13. Elijah
Chapter 13
Elijah
O ne month later
“9-1-1, where’s your emergency?” The woman’s voice echoes down the line, calm and professional.
My fingers tighten around the phone, the weight of it cold in my grasp. I can’t look away from my father’s body, sprawled out in front of me, blood pooling around him like an ever-expanding dark lake. The icy void inside me is relentless, gnawing at my chest, but it’s the surge of rage that cuts through it. Hatred for the man who helped create me.
“I need to report a murder,” I say, my voice steady but empty, a cold emptiness where warmth should be.
Her .
Where she should be.
I hear the click of keys as she processes my words, but it doesn’t matter. “Who is the victim?” she asks, her voice unwavering, just as it’s trained to be.
“My father.”
“And do you know who did it?”
“Yes...” I pause, my foot nudging his body to make sure his lungs are no longer breathing air and his heart no longer beats. She waits for my answer; the silence is deafening. “I did.”
I rattle off our address, my hand shaking slightly, before I hang up the phone without waiting for her to ask more.
* * *
I’m engulfed by a flurry of flashing blue lights that cut through the darkness and reflect off every surface.
“Get down on your knees!” a voice shouts. “Hands in the air!”
I freeze, the guns trained on me as if they’re waiting for a mistake. One wrong move, one split-second hesitation, and I’m dead. The thought crosses my mind — would it be so bad? To be done with it all?
Would I see her again?
I lower myself to my knees slowly, hands rising above my head. The chill of the concrete below me stabs through my clothes, but it’s nothing compared to the coldness that settled in my soul the day I was told she was dead.
I take a deep breath when the familiar stabbing pain threatens to pull me under, that happens whenever I think of her.
“Stay where you are!” another officer yells, his voice tense.
I feel their hesitation, their uncertainty. I’m not a threat to them — just a man who crossed a line and is now a killer.
But I don’t deserve mercy.
This was justice for the girl who never got it. Revenge, even. The secret that led me here dies with me. Roman and Crew will never know why I did this, and I won’t tell them.
We don’t get to feel sorry for ourselves after all the hell we put her through, driving her further to the edge of the cliff. No, we deserve to rot. To live with what we did to her.
I try to focus on the ground, yet my mind drifts to her, as it always does. Her laughter, her warmth, the way she made everything feel right—we took all of that away. We destroyed everything that made her beautiful, that made her her .
The officers’ approach, their heavy boots echoing on the pavement. One reaches for his radio, but the sound is drowned out by the pounding of my heart.
“On your feet.”
The cold metal of handcuffs clasps around my wrists, the metallic clink signalling the end of my freedom.
They drag me to my feet, and my gaze locks with one of Roman’s father’s men. He looks at me, something flickering behind his eyes. “Why’d you do it?” he asks, his voice low enough that only I can hear him.
I shrug, uncaring. “Because he was a bastard.”
I don’t tell him it was for her. For everything that my father did to her, driving her to cast her body into the ocean, never to be found.
He nods, signalling the officers to take me away. With each step, the handcuffs dig into my skin, but the only thing I feel is a strange sense of relief.
I hope she knows that he’s gone — gone to the depths of hell, where he’ll never hurt her again. Not here or in the afterlife.
We failed her and lost her as a consequence of everything we did to her.
* * *
Roman sits across from me in the interrogation room, his face contorted in a mixture of fury and disbelief.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he growls.
He’s pissed, but it’s not just anger. It’s fear; I can see it in his eyes.
Fear for everything he’s worked for, but I don’t care. His dad is a piece of shit who will get what is coming to him, when the time is right just like my dad did. But first, Roman has to face the truth about Scarlett.
“I was thinking I was done with his shit,” I reply, my voice flat, emotionless. “He needed to die.”
I feel nothing, not for my father and not for Roman or Crew. The emptiness has swallowed it all. But Scarlett’s face — her memory — lingers, haunting me like a ghost.
We all have to pay for what we did to her.