Chapter 83 Kane #2
“I’m not doing that, you idiot.” Delilah lightly swats my leg. “I hid something under the floorboards.”
She crawls under her bed, and I lift the bed skirt to see the small cut in the carpet. The clattering of the wood panel being removed is barely heard over the bloodcurdling scream, but she doesn’t pause as she reaches into the dusty floor to pull out a hard drive wrapped in plastic wrap.
“Got it,” she says, breathless, in disbelief. Climbing to her feet, she laughs, growing in strength. “I fucking got it. I’m not a stupid girl who doesn’t know anything.”
“Never.” I cup her jaw, softly kissing her while she continues smiling.
She climbs up my body, tightly wrapping her legs around me as she breathes life into me. I use my hand to guide me until I get to the top of the stairs. It physically pains me to pull away from her but I’ve already hurt her too many times, I’m not going to be dumb enough to do it again.
But as I walk down the stairs with my wife’s head on my shoulder, Daigon groans, “You two touch each other a lot.”
“You share a plate, a seat, and God knows what else with your wife,” I fire back. “I’m surprised you don’t spit food in her mouth like she’s a baby bird.”
I don’t know if Ruby is aware her husband is a cannibal. They share two meals a day together, but the third is always cooked to resemble what everyone else is eating and served on a special plate. He never allows his children to eat off his plate either, so I don’t know what lies he tells his wife.
Or how he’s going to explain what he’s done to her mother.
Lizbeth is tied to a chair with violin strings forming a sharp tourniquet around her right wrist. He cocks his arm back and punches her in the face, sending a crack around the large hallway.
Per our deal, Harkin is untouched apart from being tied to a chair opposite his wife.
He doesn’t barter for her life, or even a less severe beating as Daigon lifts his bat, slamming it into her knees.
Delilah slides down my body, sounding bored at her mother’s screaming. “Don’t be insolent.” She leans into her face. “Don’t be dramatic, Lizbeth. You always were such a silly girl.” Without looking away from her mother, she holds her hand out. “Can I have your bat, please?”
“Get your own. This one’s mine,” Daigon says.
Using two fingers, he presses against Delilah’s shoulder until she moves out of his way. I hook my arm around her neck and lead her to Harkin.
“You gave them part of you?” He weakly laughs. “They’ll never let you go now.”
“Ah, you see, I don’t give a fuck,” I say easily. “This woman is worth all of my limbs. That is something you will never understand. Keep laughing, because my intelligent wife is going to make this your own personal hell.”
Delilah holds up the hard drive instead of taking one of the knives laid on the floor.
Her smile carries through her voice as she explains, “Do you remember whipping me when I told you to get Kane out of prison after I showed you the videos Asher made? I made copies, but that clip wasn’t the only thing he recorded. ”
Harkin pales as his wife stops screaming.
My beautiful fucking wife smiles wider without any trace of fear.
“One thing no one ever understood about Asher is how deep his arrogance ran. He wasn’t filled with confidence because he believed in himself.
It’s because he would collect everyone’s secrets.
Mine was loving Kane so effortlessly and without condition I would do anything to make sure he was safe.
Yours? Well, that wasn’t so noble, was it? ”
“There’s nothing on it. I destroyed it,” he lies to himself. It must be a Leroux trait to delude themselves into thinking the world is as they want it.
“Did you destroy your negotiations over the children in your hospitals overseas? How you were boasting about it being so easy to snatch them up and deliver them to Rowan? Or what about the meeting you had with Helene when you took Asher on a hunting trip to introduce him to his grandmother?”
I grimace at the foul stench coming from him and I don’t need to see the brown puddle forming on the cream seat pad to distinguish the liquid. Filthy fuck, he shat himself. He actually shat himself. I bury my laugh in Delilah’s hair as she takes a step back.
“What would happen if I let you live only for the information to be made public?” she asks.
“How many countries would be looking for the perpetrators? I’m sure there’d be a few who could pool their resources to find the island.
So, your choices are: give me the location or I put it all out there.
Either way, you all die and I get to live. ”
“You wouldn’t.” He trembles.
“Fucking dare me,” she spits. “Why would I want to see you suffer for a few hours when I could watch it play out in the court of public opinion? That’s the one you care about.
I do not give a fuck about myself. I have no respect or dignity; you made sure of that.
So I will stand there on national television, telling everyone in disgusting detail how the revered Dr. Harkin Leroux is nothing other than a filthy pedophile who raped his daughters.
I will tell them every sordid detail, from my childhood in this house to that fucking island you’re protecting.
” She gracefully picks a knife up to carve into his chest. PEDO.
“Or you can die with everyone thinking you were good. I’ll let you, so Ruby and Scarlet aren’t put through the torment of reliving the shit you put us through.
It’s your choice. Unlike you, I’m giving you one. ”
Daigon steps back, lifting his bat as he says, “I’m not.
” He swings with so much force the air whistles before the metallic clink of it slamming into Lizbeth’s skull makes me flinch.
Blood, brain matter, and bone fragments spray from the impact, painting the wall on the other side along with his face and Delilah’s hair.
He’s not even out of breath as he turns with his bat held between his thumb and forefinger, asking, “Do you still want to use it?”
She takes it with a smile. I pull her back, so she has enough distance while he coaches her. “Plant your feet. Hold it with both of your hands stacked.”
She gets it wrong, so I adjust her hands then step back. “Get momentum by swinging your arms back, pretty girl.”
Her full concentration is on the bat as she nods, slowly bringing her arms back to test the weight.
Nodding again with determination, she pulls her arms back and sends the bat into her father’s shoulder.
She nearly falls from the swing, so I grab the back of her hoodie to keep her on her feet as the bat clatters against the floor.
“You’re not very good,” Daigon mutters as he collects the bat from the floor.
With my hand on her hoodie, I use my feet to adjust her stance. “Like this. Keep one foot behind you.”
He hands it to her again, looking in her eyes as he says, “Don’t let go of it this time.”
“It was the first time. I’m allowed to make a mistake.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m sure torture has a learning curve.”
“It doesn’t,” I say at the same time as him.
He nods knowingly, given our shared history of The Dollhouse, then gestures for Delilah to try again. She gets better at beating her father and manages to stop herself from hitting him in the head to prevent him being useless like his lifeless wife. But she tires too quickly and drops the bat.
My giant brother-in-law huffs in complaint as he steps back, surveying the expensive furniture. Scraping fills the air as Daigon drags the large dining table into the hallway. “Troublemaker, move out of the way.”
Delilah steps to the side with a small crease between her brows as I pull her into me. Ruby married a fucking crazy person. He unties Lizbeth’s dead body then drags it around by her hair like she’s a puppet. My wife is also insane, demanding, “Kiss your wife, Harkin.”
Daigon slowly turns his head in horror. “You people really like touching each other.”
But my girl, my strong fucking wife, doesn’t let him get away with shit as she tilts her chin in the air. “No. It was a rule when we were kids. We had to kiss this perverted bastard whenever we left the room.”
“We?” he says, eyes darkening. “Ruby too?”
“All of us. Every single time, even if we were getting late for school.”
“She’s lying,” Harkin weakly shouts. “They’re all lying.”
“I’m lying?” my beautiful wife grits, eyes wild with rage. “You used to sit at the head of the table with your paper folded next to your breakfast plate. If we dared to leave without acknowledging you, you’d say, ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, princess?’”
The giant towers over him as he darkly orders, “Kiss your wife, Dr. Leroux.”
Lizbeth’s limp legs scrape across the floor as she’s roughly thrust forward to her husband. The mangled side of her face brushes Harkin’s, but he takes a deep breath before he presses his nasty lips to her bloody cheek.
I have my own score to settle with the cunt, which I don’t want Delilah to see, so I kiss the top of her head and softly suggest, “Why don’t you wash the blood off?”
She looks up at me knowingly, her eyes gentle despite the defiance in her tone. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Daigon drops Lizbeth on the floor then lifts our father-in-law with the chair he’s tied to onto the table. I gently move Delilah to the side to survey the array of weapons and find the dullest one as Daigon asks, “Do you know how to control the heat?”
“Yeah, the thermostat is on the wall behind you,” Delilah says. “Are you cold?”
A wide smile takes over his face as he turns, clicking through the settings to blast the heat.
The marble is uncomfortable to walk on even in my shoes as heat floods the entire house.
It takes him asking for salt for me to figure out what the weird fuck is doing.
Delilah’s confused but she acts like our assistant, and I laugh at the small silver saltshaker she collects for him.