Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
I threw open the door and walked out.
The sound of my steps on the patio stones were steady and casual, matching the thump of my heart. This is what I needed to do.
I folded into my car, turned the key and the engine came to life. Then I slowly drove down the driveway.
I glanced once in the rear-view mirror just as the ground rumbled beneath the car and there was a loud boom.
Pieces of the house lifted into the air with flames. Black smoke billowed into the sky. I stopped at the road and watched in the mirror as the house burned.
It was the destruction of the rage. Destruction of what one girl made me feel for the first time in my life.
I had to burn the emotions and find the calm again.
Because if I didn’t, the rift was going to split and there’d be nothing left of me. The darkness would be all consuming and even London’s lightness wouldn’t be able to bring me back.Present Day
FranceMOTHER WAS DEAD.
I killed her and all I felt was relief and satisfaction.
Fuckin’ dead and maybe I was just as bad as her because I’d enjoyed watching her flounder as she struggled to breathe with the wire tight around her delicate throat. I liked how her fingernails dug into the backs of my hands as she clawed and raked at me, at the wire, at her neck, her eyes begging.
I’d begged at one time, too. As a kid, I’d begged for the pain to stop. Begged her not to kill my father. Begged night after night for my sister to be saved from the farm. Begging did fuck all.
Mother destroyed what a child was born with—innocence. The power hungry bitch had turned Vault into an organization about supremacy and control using any means to get it and, in the process, changed the beliefs it was built on. Her vision corrupted its path and I’d been a part of that.
I walked down the darkened corridor. My dress shoes a drum on the hard cement floors, like the music before a death scene in a movie. Echoing. Loud. Solitary.
It reminded me of the day I walked the corridor in Vault’s Toronto house after Deck, his men, and me rescued Georgie from Tanner in the shed. The day I saw her in the cell. When I heard London’s cries.
Unleashed. The snap unclicked and my emotions set free the moment I saw her in that cell. The matted hair, dried blood on her face, eyes dead. And it was then, that moment, when all my training to be unemotional had a purpose—it was to be able to walk away from her so I could stay alive in order to get her out one day.
I’d stared at her, locking away the emotions that fought to surface and gave her the words she needed to hear. Then I left. I fuckin’ left with my guise of patience fragmenting and my insides catapulted into a war zone of grated rage.
The ‘farmhands’ had it right after all. Emotions were the monsters and I’d become one.
London was mine. She’d never belong to them—ever. They should’ve never touched her in the beginning. Never ruined her. No, tried to ruin her.
I ran my finger along the blade of my knife, watching for any sign that someone had discovered I’d killed Mother, yet appearing like I was out for a stroll—in a dark, musty dungeon. Mother’s house was an old castle that had stone walls and sconces with candles to light the halls, but they were only used for visual effect.
I probably had twelve to twenty-four hours before anyone discovered Mother was dead. Not much time to fly back to Toronto and get London out, but it was enough. Deck and his men were on stand-by and Tristan had his private jet waiting at the airport to get us out fast.
I’d taken Mother’s cell phone so I’d know if anyone was looking for her and her laptop to hack to try to find the location of the farm, the drug formula, and the anonymous board member. My skills weren’t as good as Chaos’s, and I knew Deck’s man, Tyler, specialized in this shit.
I stopped at the last heavy wooden door on the right with large black iron studs along the edge. Unlike the Toronto house, nothing here had eye scanners and fingerprint access, only old school key and locks granted access, which I’d also grabbed from Mother.
On the other side of the door, I heard my sister’s faint footsteps. There was that subtle limp she had from when she was shot in the thigh when she’d tried to escape.
The memories of Chess had been filtering in lately. I’d even told London about her when I’d never told anyone. It was like I was thawing, the ice congealed around my emotions melting a little each day. The constant conditioning to become emotionless and uncaring since I was seven years old had worked—until London.