Chapter 5 #4
I was the fucking best they could consider.
How surprising. I’d always been picked first for dodgeball.
Most people liked how competitive I was, though I never enjoyed playing.
I just refused to lose. Now, the ball was a gun, and the opponent was a girl in bright fucking pink with a sweet ass and . . . Tow Mater Crocs?
Even Satan was giggling at me.
I had to kill her. I’d killed animals. With guidance, I’d assisted in torturing people in the barn at as young as ten years old.
Papa held a hunt in the woods with men he wanted to die terrified.
He released me and five other kids training to one day become a member of something great.
I can’t say I haven’t killed before. I was a Harrekson. It was in my blood.
But her? Fuck. Look at her. She’s terrified of her own father. She’s scared of her own skin. I didn’t want to kill her. If I hadn’t made a deal with Papa, I wouldn’t even consider causing any harm to her for vengeance on Sebastian.
I turned back in the direction I came and carefully crossed the yard to retrieve the tracker from Curly Q’s Mustang.
It wasn’t this poor girl I wanted to make my mark with.
I didn’t want to earn these stars by taking out someone already living through her own version of hell.
I wouldn’t hurt her when the world already had. Not yet, at least.
Her little smile in those pictures belonged to the young girl who stood in the same spot, in another house.
That sweet, sweet kid stared down the barrel of a gun, wondering why her perfect hero of a daddy would ever treat her as good as shit.
Her relationship with her father was dead and broken. She just hadn’t accepted that yet.
If anyone understood, it was me. She needed to understand there was a life somewhere out there that didn’t involve that motherfucker.
I couldn’t kill her. I wouldn’t. I never planned to .
. . I thought. I could manipulate her, get close to her father for Papa, and Levi could move in.
Unless there was a chance Papa’s direction could shift—then I wouldn’t mind making this town a safer place.
I’d be doing Coven justice taking Sebastian Dawson out of it.
It could be the shift that took my father’s focus off killing an innocent teenager.
He’d commend me for wanting to take care of the real issue.
A star was only as bright as the fire it burned.
If I went nuclear on Sebastian, surely that would be enough.
It had to be.
The car door was still unlocked when I returned.
I threw it open and snatched the bar from under the seat.
I evaluated my options now that the tracker had been activated before chucking it as far as possible into the old lady’s yard next door.
Sebastian would be too smart for a tracker.
I could lie and say he found it, or that it fell off during one of his kid’s horrible driving attempts.
I swear, she hits every curb that comes close to this beautiful vintage frame. Seriously, who the hell gave her a driver’s license?
I struggled to remember the last time I ever thought something Papa did was a good thing, especially when I realized my head swarmed with memories of his torture techniques.
Sebastian was the man keeping me from healing with my daughter.
Every chance I had was a chance to make up for lost time.
And yet, here I fucking was, watching this man ruin his daughter.
Papa would be ashamed of me. I turned my back when I had the perfect opportunity to get a jump on this girl’s movements. A tracker allowed me to memorize her routine.
I steadied my breathing and slipped behind the gate into the long, discarded grass. My feet carefully stepped back over the extra planks of unused fencing back toward where I parked my bike out of sight. I was sure there were better spots to hide around the property.
By the end of the week, I’d memorize every entrance and exit the Dawson’s manor had to offer me. Each window, every door, which locks were old enough to jimmy free, and where Sebastian would put security cameras around the property. I’d have this place burned into my memory.
And her.
Even as I shoved my head into my helmet and prepared to roll out of Cross Key Grove, her fake smile burned into my memory, the fear that trembled through her body as her father held a gun to her face.
I’d never forget that now. I’d never see that man as someone who deserved to have a child, especially one with such hopeful eyes.
For fuck’s sake, those eyes were branded into me like hot steel straight from the dark father’s coals. She had no idea her innocence had been marked for the slaughterhouse by her own father. A loss of childhood. A loss of life. She had been robbed by the man she trusted most.
Ditto, babe. Welcome to my club.
Revving my engine loudly, I gritted my teeth and ignored the buckle hanging under my chin. As I flew over the train tracks, one heavy idealization jabbed me straight through the heart.
It didn’t matter what I wanted. I had no choice. I had to kill this girl.