Page 104 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

A cold shiver raced across my chest. “You know about Payne?”

“Course I know about him,” he said.

My left fingers clenched into a ball. I couldn’t allow this guy to kill himself. Not only because of the information he held about my dad, but also, if he had anything to do with Luna’s dad getting killed, I’d made her a promise that I’d deal with him.

I gripped my knife’s handle tighter, my muscles tensing to strike. Could I overpower him and get the gun faster than he could fire off a shot?

“What exactly do you know about Mr. Payne?” I asked.

Stanley looked over my shoulder, his paranoid gaze sweeping over his jungle of a front lawn before settling back onto me.

“Doesn’t matter now. Go away.”

His twitching finger threatened every second, and Luna’s voice echoed in my mind—a desperate plea to not let myself get killed, a promise I couldn’t break. Not now.

He tried to shut the door, and again, I blocked it, my foot wedged between it and the frame.

“Why are you here?” The guy’s voice was laced with as much impatience as anger for keeping him from his suicide.

“Answers.”

The guy looked me up and down like a disgusting wart. “Who the hell are you?”

“Hunter Lockwood.”

The guy’s eyes widened, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

“You’re the Lockwood boy,” he whispered, almost to himself in a tone of despair.

“Every night for almost twenty years, I’ve replayed the moment he was killed. It haunts me, having no idea why it happened or who did it, but I think you might have some of those answers.”

The guy’s chest rose, as if he was trying to grow another pair of balls.

“Doesn’t matter anymore.” His voice broke slightly, hinting at regret.

“Does to me.”

The only sound was that of my breathing as I leaned forward, about to strike.

“I’m sorry for it all.” He brought the gun up and pushed the barrel beneath his chin, and when he did, he exposed his forearm.

Time froze, dragging me back to the haunting night of my father’s murder. A buried detail from the shadowed recesses of my memories came surging forward.

As the man brought his knife around my father’s throat, I saw something on his forearm.

Something that I didn’t register at the time, too fixated on the blood and the open gash and the sound of my father struggling to breathe and the chaos and the crying and screaming and police lights. And death.

Something that remained entombed behind the thick wall of trauma, even throughout all the police interviews asking if there was anything I could think of at all that might point us to the suspect.

A tattoo. A unique one of a child’s hand grasping his father’s in black-and-white ink.

The same tattoo I was staring at right now.

He clenched his eyes shut, bracing for the bullet to end all my hope of finding outwhy.

I yanked the guy’s wrist and knocked the gun to the side.

“You’re the man who killed my father,” I said.

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