Epilogue Three
………………………….
Q
A year and a half later…
I’D BEEN THE MASTER OF MY own darkness for many years, yet it wasn’t until my brother came along that I realised I didn’t have to always live in that darkness.
Tess had given me a heart.
Lino had given me a home.
But Henri taught me how to trust that I deserved them.
Despite what we did during the day and the blood that coated our hands, we came home to our wives and shut out the despicable world.
Every day the software—that Ben and Stew had designed—flagged new traffickers and flesh peddlers, I cursed my own species. Every night that I went to bed, I was fucking furious that men like them existed.
I still had nightmares of losing Tess to them.
I still had flashbacks of bastards coming to take my son.
I’d always had fairly good instincts. I chalked such a talent down to being in tune with the animal inside me and using my primitive senses more than others. Therefore, the moment I received that phone call from Henri. The second I heard Victor Grand snickering in the background and suffered through him congratulating me on propagating, I’d snapped my fingers at Franco and initiated a plan I’d had in place ever since Tess told me she was pregnant.
She didn’t appreciate using our son as bait.
She sat beside me in the car staked outside Lino’s school, day after day, just waiting for the inevitable abduction.
Franco and a few mercenaries rested on rooftops around the school. I’d equipped all his teachers with walkie-talkies and the principal knew what would happen. And to let it happen when it did.
I didn’t have to wait long.
I had to give it to Victor’s men: they weren’t obvious.
They didn’t pull up in a white van or go charging into the school.
Only one man went in, dressed in a perfect pinstripe suit holding a letter forged with my signature. It said he was there to take Lino to me, seeing as I was too busy to collect my own son.
As fucking if.
Only two things trumped everything in my world.
My wife and my son.
I would drop everything for them.
I always would.
We let it play out.
The principal took the lying bastard to Lino’s classroom.
He ordered my son to gather his things and go with the cunt.
The radio in our car crackled with Lino’s third period teacher as Lino left very unwillingly. According to her, the man smiled with all the airs and graces of a well-trained nanny, but his eyes were dead. His voice nothing but evil.
She hated that I’d given her instructions to let them take him.
She almost went after them as Lino shouted in the corridor and fought the bastard’s hold.
My son hadn’t been told what would happen, so he didn’t have to act surprised and scared.
I needed it to be convincing.
Tess hated me for that.
I’d worried about that part of the plan, but…I needed to know where he’d be taken and how many I had to kill. I couldn’t have them aborting and trying again when I wasn’t so prepared.
Lino had been forced into a black sedan and driven slowly through the city.
Tess had bristled beside me the entire drive.
The heartrate monitor I’d affixed to Lino’s undershirt every day since I’d spoken to Victor showed his pulse was steady and strong.
He wasn’t being hurt in the car. They weren’t there to kill him. Merely use him to kill me.
We could wait.
They drove to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city.
Franco and his men got into position while I ordered Tess to stay in the car.
Of course she didn’t obey, and together we’d strolled right through the roller door, guns at our sides, snipers covering us from all angles.
The rest, as they say, was history.
Fourteen men to abduct my son.
Fourteen highly trained men.
But eleven corpses and three hostages just the same.
I’d been focused on dispatching them as quickly as possible and didn’t notice what Lino got up to.
But Tess did.
She was the one to snatch the wickedly sharp knife out of his hands. A knife he’d yanked off the man holding him hostage. The man now dead on the floor with his small intestines unspooling.
I loved my son unconditionally.
Up till that moment, I’d only ever seen him as a child who needed protection and guidance, but as Tess cleaned his bloody hands and cradled him into her side, I saw the first inklings of the man he would become.
He had too much of me in him to be normal, but he also had a lot of his mother.
His mother was scrappy and stubborn, but she was also soft and kind.
I didn’t fear that he needed to deliver pain like me…only that he could deliver it if necessary.
“Whatcha doing?” Tess asked as she strolled into our bedroom and dumped an armful of fresh towels on the end of the bed.
I scooted higher against the pillows, resting my hands on the thick sheaf of paper my brother had given me. I was still dressed after saying goodnight to him and Ily. They’d cut across the meadow with their two-year-old daughter swinging from their hands.
I still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that I was an uncle.
Or the fact that three other half-siblings had reached out.
I hadn’t talked to them as much as Henri had but they seemed sane enough. Not sane enough that I wanted them around my family, but at least my fears that my father’s progeny were out there, raping and murdering, seemed foundless…for now.
“Reading.” My heart caught at how effortlessly tempting she was. Even folding laundry.
“Reading what?” Abandoning the towels, she threw herself beside me and reached for the paper.
I let her. “Fact delivered as fiction. As he once said.”
“Oh, is this his book?” Tess sat cross-legged and flicked through the pages. “He finally finished?”
I nodded, scowling. “He wanted my opinion before submitting it to a publisher.”
“And? What do you think?”
“He’s listed almost every deletion we’ve performed together. He’s playing with fucking fire.”
“Yeah but no one will believe it’s real.” Her eyes skimmed a middle chapter. “Oh wow, he really does list everything.”
“What if Priti or Lino figure out that it’s true?”
Tess grinned her savage little grin. “Then they’ll be proud to have such badass fathers.”
“And if law enforcement get tetchy?”
“Meh, they’ve turned a blind eye to you for decades. It’s a story. A gruesome one but…still just a story.” Bundling up the pages, she placed the stack on her bedside table. “I think it’s good that people see the truth, even if they don’t believe it’s real.”
Crawling over me, she straddled my hips and unbuttoned my shirt with that familiar look in her blue-grey eyes. “Now… ma?tre .”
Instantly, the beast inside me woke up.
Yanked at its leash.
Got ready to play.
Grabbing her around the waist, I threw her off me, launched off the bed, and tossed her over my shoulder. “You know what happens when you call me that, esclave .”
She squirmed as I spanked her ass. “I get lucky?”
I chuckled. “No. You get to scream.”