21. Paul #3
“It was quite entertaining watching him cut off his own arm without even so much as blinking. He wiped out your father and handled his own disappearance flawlessly. We were ready to dispose of him, but then the lot of you became much more observant. None of the jinxes we cast or hits we set up for you with your alpha out of the picture worked. Never in my life have I seen two contracts fail after repeated attempts and one remain completely untaken just because Miss Advocate here happened to be overseas.”
“Three contracts fail,” I corrected.
Vincenzo tilted his head like I was speaking in tongues. “What are you talking about?”
“You had three contracts fail, and my sister’s was left stagnant. One for Chris, one for Jackson, and one for me.”
Neither of the Parracidas said anything for a beat. Not until the grandfather leaned in and whispered in Vincenzo’s ear.
“And whose fault is that?” the patriarch snapped, waving his elder away. “I haven’t been to the estate in ages! I can’t be expected to remember every one of Caspian’s boring progeny!”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you telling me that you forgot the middle son of your supposedly greatest enemy?”
“Potentially.”
“No wonder he ended up being such a thorn in our side!” Arlene spat, her voice full of venom as she elbowed her own husband. “If it weren’t for Alexandria slipping trackers into the siblings’ phones while she was at the estate, he might have even found us out!”
Ah. So that was how they discovered our hideout. We’d been hacked from the inside. How, after everything that had happened, had I never thought to restrict the Parracidas’ access to our estate? It wasn’t like they were blood!
I guess that I was just so used to seeing them as an extension of our staff that I forgot to consider they were their own people with their own motives, and apparently real evil ones at that.
“What does it even matter!? We have them here now, and when their brother spills their blood, our family line will finally get their wolf forms back. We will be able to take our place as heads of the entire East Coast!”
So that was the long and short of it then.
All the pain my family had endured, from the death of my mother, to the murder of my father and not-quite murder of my brother, was so the Parracidas could steal our shifter birthright from us and topple the entire power structure that had kept shifter war out of the East Coast and protected the weakest of us when magical folks fully revealed themselves to humans.
It was just so selfish .
I was more than willing to admit that all three of the great families were incredibly wrong for continuing the punishment of their family like it wasn’t a big deal.
As if it was just a matter of course. And I would be more than happy to pay restitution to them and make things right.
But this wasn’t the way to do it. And now, because of the choices they had made, they had to be stopped.
But how?
“You’re right, you’re right. I suppose I lost the plot a bit.
” Arlene drew in a centering breath, straightening her posture.
I got the impression that she was taking her final bow for her performance.
“You, scourge! Slaughter all of them, including that precious human of yours. But make sure you save her for last!”
The air crackled with tension, and I didn’t know what possessed me, but I had to say something , so before I could even think it through, a cry escaped my mouth.
“Wait!”
All three of the older adults chuckled, but it worked, because Arlene held her hand up, and her daughter stopped opening Luther’s cage.
“There’s no use pleading for your lives,” she said, and I could tell she was loving her position of power.
“There will be no mercy here. And don’t think you can stall until someone from your little security team comes to find you.
My daughter has been thorough in her work, even before we activated Luther, so every single member of your staff has a tracker on them.
Either physically or programmed into their phone. ”
If she wasn’t such an obviously wicked woman gleefully celebrating our impending deaths, I would have thought it was cute that she looked so proud of her child.
“It was ingenious, really. A simple ghost program that they got by clicking on a link in an email she sent to sign up for her Christmas baking list. That’s really it.
The chance for fresh cookies and macarons ended up being the downfall of your entire pack. ”
“Nobody likes shredded coconut that much,” I objected.
“ Macarons, not macaroons,” Alexandria objected quickly, and it might have been the most impassioned I’d ever heard her. “There’s a differe—Never mind.”
If Cherry was around, she would no doubt have a grand time listening to an info-dump about two desserts that sounded the same, but she wasn’t, so I turned my attention to Arlene and Vincenzo.
“There’s still time to undo this,” I said, choosing not to address Arlene’s remarks about the tracking devices.
I had thought our cyber security was far too adept to let something like that happen, but clearly, I had been mistaken.
And that mistake was likely going to cost me and my family our lives.
“If you made a pact with some entity beyond our realm and gave them your wolf in exchange for all of this, that entity will not take kindly to you trying to find a workaround. There are some things that are just not worth messing with. But we can get experts, people who have experience with this, and try to get you out of it before anything goes wrong.”
“Before anything goes wrong?” she crowed. “You say that like we’re not already victorious. The game is over, and although you put up quite the fight, it’s done.”
“Enough of this pontificating!” the grandfather snapped, stepping forward. “If you keep monologuing, I’m going to expire of old age before we do anything! Alexandria, let the beast out and end this already!”
“But Nonno, what if they’re right? Should we be double-crossing a daemonium like this? What if no one has to die?”
“Have you lost your mind, child? Open the cage!”
She jerked, hurrying to do so, and Luther took two lumbering steps out before pausing.
“What are you waiting for? Kill them! Kill all of them so that the Parracida pack can once more rise to our glory! Semper ?—”
He never quite got the words out, suddenly stumbling back and holding his throat as he choked. All of us watched, stunned, as he fell to the ground. Foam bubbled out of his mouth as he clawed at his throat.
“What the hell?”
Another stream of water shot down, hitting the old man in the chest, making him scream as smoke rose from him.
Collectively, every head in the room snapped in the direction of the water.
A damp Cherry was crouched in one of the highest windows of the tower, a comically large super soaker in her hands.
“The personal assistant!”
“The social media manager!”
“That bint from the funeral!”
“How are you here?” Vincenzo snapped, his face going purple. “We have alerts if any of your trackers get remotely close to our home!”
Cherry pumped her artificial gun twice before aiming it again. “Joke’s on you, I never remember my phone. Or my wallet.”