Chapter 51
LUCY
“Dad… what’re you doing?” I ask slowly, looking wide-eyed from my father to the gun he’s holding to Hatton’s head.
I’ve never seen so much rage on my dad’s face.
The floodlights from their boat throw everything into a hard, surgical white relief, bleaching the color from the ruins and the gravestones and making every sharp, furious angle in his expression look carved from stone.
His men flank him—some securing the perimeter, some with weapons still half-raised, ready to finish the job if my father can’t pull the trigger on the gun he’s holding to Hatton’s head.
That fact, I think, is taking a really long time to truly sink in.
My mind is clearer now after Hatton gave me his meds to counteract whatever the Pining did to my system, but I'm still rattled, still trying to catch up to the fact that I went from hallucinating Wonderland to watching Hatton turn a man into red water to being kissed like I was something precious he'd torn the world apart to get back.
During the fight, once Duchy lost enough of her "muchness" to go from the terrifying Duchess to just scared, guilty Duchy again, she caught me up in fits and starts while everything blew up around us. Girl talk multi-tasking for the win, I guess.
So I mostly know what happened between getting kidnapped—again, ugh, rude—and now, when my dad has a—
Oh my God, my dad has a gun to Hatton’s head!
"Dad, stop!" I lunge to get between them, but Hatton tightens his grip around my waist and nape, holding me flush against him so I can't put myself into the line of fire.
"Don't, Lucy," Hatton orders.
I glare back at him and jab his collarbone—the only place I can reach at this angle.
"No, you don't." Then I swivel my glare up at my father. "And you don't either! What is going on with you two!"
Hatton holds still under the gun. Blood is spattered across his arms, his chest still heaving from the fight, too exhausted for defiance but too stubborn for surrender.
My dad, meanwhile, seethes.
"You had one job." Dad's voice drops low. "Protect. Her. But instead, I get not one, but two videos of my daughter."
Two?
There was the Smoke and Mirrors Room and…
Oh boy.
The actual gravity of his rage hits me all at once.
"I know," Hatton says quietly.
"And then I find her here? Tied up, drugged, in a goddamn graveyard?"
"I know."
“Distractions kill in our business.” Hatton flinches, but my dad is relentless. “We lose people we love when we don’t have our fucking heads in the game. I don’t care how you feel about my daughter if what you feel for her will get her fucking killed!”
Wait… Love?
My heart catches on the word and holds it, even as the rest of me screams about the gun.
Does my dad know something I don’t?
Hatton doesn’t deny it. Instead, I feel him deflate in my arms, and I ache for him.
His mom.
“Dad, stop,” I growl.
But Hatton merely closes his eyes and swallows. “I know, McKennon.”
Dad steps closer, every line of him vibrating. “So Fury, as the future head of your own household, who might one day have children and might have to trust someone else to protect them, what”—his voice cracks like a whip—“the fuck would you have me do?”
Hatton lets out a slow breath. The answer settles over his face before he says it, grim acceptance that makes my stomach drop.
“Kill me.”
“What! No!”
This time I wrench fully out of Hatton's hold and throw myself between them before either can stop me.
“Lucy! No!” Hatton yells, and the anguish in it—the raw, animal terror that I’ll get hurt—tears at my chest.
I know my dad, though. He won’t hurt me.
But he will certainly hurt Hatton.
My legs quake and my head still pounds from the drugs.
I’m barefoot, covered in the blood Hatton spilled for me, but I don’t have the ability to physically move my father even on my best days.
But I press my hands against his chest and push anyway, knowing he’ll give in.
Not because I’m strong, or particularly forceful.
But because somewhere under all that wrath, I’m still his daughter.
“I said stop!”
He freezes.
Then his eyes sweep my face, my wrists, my torn dress, all like he’s really seeing me for the first time since he stepped off the boat. His hard expression collapses.
“Laoise,” he breathes, saying my real name in that soft way that brings back memories.
Him carrying me on his shoulders down Fremont Street, my parents taking me backstage at Cirque du Soleil, them cheering me on during every single performance, hiking Valley of Fire until my little legs would give out and he’d carry me back to the car.
“No more.” My voice shakes but the conviction in it doesn’t. “No one makes decisions about my life without my consent anymore. Not him.” I nod at Hatton behind me. “Not you. Not anyone. It ends tonight.”
My father stares at me. His jaw works, but he raises his gun slightly, so it at least isn’t aimed directly at Hatton.
“You left.” The accusation in it is threadbare, worn through by six months of fear. “You left without a word, and I—”
“I know.” My throat tightens. “I know I did. And we’re going to talk about that. All of it. But right now, you’re not going to shoot the man who just killed—again—to keep me safe.”
Dad’s eyes flick past me to Hatton. To the blood on his hands, the spent gun, the bodies scattered through the ruins. To the carnage that Hatton wrought, methodically and without hesitation, all because I needed him.
Something shifts in my father’s expression. Not forgiveness, obviously. We’re a long way from that, but recognition. A grim, begrudging sort of understanding, like he knows exactly what kind of madness Hatton gave into in order to save me.
He clicks the safety as he lowers the gun before sliding it into a holster at his waist.
Then he reaches for me, and I all but leap into his arms. He closes them around me so tight it hurts, but I don’t care. For the first time in ages, I’m enveloped by his whiskey scent, now tinged with salt air, and I’m sobbing before I know it, six months of running cracking me open all at once.
“I missed you.” I choke out. “Dad, I’m so sorry.”
“Shh.” His hand cups the back of my head. “Don’t you dare apologize. I’m sorry. I should’ve—” His voice breaks. “I should’ve done a lot of things differently. You were afraid. Your friend had…” He swallows. “You were doing what you felt you had to do to stay safe.”
We stand like that for a long time, or what feels like it.
When I finally pull back and wipe my face with the back of my hand, I find Hatton standing a few strides away, giving us space.
His face is carefully neutral, but his ocean-blue eyes are bright and glassy in the harsh white light, and his hands hang at his sides, like he doesn’t trust them not to reach for me.
After everything, not giving in and closing the distance almost feels wrong.
“Hatch tipped us off on where you’d be,” Dad says, clearing his throat, reassembling himself into the King of Las Vegas.
Hatton huffs wryly. “Yeah, I tipped you off, huh? I didn’t call anyone else?”
My dad cuts him a glare. “Watch it, Fury. Just because my daughter has asked for a truce doesn’t mean I want to give you one.”
Then he dismisses Hatton with a shake of his head and walks me up the shore to a cluster of gravestones.
“Hatch also told us he needed help taking down Castle.” Dad’s jaw tightens. “We found the bastard watching the whole thing on his screens.”
I wince. “Where is Castle now?”
Dad nods toward the boat he rode in on farther down the long dock. “Restrained on our—Fuck. Quick! Don’t let him get away!”