33. Malachi
MALACHI
I watch her go, and my heart hurts. Turning to Cain and Roman, I see the same helplessness and anger in their gazes.
“We need to kill that fucker,” I say. “Ophelia won’t be truly free until he’s dead.”
It’s what I had been thinking about as I ran our situation around and around my brain. I kept coming back to the same thing. We have to kill the Prophet.
“Agreed.” Cain nods. “It also will give us a bargaining chip with her father. I’ve been thinking, if we call him and offer to take out the Prophet in return for him letting Ophelia return to Verona Falls with us, we kill two birds with one stone.”
Rome shakes his head. “We’ve been AWOL with his daughter, so we owe him more than a call. We need to take Ophelia home first. Then she can talk to him with us, face to face. He might not agree to our demands, though. He seems like a dick to me.”
I snort. “They’re all dicks. Our families are, too.
” I don’t often talk about what happened to me because I feel that it pales in comparison to the shit Cain and Rome went through, but it was fucking bad enough.
No child should have to grow up with an addict for a mother, and then deal with my father’s violence on top of that.
It’s what had pushed me to the breaking point.
As I think about it, my heart starts to race.
The worst thing was being held down. There’s nothing more terrifying than that feeling of being utterly helpless and trapped.
It’s degrading, too. Even as a child, the anger and impotence you feel in that moment is soul destroying.
The anger has nowhere to go, so you start to turn it inward.
I became an obsessive child. I worried, and watched, and was far too aware of the emotions of the adults around me.
I walked on eggshells my entire childhood.
It's made me go the other way as an adult, and I’ve perfected my disinterested, asshole persona.
It served me well, until Ophelia. Now she’s cracked my facade and wormed her way deep inside.
It fucking terrifies me. Caring about someone as much as I do about her is a weakness.
If you love something or someone so much, then others can use that against you.
The thing you love can become a sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
When I was about seven years old, I’d found a stray kitten under the porch of my house.
I’d guessed it was about six weeks old, and I looked everywhere for the mama cat, but I hadn’t been able to find it.
My dad hated cats, and I knew if he found the kitten, he’d drown it.
So instead of bringing it into the house, I’d taken it into the shed, and set it up a little bed, and fetched it some milk and cold cuts, because I’d heard cats liked milk and ham.
I thought I’d been doing the right thing, but I didn’t know the milk would upset its stomach, and there wasn’t enough nourishment in the ham.
Looking back now, the kitten was probably too young to be away from its mother and wouldn’t have survived whatever I’d done.
I’d tried, though, and I’d stroked the kitten and pressed my nose and lips to its tiny head and replied to its little mews when I felt it was trying to talk to me. I finally had something that was just for me.
I’d loved that kitten, but two days later, when I went to check on it, I found it dead. I cried like my heart was breaking, and I remembered thinking fiercely how I wished it had been my father who’d died instead.
The image of the dead kitten I had once loved flashes into my mind, and I push it away aggressively. No, no, no . I cannot go there now. Losing my pet had been the very darkest moment of my life in that fucked up house. I won’t call it a home because it doesn’t deserve that title.
“Are you okay, Mal?” Cain asks.
No, I’m not fucking okay. I feel as if I’m about to have a panic attack. Needing to move, I push off the wall and head to the door.
“Get yourselves going and come meet me in the kitchen. We need to talk. I’ll put the coffee pot on.”
I stalk out of the room, not stopping until I reach the kitchen.
Once there, I grab the back of one of the stools by the breakfast bar and bend over, gasping.
I feel as if I’m breathing through a straw.
Shit. This is the fucking worst. To this day, I can’t bear to think about my kitten.
If my father had been a decent man, I’d have been able to tell him about it, maybe take it to a vet.
They’d have told me how to take care of it properly, and it would have survived.
Ophelia is innocent, too. Will she end up hurt?
Maybe even dead? We’ve been hiding out in this house, playing happy families, while the world outside got more dangerous for us with every passing hour.
We’ve tried to pretend none of it matters, but it does.
We’re screwed if we can’t find a way out of this mess.
Roman strolls in, hair mussed, but wearing low-slung sweatpants and a t-shirt. He yawns and scratches his scruff as he takes a seat at the island, bleary eyes trained on me.
“What gives?” he asks.
I grind my teeth. “I’m fucking stressing, okay? We’re in a bind.”
He snorts, as if this shit is funny. “Tell me about it. I killed a man at the facility. Fucking slaughtered him like a pig. Well, I did worse than I’d ever do to a pig.
I’m going to face charges for that if I can’t find a way out of it.
It means looking after our Angel must be down to you and Cain. ”
Well, this isn’t helping my panic.
I stare at him in horror. “You can’t go to prison. Your family wouldn’t let that happen.”
His family might be evil fuckers, but they paid for his education, didn’t they? They have no idea the three of us are plotting to bring down the heads of all our families. There’s no way they’d let the heir to their crime fortune rot away in prison.
He sighs. “I’m not sure even their power and sway would be able to get me off of a murder charge in a town where they have little influence.”
“You seem a bit too fucking chill about this.”
He gives a dark laugh. “I’m not chill at all, but I can’t bring myself to regret it. He deserved it.”
His eyes bore into mine, the painful truth of what he felt he had to do reflected in their depths.
“We’re so fucked.” I scrub my hands over my face. “So very fucked.”
“Ophelia’s father is going to be pissed that we took her, too.” Roman shrugs. “I don’t think he’s going to be the pushover Cain seems to.”
“She always said her parents loved her, but her father seems like a fucking cunt to me.”
Roman nods. “Yes, he does. Arrogant. Thinks he’s always right. Won’t listen to reason. It’s almost as if he runs a criminal cartel.”
We both laugh at that, the dark humor kind of helping to lighten the mood.
Rome continues. “Maybe he does love her in his own way, but the way crime patriarchs seem to love their families is all about control.”
His words have a depressing inevitability. “Do you think we’d be the same? Not that we’re planning on being a family with kids or anything, but … if we did, do you think we’d be the same?”
Rome steeples his hands in front of his face as he considers my question.
“I don’t know. I’d like to think not. We know what harm we faced as children, and we’re trying to break the cycle, but who knows?
They say history repeats itself, so maybe we’d end up just like our fathers in the end.
Although, I’d rather cut my cock off than be like the men in my family. ”
“Now, then, we don’t need you getting handy with the knife again.” I try to lighten the atmosphere some.
“I don’t care what happens to me,” he says. “Not really. I just need Ophelia to be okay. I could cope with being in prison, if I knew she was free and safe, but she’ll never be free and safe while the Prophet is still out there.”
I let down my guard and show some of the vulnerability I normally hide. “It’s scary loving someone, isn’t it?”
He nods, his gaze cast down. “Yes, it is. It’s probably why I don’t do it often, or ever, until now.”
Cain walks into the room and pauses as he approaches us. “You could cut the air in here with a knife, it’s that heavy.”
“Yeah, well, things feel heavy,” I reply.
“We’ll sort them out. We have options.”
“Cain, I damn well love you like a brother, but sometimes your optimism is exhausting.” I smile sadly at him. “There’s so much coming for us. So much crap swirling around us. We can’t stay here forever.”
“We can stay a long while. Eric said so.”
Roman turns to face Cain. “Right, and what if he faces a threat of his own? You’re not telling me that if someone threatened him or his family he wouldn’t turn us out of here. You can’t rely on the kindness of strangers for too long, my friend. That’s just a rule in life.”
“Well, it’s a shitty rule,” Cain says, reminding me of a petulant child.
“I also don’t think Ophelia’s father is going to be as understanding as you seem to believe.” Roman shifts on his seat a little, making himself more comfortable. “He’s got to be fuming that we took her.”
“What?” Cain’s eyes flash. “He ought to be grateful we saved her from being raped.”
“He doesn’t know that, though,” I point out. “He’s going to be worried sick, and all he knows is we took his daughter. In his eyes, she’s missing again, and he doesn’t know where she is or if she’s okay. That’s going to be making him absolutely feral. It would me.”
“We can explain.” Cain’s expression is defiant.
“We need to offer him something,” Roman says.
“We will. The Prophet’s head on a platter and his daughter’s freedom.”
“What if that’s not enough?”
Cain explodes. He picks up one of the stools by the breakfast bar and throws it clean across the room. It bounces off one of the walls, leaving a big, dark mark on the pristine paint.
Jesus Christ . I stare at him as if he’s grown another head.