Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“As long as you breathe, moy lvenochek, you win.”
Anastasia
Levi
Through the years, I’ve tried my best to remember this damned forest that became my own prison.
I knew finding it would mean finally locating him.
No matter how much I forced myself to do it, though, I couldn’t, and I hated myself for it.
Until the tracker I inserted inside Lavender led me here, a place located three fucking hours away from my home. The idea of him being so close to me all these years sends me into a different spiral of madness.
He got his hands on my woman.
He hurt my woman.
He scared my woman.
None of these things should have happened.
I wish to see him choke on his blood, and for that, I have to control the anger polluting my mind, urging me to snap his neck whenever I find him.
Finally, I get out of the forest, seeing the one-level glass house opening up to my view that burns brightly while around twenty men race around it, trying to save themselves as they’re shot like flies with arrows. Several more explosions can be heard in the distance.
Von and Kane must be here. Their style is to bring maximum pain to their victims.
They wouldn’t have missed the fun. Wyatt must have called them, because ever since that phone call, everything has been a blur.
I barely managed to say anything as I hopped into the car with my friend and drove off to the location.
I think I vaguely remember Rush and Rafael yelling in my ear and following us, but I’m not sure.
All my thoughts halt when I locate my target, noticing the rapist as he holds something dearly to his chest and rushes toward the gates, probably to get the fuck away.
I dart after him, uncaring about the spreading fire—let the fucking place burn to the ground as long as they protect the forest.
I take out the knife from my pocket and throw it at him, aiming at his calf. He cries out, spinning around, and points his gun at me. “You little fucker.” He cradles the weight on his arms, and that’s when I notice what it is. Instant acid fills my mouth. “I almost dropped your mother.”
He didn’t bury her. He kept her.
Tormented her even after her death.
He presses the tip of the gun to her cheek as he smirks.
“You try to come close, boy, and I will kill her.” He has lost his mind so much that he doesn’t understand she’s already dead.
“You should have been dead by now. I did everything in my power. Do you know that I used to pay them extra so they would torture you more? John thought he was so smart, but I knew he had you.”
Despite the rage consuming me from him still touching my mother, I clasp my hands on my back and put a lid on all my emotions, leaving my mind blank and focusing only on the task.
To eliminate the danger once and for all.
My hand wraps around the knife hanging on my pants pocket while he continues to spew more bullshit.
“You deserved it.” He spits on the floor.
“You should have suffered for taking them away from me. I lost my princess! My daughter.” An invisible arrow pierces my heart because I didn’t save her either. “She died of illness at five!”
As hideous as it sounds, I’m glad she didn’t grow up with him, because monsters like him?
They will hurt their own, and if she grew up to look like our mother…God knows what he would have done to her or what sick fantasy he would have decided to play, thinking it was his do-over. I sometimes think that was the whole reason he wanted a girl.
To have a more perfect version of my mother.
“Mother protected me all these years. I think she’d want me to finally punish you for hurting her and her children all this time.”
He roars, “I never hurt her. I loved her! She was mine! We were soulmates destined to grow old with our princess, but we kept you. You ruined her! She was difficult and stubborn because of you.” He removes the safety on the gun, his pupils dilating while sweat slides down his cheeks along with rain.
“You will know my pain. Your Lavender? As good as dead. My men found her.” I take a step toward him, watching his hold on the skeleton tighten, and he shouts, “Stay back!”
“There is nowhere to go, Jonathan. It’s game over.”
I’ve imagined countless times how I would face my childhood’s demon, and what I would do to him, and now that the time has come…it brings me emptiness.
I do not wish to prolong it.
I wish to end it so no one suffers at his hand anymore.
My mom has been suffering for almost twenty-five years. She deserves a rest from him.
“It’s going to be over when you lose her as I lost my love. Then you will know my suffering!”
“Lavender is safe. She shares one quality with Mom. They are both warriors who survive no matter what.” I step forward and watch the gun in his hand while calculating the distance to make sure my knife hits the exact target.
“You know why she died? She knew I could finally survive without her.” Anger crosses his face.
“Mom didn’t give up. She delivered her final revenge to you because no matter what you did to her before, or after her death…
she was never yours. And she took her daughter with her so you wouldn’t tarnish her soul. ”
“No! She loved me! Me! You killed her!”
“She raised me long enough to teach me to never be a piece of shit like you because no one would ever love a man like you. You deserve to rot in hell, and even that would not be enough.”
He fires his gun, but I dodge to the side and throw my knife into his hand, making him cry out in pain as the gun falls on the ground. I lunge for him, swiftly taking Mom from him and moving her away before kicking him in the knees.
He falls, and memories play in my mind, one after another.
“Stop!” Mom begs as he drags her by the hair and then hits her in the face. “Not in front of him!”
I fist his hair, pulling my arm back and delivering a hard blow right on his face. A cracking sound fills the air.
Mom chokes on the blood in her mouth while he removse his belt and rushes toward me, pushing me to the bathroom and mustering up a smile before locking the door. “Cover your ears, moy lvenochek.” I don’t do it, though, and hear my mom whimper in pain when he starts beating her with a belt.
Removing my own belt, I wrap it around his throat and drag him farther away from her while he struggles in my grip, the coward that he is.
A man who never truly has any strength, and when he’s met with a more powerful force, he folds.
“All your power is a facade to hide a man who is afraid of his own shadow,” I say, loosening my grip as he gulps for breath, and then start to deliver blow by blow to his back with the belt. “You are a piece of shit who killed my mother!”
He tries to get away from me, but I kick him in the back before throwing away the belt and starting to hit him hard, all the while hearing my mom’s screams and seeing her bloody face in front of me.
Finally, I step back when another clap of thunder shakes the sky, and the rain becoming so intense that it soaks us all.
I grab his gun and point it at him as he lies on his back, breathing heavily, and watches me with so much hate filling his eyes.
One shot and I will end it all.
Mommy finishes telling me a story about the brave knight who saved a kingdom.
“One day, Mama, I will save us,” I tell her and cup her face, rubbing my thumb over the bruises on her chin.
“I will slay the monster with my sword.” I’m not sure where I’ll find it, but all these magical stories she tells me always have some kind of magical solution. “He won’t hurt you anymore.”
She smiles before wincing at her busted lip and hugs me close, kissing me on the top of my head.
“Net moy lvenochek.” She rocks me in her arms. “You won’t do it.
If you kill him…he wins. His dirt will be forever attached to you.
He doesn’t get to have your soul.” I don’t understand her words.
“Moy lvenochek will win because it’s not your job to kill him.
It’s mine.” Another kiss. “I’m the parent. Parents protect their children.”
My mom protected me as much as she could, but she isn’t here now.
It is my duty to protect her.
I aim the gun at him as the seconds trickle by, and still her voice outshines the rage and hatred in my heart. He smirks from the ground and erupts in full-on laughter. “You can’t do it. You’re weak.”
Before I can reply to his idiotic remark, I feel a presence behind me, and a hand lands above mine on the gun.
I look at the man who became everything a father should be to me.
I assume my uncles aren’t far off either.
“I’m here, Levi,” he tells me, and slowly takes the gun away from me. “I’m here.”
The two desires fight within me: one wishes to keep my promise to my mom, and the other to exact his rightful revenge.
“Lavender needs you right now.”
My beautiful, brave woman who stood with me in my darkness and willingly stayed with me, knowing this fucking asshole would try to kidnap her to hurt me.
The warmth, obsession, and need following me whenever I think about her finally make sense.
I love her. She’s mine, and my love for her is far greater than any revenge could ever be. It tips the scale to the right direction, as only this can give me peace.
Life is meant to be lived in the present. Otherwise, the shadows of our past will kill us, and my mom didn’t suffer so much for her son to waste his life.
My greatest revenge will be to love and be loved by my woman.
“I want him to suffer.”
“And suffer he will. He hurt my son.”
And for my dad, it might as well be a vow he gives me.
I do not wish to know what will happen to him. In fact, I don’t want to hear about him at all from now on.
For if we talk about him, he has importance and presence in our lives, and he doesn’t get to have that.
I nod, my throat clogged, and, without sparing Jonathan a glance, I walk toward my mom and remove my jacket, throwing it over her before picking her up and going toward the entrance.
While Jonathan bellows, “No! Anastasia is mine! Where are you taking her? Get back here, you bastard!”
I do not turn back, I don’t acknowledge his words, I do not give him any satisfaction.
Instead, I finally free us from his torment.
Forever.