Chapter 28 #2
“You’d do well to shut your mouth, or I’ll string her up just like I did your mother and let her watch as Simon carves out your insides like he did your father.
” She rises to her full height with a look of slick satisfaction gleaming in her soulless eyes.
The anger gone from her smiling face as the earth shifts beneath me, and she watches hungrily as what she’s said lands like a boulder in my gut.
My heart breaks anew as images of my mother flash through my mind.
All those moments I thought she had chosen to leave me, like bullets from a firing squad as they pierce my chest.
My pulse thumps in my ears, my heart battering against my ribs as I reach for Lenora. She doesn’t need to set her dog on me this time. She knows she has the upper hand when I stop dead as she levels the gun against Cara’s forehead and cocks the hammer, her finger teasing the trigger in warning.
“You killed them?” I ask, already knowing the truth to my pointless question, but feeling the need to ask it anyway as tears well up in my eyes—the show of emotion is not for the cruel man that sired me, but for my innocent mother and for the freedom I lost when Lenora had me believe I had murdered my father in cold blood.
“Take a seat and let Auntie Lenora tell you a story,” she titters, like she’s about to break out a copy of the Secret Garden and tuck me into bed with a cup of warm cocoa.
When I don’t immediately follow her command, she presses the barrel of the gun into Cara’s eye socket.
Cara winces, crying out in pain when she jabs it deeper.
With an even voice and an arched brow, Lenora says softly, “Do it, or I’ll have the boys strap you to that table, staple your eyelids open, and make you watch as Simon plays out his little snuff film fantasy.
You want to watch him fuck your beloved in every painful way possible before slitting her throat? ”
That order I follow without contest. Lenora is many things—psychotic most notably—but she isn’t lying. I don’t doubt for a second she will follow through with the threat, and right now, I have no way of stopping her. Watching someone hurt Cara, I couldn’t survive that.
Crossing the room towards me once I’m seated, her expensive alligator skin heels tapping on the beaten-up linoleum floor, I listen as she tells me every sordid detail of her wicked past.
“Your mother found out about what your father and I were doing here. Always did have a conscience, my sister—more fool her. Once that idiot started beating her enough that she couldn’t hide the bruises anymore, your mother put into place that if anything should happen to her, your father would get nothing.
Everything would go to you. As the older sister, she had financial monopoly over our family’s money too.
I had been cast out years before you were even born.
Your father was never the wealthy one; he was a back-alley bookie when they met, a degenerate gambler who found a way of charming my sister into marrying him.
Killing her and marrying your father myself should have ironed out this little mess.
” Her smile is broad and unnerving, an unnatural show of endearment that has a shiver running down my spine.
My fingers tingle as I consider how quickly I could cut off her air supply—if only she’d step a little closer. She must see the shift in my expression because she takes a few steps back, waving the gun in the air as she continues her story.
“I never did find the loophole I needed. But I did learn that if your father died, everything—this place, the money—it would all become yours, just as my sister wanted. But if I could have you admitted as a patient…then everything would go to your guardian, and you know what we call that?”
“A loophole,” Simon chirps. If it wasn’t for his stench, I would have forgotten he was still standing there.
I stare up at her, my voice steady, “Why didn’t you just kill me when you killed my father? Wouldn’t the marriage have ensured everything go to you that way?”
“Hangman’s Law, dear boy, everything would have gone back to the Wolfe estate by default.
After my parents disowned me, I had no say.
Some distant second cousin of your father’s from bum fuck nowhere would have inherited it all.
Guardianship states a minimum of six years’ incarceration where the offender—you—is unable to make sound choices of their own, that their legal carer—me—has the ability to do with the funds as they see fit. You were my key to getting it all.”
“If you think I’m signing my inheritance away to you willingly, you’re fucking crazier than I thought.” I laugh, but her steely composure doesn’t waiver like I’d hoped it would.
“When you thought you slaughtered your father, you happily signed your life away—numerous documents that you didn’t even read when they carted you back here on the court’s orders. It helps to have a judge in your pocket.”
“Your dick-sucking skills are clearly on point to have a judge willing to break the law for you.”
“You wouldn’t believe my reach, Ezra. It pays to have the right people owe you a favour. Just ask your mother’s driver. Oh no, that’s right, you can’t—you killed him.”
My eyes go wide, unable to hide my shock as she smirks.
“I know far more than you think I do, Ezra Wolfe; I always have.”
The fight in me dwindles as I look across at Cara, tears tracking over her reddened cheeks as she listens to Lenora admit all the awful things she has done to get me here.
“Your mother had a weakened sensibility, couldn’t take charge and own our legacy.
Wanted to donate a portion of her estate to every fucking deaf charity that came knocking with their hands out.
Our family has been dealing in the skin trade since before I could walk, since before I was even born.
I respect my lineage.” Her twisted sense of pride is unnerving.
I’ve done plenty of fucked up things, and even I can see the fault with her logic.
“You’re downright certifiable, lady.”
“Well then, I’m in the right place; I certainly know crazy.” She cackles.
“Wildly psychotic and criminally unhinged feel more fitting, but who am I to question the semantics of how epically fucked in the head you truly are?”
“Big words for someone who is at my mercy,” she croons with sick satisfaction as she holds up a scalpel from the tray of medical tools, the blade glinting under the light before she swipes it against my neck, a dribble of blood trickling down onto the collar of my scrubs.
I refuse to acknowledge it and that has her cackling as she turns and walks away from me.
Cara struggles against her cuffs when she sees the blood coating my fingers as I dab at the wound.
“It’s okay, Red,” I say softly, wishing I could bundle her up in my arms and protect her from this world.
“So who’s dying first? Neither of you can live now anyway,” Lenora sing-songs nonchalantly as she paces between us, interrupting our brief moment of comfort.
Everyone here knows that neither Cara nor I are walking out of here; the likely outcome is that we will be shot at close range, dismembered and fed to the furnace down the hall before breakfast has even been served upstairs in the dinner hall.
‘Scrambled eggs and hash browns—sort of bummed we will be missing that,’ the beast in my head chimes unhelpfully.
I glance Cara’s way, and she pushes up on her knees, using her bound hands to sign the word hope .
If there is even a sliver of a chance that one of us will make it out of here, then I know what I need to do.