“Didn’t expect Rika to be in the car that day, but…” my father trailed off. “And then the town doctor provided Christiane with a nice little cocktail to keep her docile for the rest of her miserable little life.”
He stepped up to me, but I wanted to back away. The walls were closing in even though we were outside, and I gripped the blade in my hand as full knowledge of what was happening fell like a ton of bricks on my shoulders.
“You never really took notice of Christiane, did you?” he taunted.
But I barely heard him as I got lost in my head.
I could’ve had a different life. Christiane would’ve been different. I would’ve had good parents.
“The way she’d look at you at parties or on the street in town,
” he went on.
She was looking at me? No, I don’t remember that. What was she seeing when she watched me? What was I doing?
My throat closed up, and my hand with the blade shook.
“Her heart was broken long before Rika was born or her husband died,” my father droned on.
She wanted me even with what my father did to her? Her husband wanted me anyway?
“She would look at you for so long, completely obvious,” Gabriel continued, inching up to me farther and torturing me with what was happening right under my nose, and I never even knew it. “I actually thought she’d be a liability, and I might have to kill her, too.”
What if she didn’t like what she was seeing? What if that’s why she never approached me? What if she saw me growing up and thought I was turning out exactly like him?
What if she was scared of me?
“You honestly never noticed?” he asked, looking at me like I was the dumbest shit on the planet.
Rage filled my chest, my stomach twisted into knots, and every image of him flashed in my head.
Raping her. Destroying her life. Stealing me away as she screamed.
Forcing her to watch another woman raise me a few miles down the road.
Giving me to that house and the horror I had to swallow.
And I looked up at him, clenching my jaw and channeling it all, knowing I would never give him any grandchildren to get his hands on.
“I thought you were so much more perceptive than that,” he told me. “But I guess she wasn’t very smart, either, so—”
I growled, grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving the goddamn dagger right into his fucking stomach.
My friends gasped behind me, and I heard Banks cry my name, but it was barely a whisper.
He jerked, his mouth falling open as he stood there wide-eyed for the first time in his miserable fucking life, and looking like he couldn’t breathe all of a sudden.
I pulled it out and stuck it in again, feeling it dig into his flesh and feeling a chill spread up my angry arm and filter through my blood, the rage cooling just a little.
I pulled it out once again, stared into his eyes, and rammed it into his fucking body, burying it in his stomach one… final…time.
“Just…die,” I bit out right in his face. “Die.”
He sputtered and rasped, his knees giving out and his body crumbling to the ground as he slid off my knife and collapsed.
Someone sobbed quietly behind me, but everyone else was silent as we watched him spill all over the roof, his white shirt turning crimson as it soaked.
I stared down at him, holding his eyes. Someone approached from behind, but I waved my hand from where it hung at my side, gesturing for them to back the hell off.