Chapter 12 #3
“Oh, they have really good chocolate peanut butter shakes here,” I moan. “Can I have one of those and a bacon cheeseburger, please?”
“Have you sampled all the restaurants?” Gareth teases me. “Maddox, I’ll take the same!”
Everyone orders, and soon I’m eating my food in Gareth’s lap, disliking the alphas a little less than when we started.
MADDOX
“We almost didn’t get to her in time,” I growl.
Olivia is just outside of the murder room on a fluffy, comfortable couch we dragged out for her.
We have a ton of men surrounding her, and Balthazar laying at her feet.
She’s as safe as we can make her, and Gareth left her a gun, reminding her to point and shoot.
Raynard leans against the wall as he supervises his men.
I have a feeling he wants to make sure there’s something left for him to haul back to California.
They’re currently stripping and stringing him up in the chains we keep in this room.
I’ve thought of just about everything, on a “just in case” basis.
It just hasn’t been enough.
“She’s safe,” Gareth reminds me. “Yes, a fuck ton of shit could have happened, but it didn’t.”
“Olivia even shot someone’s kneecap out with my gun.” Cai says. “It was a mistake to think she couldn’t handle this life or us.”
“You know it was never about that,” I grumble, picking up a bat once Dad is hung up properly. He doesn’t look as strong and large as he used to anymore. “He was always the issue.”
“Son, wait!” Dad yells, but I swing at his shoulder despite his words.
“We’re no sons of yours,” I growl, beating the fuck out of him.
“I think we should teach him the importance of keeping his hands to himself,” Gareth decides, finding a very dull knife. He prefers to keep his torture simple.
“Feel free to do your thing,” Raynard says in a bored tone. “Maybe leave me his head.”
“You motherfucking asshole!” Dad screams. “You just want to take over. Boys, he’ll fuck you over one day too.”
“They haven’t been ‘boys’ in a long fucking time,” Raynard snorts in derision.
He watches as Gareth grabs one of Dad’s fingers and begins to saw at it with the knife.
Yeah, that’s gonna take awhile. “The level of hate they have for you is all your fault. What did you think would happen after all the abuse you’ve leveled at them? ”
“It makes them strong,” Dad snarls.
“Oops,” Gareth mutters, breaking the finger and then painstakingly pulling and cutting it off. Throwing it to the side as Dad yells, Gareth starts again.
Crossing my arms, I begin to ask my father all the questions that I’ll need to know to take over.
Dad has always prided himself in being strong enough to stand up under intense torture.
He’s always insisted the same of us, which is why we each disappeared on our sixteenth birthdays for the day to be tortured.
Cai and Aled were side by side, making things even more difficult.
We should have said enough was enough years ago, as we are grown fucking men, but our family lore is littered with broken bones and abuse. This became our normal. It took watching Livy about to be a victim to our father to decide we needed to break the cycle.
As I said, it was too damn close.
Watching dispassionately, I watch as Cai walks over with a much larger knife and cuts off Dad’s dick mid-urine stream.
“Real men don’t terrorize their sons and their omega,” he mutters. “I don’t think you’ll be needing this in hell.”
Raynard swallows back a smile as he watches us, not saying a word as we burn, cut, and punch our father. Getting creative after about an hour of torture, Cai starts to heat up a poker.
“Isn’t this enough?” Dad begs.
I have the numbers to the hidden bank accounts, the secret business ventures he refused to give us a cut from, and anyone he works with that he’s hidden from his partners.
Raynard stabbed him in the shoulder when he found out how much he’d been fucking them over before stepping back and apologizing.
There’s no need to apologize when dealing with this level of disrespect.
“I don’t think you understand yet that you’re not walking away from this,” I drawl, taking the poker from Cai. One brand from each of us sounds about right.
“Do you really think you can continue to be the boss while dickless?” Cai laughs. “That’s definitely going to get around.”
“Eeny, weeny, tiny, weeny…”
The four of us break loudly into the lyrics of Short Dick Man, making Reynard’s men heckle Dad’s dick when I spear it with the poker and force it into his mouth while he screams. At least I won’t have to hear his bullshit now that the poker is searing his tongue.
Once his mouth is ruined, I hand it back to Cai.
He cleans off the poker, reheats it, and shoves it into Dad’s ribs, grinning as our father screams wordlessly.
I can’t be bothered to wince, knowing as Dad wheezes that it probably punctured his lung.
Aled takes the poker and methodically decides to shove it up the gaping hole between Dad’s legs.
“A little late on cauterizing the wound,” Raynard smirks as Aled barks out a laugh. We’ve fallen into solemnity towards the end, and the levity is welcomed.
“Let’s wrap this up so we can take our girl home,” Gareth says. Glancing out the window, I see that she has a blanket thrown over her and she’s sleeping. I don’t know where the hell they found it, but it’s clear that she’s been looked after.
I can feel the weight of the day begin to pull at me, and I have to admit that I’m exhausted.
“Have at it,” I tell Gareth. We agreed that he would take the kill.
Changing his weapon for a knife, he scratches out the word TRAITOR from one of Dad’s cheeks, over his forehead, and then down to his other cheek. The word stands out starkly, while Gareth holds on tightly to Dad’s hair to keep him in place as he moves to slit his throat.
“Let us drop him for you, sir,” one of the guards says politely as they ensure that Gareth can stand comfortably behind Dad.
“What’s your plan?” Raynard asks curiously.
“Knife to slit, hatchet to remove the head,” Gareth grunts.
Dad attempts to kick at Gareth, but isn’t able to since we broke all the bones in his legs while whaling on him with the steel bat. Sucks for him.
Gareth shoves the knife into Dad’s throat while we watch, pulling it across to spill his blood. Cai, Aled, and I all flick Dad off as the light disappears from his eyes. I’m glad he died knowing that everything he built was taken from him.
He died helpless, dickless, and mocked by the people he wanted to hold him in the highest esteem.
The guards lower dad from his chains so that he drops to the ground on his face, undignified and haphazardly. Gareth reaches for the hatchet to hack off Dad’s head, and then Raynard steps forward.
“Go clean up. We'll take it from here,” he says.
Nodding, we walk out of the room and head to the office.
While it’s a back up plan, it’s also a safe house my father never knew about.
There are clean men’s clothes in the office, and the bathroom is set up like a locker room.
Showering quickly, the four of us clean up so that we look less like serial killers and more like the businessmen that the world thinks we are.
If it was my choice, we’d throw on joggers and hoodies to call it a day, but unfortunately all we have are full suits. Gareth rolls his eyes as he fixes his tie, before striding out of the room with us behind him.
“Let’s go home,” he tells Balthazar, grinning as the dog sits up and licks carefully at Olivia’s face to wake her up.
“What?” she asks sleepily.
“She’s not walking, big guy,” Gareth chuckles. “She doesn’t have shoes.”
Wrapping the blanket around her since it’s cold out, he picks her up into his arms.
“We’re done here,” he murmurs. Walking out the side door, we leave Uncle Raynard to clean up the mess we left.
“Good,” she sighs, her lashes fluttering as she begins to fall asleep again.
It’s only as we’re on our way home that I get a call I regret picking up.