Vicious Minds: Part 3 (Children of Vice 6)

I shrugged. “Just different. I wondered what my life might have been if you all weren’t my family.”

“Don’t talk as if you are going to die. We will make it—”

BANG.

The feeling of his blood splattering across my face was not pleasant. I reached up to wipe away the crimson stain.

“No, I will make it and stop wondering.”

6

“We hurt most who we love the most

Bad grammar, painful truth.”

~Andy Stanley

WYATT

I stared at the screen in absolute shock.

There were a dozen ways I thought this night would end. In eleven of them, Calliope died. One of them had her surviving because I thought Ethan would pull something none of us had seen coming. But no matter what, I had figured the first one to go down would be Calliope, and then after that, we would take out of the rest of her family. But instead, she had just put a bullet in the head of her own grandfather. The blood poured out of his skull over the marble, all the while Calliope stood over his body.

“This can’t be real,” I said as my father stared at the screen as well.

He wasn’t out there, because his shoulder blade had shattered from the stray bullet shot that had hit him. With his good arm, he reached for the remote and zoomed in, and we watched as Calliope lifted her head, took a deep breath, and moved over to the sink, taking a napkin to clean the blood from her face as best she could. After that, she picked up her phone and dialed.

I thought she’d call Ethan.

But instead, it was my phone that rang.

“It’s not fake,” my father replied, reaching out to me as I handed him the phone.

When he answered the phone, she immediately said, “Have you called off your mom…or wife? Which Callahan am I speaking to?”

“Why did you do this?”

“Because I am a loyal member of this family, of course.”

I scoffed, rolling my eyes, moving out the window. We were about four blocks from the museum but were high enough that we could see it, which meant my mother would still be able to see her from her sniper scope.

“If you think this will get us to trust you—”

“I do not need you to trust me, Dad. I just need you not to shoot me. So, would you like to know the truth now? Or would you rather keep firing in the dark.”

“How do we know you really killed him?” he asked her.

“There is a lot of blood on the floor. Don’t you have cameras? Can’t you see?”

“What is done on tape is deceptive.”

“If you want me to bring you his head, I’m going to need something sharper than my heels.”

She really was insane. Calliope sat on the edge of the sink, swinging her legs back and forth right beside her grandfather’s dead body. I knew the man wasn’t

her flesh and blood, but he’d raised her, hadn’t he? And in the end, when cornered, she’d used him as a shield for herself. This was the woman Ethan had fallen for? Did she have a heart at all?

“Well, Mr. Callahan...Ethan’s here.”