Page 113 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

But thankfully, he stepped inside.

“Don’t worry,” I told Red. “I’ll lock up.”

CHAPTER52

Hunter

Ipressed my blade against the jugular of my father’s killer. He made no move to fight me, resigned, I guess, that this was his fate.

Welcoming it, even.

I’d always wanted to kill the man who murdered my father in cold blood. Ever since I was a kid, I knew the only way to stop this unrelenting torment in my soul—a putrid mixture of guilt, shame, and suffering for not having done something to stop it—was to seek out the murderer and end him.

And yet, as the cold steel of my knife pressed against the warmth of his neck, his pulse quickening and throbbing against the sharp edge, peace didn’t feel one slash away.

Killing him wouldn’t bring my father back. It wouldn’t undo my failure. I had frozen, and sat paralyzed, as this man lunged at my father, slitting his throat.

That guilt would still be there, even if I ripped open his jugular and watched him bleed out. Only, it would be mixed with a different kind of pain.

If I had been in this man’s shoes, if someone had killed my child, left him to die, had gotten away with it, and I had come to the conclusion that he would never face the consequences of his actions…would I have accepted that? Would I have moved on with my life, or would that have felt like a betrayal to my son?

In my deluge of grief, would I have also chosen to take justice into my own hands?

I already knew the answer to that.

But I wanted this. I needed this—to see his blood spill from his body, to watch his life force fade to black with my face being the last thing he’d ever see on earth. I needed to feel the vindication of avenging my father’s murder, even if it was hollower than I’d fantasized.

But in all my fantasies, this man had been a monster, a beast of demonic proportions, yet looking at him now, I could see he was merely a grief-stricken father who’d done what I probably would have in the same situation.

Save for doing it in front of a child. That was a detestable mistake, but if I put that horrific split-second decision aside, one could argue that this man was more like me than anyone else. Seeking justice where it had failed his family.

Killing him, in some way, felt like killing myself.

But he could have made different choices. He could have gone to the media to make the police listen, if only in the eyes of the public, and accept that the blood money would go away. He could have turned down the money in the first place, no matter how desperate he was for it.

But I suppose that was easy to say now, in hindsight.

When one is suffering the trauma of grief, one doesn’t always make rational choices. He was wrong, so very wrong in the string of decisions he’d made, but by the looks of it, he’d suffered every day since.

Which begged the question: When it came to vengeance, what was enough?

But what did it say about me if I didn’t go through with this? It said I was complicit. It said my father’s murder was acceptable. It said I was okay with it, which was the ultimate betrayal of my dad.

Plus, killing the man I’d hunted my entire life had to be healing, even if it didn’t seem like it right now.

I pushed the tip of my knife against his skin until a single drop of blood broke free, giving me a taste of what would come.

Stanley’s eyes bore into mine, almost pleading, as the scent of his fear mixed with an odd sense of peace, his shallow breaths carrying a note of acceptance. Welcoming his imminent death.

I didn’t want that. I wanted him to beg me for his life, and I would be the one yielding the power to take it away.

Yet my blade remained still against the artery that could end this complicated man. This man wasn’t who I thought he was. And now that I found Luna, I wanted to be a better person for her. If even a small part of me felt like this was wrong, how could I go through with it?

My hand trembled, surrendering to the realization that justice wasn’t in spilling his blood, but in granting him mercy.

With its serrated whisper fading into the echo of my vengeance, I slowly pulled the blade away.

Honoring my father’s memory in another version of justice.

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