He shook from my hands, pausing for only a second longer before rising. He looked me over before offering me his arm. Taking it, I held on tightly. Slowly he led me to the door and opened it. There, I came face to face with Darcy, and all of hell was locked behind his eyes. The rage wasn’t boiling, but it was alive and waiting for the time to strike.
There were two types of people in this world.
Those that killed first and weren’t sure what questions to ask later.
And those who knew the questions and wanted every answer, before they slowly and painfully destroyed their enemies.
Who would have thought Wyatt would have been part of the first, and Darcy would have been part of the second?
“Store it well,” I said to him. “That feeling, that deep broken anger and hate and rage. Store it in you like honey, so when you need it the most, you won’t waste a single bit of it.”
He nodded.
“Let’s go,” Ethan said.
And as we walked, as I saw the grim look on every face that knew, I held my head higher. To them, it might have looked like indifference or maybe just a façade.
But to me, this was different.
This was my victory.
I held my head up because I’d won this round again.
They just didn’t know it yet.
It was going to hit them like a thousand semi-trucks from the sky one day. How I, little, pitiful, abused, abandoned, unwanted Calliope, not only captured the Callahan family but broke it only to rebuild it—not as Melody’s legacy, but mine.
I was going to keep rising, guiltless over the people underneath my feet because I had to survive, and in this world, the only people who made it were the ones at the very top. And the only way to get to the top was to step on a few heads.
So, thank you, Coraline. Thank you for dying. I am one step closer now.
MELODY
I thought about it over and over again, and only one thing made sense. “She planned this,” I whispered, looking over the blueprints for the house. Bringing the blueprint forward, I circled the guest bedroom. “Of all the guest rooms she could have used, why did she choose this one to change? Because it’s closest to the secret exit. She knew we’d be able to come in through here. From the intercepted messages from her grandfather, we knew she had to kill someone by today—by last night. But how could she do that without exposing herself? She lured one of them into the room and killed them there. How did she know we would know, though?”
Grabbing my tablet, I searched the cameras, but they were disconnected. “Fucking bitch found the cameras but left them for us to keep watching. I thought it was going to be Helen, so I relaxed a bit when Coraline came to them. But she had just used Coraline. I’m not sure if that was her goal from the beginning. Either way, it didn’t matter. She knew we’d get there. She had other guns under that bed. But she chose the one with one bullet? She could’ve hidden a much bigger gun and blown me away. But she didn’t because she needed me alive. She needed to fight with someone just as strong. That way, Ethan would believe she was innocent. That she didn’t kill Cora, that we did by mistake. He would already think we were after her since we had confronted him.”
I shifted to check all the other cameras in the house; they were all disconnected. The video’s record went back to an hour ago. I was sure it was her way of taking a victory lap, allowing me to watch how they all believed her. How Ethan believed her….it was only now that her words came back to mind.
“Do you even know what game you are playing?”
Slamming the tablet on the table, I wanted to rip it in half! “We’re motherfucking scapegoats! She set us up to take the fall for Coraline’s death and to turn Ethan against us for sure. We walked into a trap!”
I was going to kill her, even if it was the last thing I did on this earth. I was going to kill her.
“Genius.”
Glancing up from the maps, I looked at him. “What?”
He sat against the couch, his bloody shirt now off, a bandage over his arm from the bullet he caught while escaping. His medical kit sprawled out all over the ground around us both. With half a bottle of Camus Cuvee in one hand. We were both more than a little beaten up. The effort it took to set my shoulder really made me feel old this time around.
He took a long drink before answering my question. “Calliope—she’s a genius.”
“Is that really what you want to focus on right now?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I wanna focus on that, Mel, because…because that makes me less pissed with my son. You know, the one that let the homicidal, pretty little genius into our house only for her to kill my cousin’s…no, my brother
’s wife in our goddamn guest room.”