Vicious Minds: Part 3 (Children of Vice 6)

I could feel the glare of her eyes on me.

“Don’t start. You wanted to kill him! You kept saying you weren’t going to let him destroy this family, I was trying to—”

“Save him. Because he is your mio bel leoncino,” I repeated, drinking again before she snatched the bottle from me.

“What should I have done? If I—”

“Put aside the fact that he is our son and see him as just an enemy; then you would have listened when I said Ethan was going to defend her with everything he had no matter what. You kill her; he kills you.”

“I heard you the fucking first time. How does that matter now? How was seeing that going to change anything now?”

“It doesn’t! Nothing changes now! I just want to fucking blame you so I don’t have fucking deal with my own mistakes! Fuck, Melody! Fuck!”

I was so ready to kill them both. I was so sure that Ethan was going to ruin everything because of that woman. Despite that, in the back of my mind, I should have known. I should have believed in him.

Like my father believed in me.

I was blaming her, but there was a lot of blame for me, too. Even if she didn’t trust Calliope, she still had faith in Ethan. She still wanted to save him, while I, I… was ready to kill him.

Drinking, I wondered. How would I have reacted if my father had only partially stepped back? If he had done things behind my back, what would I have done?

My father trusted me, and I didn’t trust my son. My father was there for me until his last breath, and I had abandoned my child. I knew I’d never be as good a father as my own was to me. It just sucked seeing it so fucking clearly, now.

“I don’t know what else to say,” I whispered to her as I drank. “I’ve never felt so defeated before.” Lazily I looked over to her. “So, what now?”

“We drink,” she said, taking a long gulp, before taking a deep breath. “And we pray that girl doesn’t die.” Then she handed the bottle back to me.

“How good was your shot?” I asked her.

She rubbed her wrist, stretching out her fingers. She’d been shooting since she was a child. Fighting since she was a child. It made her expert in my mind, but how many years could a body take damage and still function flawlessly? I could feel my body ache even now, worse than I ever remembered just years ago. My knees cracked when I got out of bed; my wrist hurt when it got cold, even I could see my fingers had gotten fatter and slower. Years of punching men in the face, punching walls, getting shot, or fucking stabbed, were all stealing years off my fucking life. I felt closer to seventy or eighty on the inside, than sixty. It was so hard for any one of us to meet an old age in this life. Fucking running around twenty years and shit, I swear they trained these kids younger and younger with each goddamn year.

“We are lucky I wasn’t ten or fifteen years younger, Liam, or she would have been in the morgue,” Melody whispered, obviously thinking the same thing I was thinking.

And if she had been in the morgue, there would have been no stopping Ethan from killing us. Ethan had already stabbed me for having the audacity to shoot her…if she died, then he would track us down then and there for revenge, or worse, gone after Wyatt to draw us out.

“Wyatt.” I sighed, hanging my head as I thought about ho

w we had dragged him into this.

“Ugh...I can’t.” She reached for the vodka and drank, not wanting to think about it.

The dream we had of them working side by side burned in front us…and we had lit the match.

What would my father do?

Was it too late to ask?

“Liam.”

“Hmm?”

“I think we’ve become the old people who don’t know when to quit.”

“We are old, but not that old.”

She stared back at me with a knowing look in her eyes and then drank.

Fuck.