempting to stay neutral. He gestured with his other hand to the right. Sitting under the willow tree were three bodies sprawled out. I could see their chests rising and falling. They weren’t dead.

I looked back at Bradley. “Who the hell are you?” I asked. “What did you do to them? Are you a witch, too?”

My questions came out fast, one after another, without skipping a beat. I didn’t understand any of this, but I was shaking with growing rage, and I was ready to kill this asshole as soon as I had answers.

“I honestly didn’t think we’d ever see you again, but I’m glad I’ve kept the dagger with me everywhere I went, just in case,” he said, snickering. He spoke in a slight British accent that I hadn’t heard from him before. “What a great opportunity to catch you off guard once you came through that portal.” Before I could speak again, he continued. “You’re just as dimwitted and careless as your father.”

What? This is about my dad?

“You knew Alexander?”

He pulled his glasses off and tossed them in the yard. His face was hard and furious. “A vampire killed my wife, Mercy. I could only watch as she slipped away in my arms, but before she died, she gave me a name: Alexander Winchester.”

I was stunned silent for a second. I remembered my father’s story about the woman he had accidentally killed. He couldn’t stop before he took too much of her blood. He escaped before the husband returned, but he watched the man through the bedroom window, holding his wife until she slipped away in his arms.

“I’m sorry about your wife, Bradley, but what does that have to do with me? Your quarrel is with my father, and he died yesterday. Maurice slit his throat right in front of me.”

I understood the need for revenge, but no one would go through this much trouble for revenge. Why kill innocent people for one person?

All of this. All the death couldn’t be because my father killed his wife unless it fucked up his head so badly that he was acting with no remorse.

Bradley stepped toward me, and I raised my hands, ready to use my powers.

“Ah. Ah. I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Bradley warned. Then he gestured toward Dorian and my family, lying on the ground. “There is magic connecting me to them. They’ll die in less than a minute if you kill me.”

“How?” I asked, my voice steady. Finally, I was regaining composure.

“I’m not going to tell you how the spell works, my dear.”

I cringed at the sound of him calling me “dear.”

“No, how did you do it? The killings? Was there a vampire doing your dirty work?”

He stepped toward me, and I moved back. “No. That was all me.” He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up, smiling. A proud grin tugged at his lips. “I designed this after I mastered my plan to draw you out. How to entice you to kill your own father.”

I narrowed my eyes, focusing on an object that looked like vampire fangs. Two metal prongs, a little over an inch apart from each other, connected by black rope or string.

“It makes the perfect bite mark into one’s neck. Once I subdued my victim, I used these fangs to pierce their artery, causing them to bleed out.”

He was fucking crazy.

And I was pissed. Bradley’s need for revenge was so powerful that he took innocent lives.

“But they were innocent, Bradley. You killed humans. People who had families who cared about them. Have you no shame about what you’ve done? All for what? So that I’d think it was my father and kill him to avenge your wife? I told you, my father is dead. You can’t have your revenge because someone else did it for you.”

He placed the fang device back into his pocket, and I could see him adjusting his grip on the dagger in his other palm. “No one is innocent, especially not you. After you turned your father back into a human, I knew I couldn’t continue with the original plan. But me killing his daughter? Now, that’s rich. The perfect revenge. An eye for a fucking eye. You’re the one person he loved on this earth.” He stepped closer, and my backside hit the patio post when I moved back. “At first, I was hesitant because we witches would be without Spirit again, but then I thought about it.” He tapped the dagger on his thigh, just as I had seen Kylan do at the cove a year ago. The gesture was unnerving. “Would the powers really leave this earth if a witch kills them? If I killed your coven, I would gain your powers, right? You kill a witch, you get their power.”

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