SWNOVELS Tiny Dark Deeds: Chapter 50
Royal
“She got lucky tonight, Royal. Real lucky.” Knight Reed panned over to my car, my wife sitting inside. She’d gotten in after saying goodbye to Ramses Mallick. He had his own car parked away from the scene, and a couple of our military guys had taken him to get it. Knight’s lips turned down. “We weren’t even sure if we were going to get in tonight, but she managed to.”
It hadn’t taken us terribly long to find my father, but that hadn’t been the problem. He’d been under the eye of many people and hadn’t made it easy to get to him.
“How did she then?” I asked, and Knight braced his arms.
“The place had virtually no security,” he said, shocking me. “Floor was basically completely clear, which was how we got in.”
That didn’t make sense.
“Like I said, she was lucky, and even more lucky because she hadn’t been caught on any security footage. Our guys went to turn off the systems themselves, but it’d already been done. Apparently, the power went out in the whole hotel before that, and the feeds hadn’t come back on with it.”
Crazy.
“So you don’t have any footage of what actually happened?” I wondered about the details, but honestly, not that much. My father was gone.
Finally gone.
I thought I’d feel something more about that, but I think my father had been dead to me for quite a long time. There wasn’t anything to feel, and after the bullshit he’d been pulling in our lives for over twenty years…
My team was in the process of working on what we were doing as far as the Mallick shares Sloane had signed over, and it only helped that my father wouldn’t be in the way to stall the process. There was a loophole in the paperwork Sloane had signed that my father had failed to tell her about, and I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t shared this detail with her. Knight and his online security team had been able to get a copy of what she’d signed, and she, gratefully, had a few months grace period to reverse her decision. This whole mess would be rectified quickly, and my son wouldn’t be basically handed down blood money. My father had left all the shares to Dorian in the event of my dad’s death, but a legacy like this I tried to keep away from my son. One of power and greed. My son and I weren’t like my father.
We were better.
“No, we don’t. I’m going to have our guys keep working on it, though,” Knight continued, staring at December in the car again. “We’ll figure out who did this.”
Again, my concerns lay elsewhere, and after tonight, my father would be a distant memory. He’d be nothing but a missing person starting today, and this was something my friends and I were in the process of finishing. Jax was overseeing the cleanup upstairs as we spoke. Once the room was wiped and floor clear, my father’s body would be properly disposed of, and then that would be it. He’d be gone, and hopefully, his dark legacy gone with him.
I left my friends to do that, something they volunteered for. Knight and Jax let me go back to my wife and Ramses to his own. They’d taken our burden for us.
They’d relieved us of more suffering.
*
I tended to my wife later that night, took care of her, listened to her. She’d had no business trying to handle my father herself, and it’d been foolish.
If I lost her…
So many things could have gone wrong today, my son without a mother. I couldn’t imagine a life in which I didn’t have Em in it, and the only thing that kept me sane was that things hadn’t turned out that way. December was safe, and I was there to help her wash the blood away. We showered for a long time that night while I held her, the woman so goddamn strong and frustrating.
But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
After she was clean, we went to bed and chose not to call Dorian until the morning. It was late, and we didn’t want to wake him. He’d be coming home to us not long after that, though, and to a safe home. This family had suffered so much in the last year.
“Why couldn’t I do it?” December asked me in the night, my arm around her, her face on my chest. She looked up at me. “Why couldn’t I just walk away from him?”
She’d asked me this in the shower, wondering why, when she had found my father, she hadn’t been able to just leave him to his own demise. We’d come to find out, my father had been shot in the rib cage three times and the murder weapon had never been found. The gun at the scene had been December’s, unused, and our team had taken it with plans to dispose of it.
December buried her face in my neck, so warm, soft. She danced delicate fingers over my chest, each touch always giving me life. She pinched her eyes shut. “I even tried to help him.”
Jax had told me about that, how she’d gone in and tried to stop the bleeding. That was why she’d had all my father’s blood all over her. She’d been trying to help him, and even after she couldn’t, she’d stayed.
“Because you didn’t want him to die alone.” My wife’s lashes fanned in my direction after what I said, and I cupped her face, her eyes closing. I pressed my lips to her hair. “Because you’re a good person, and you can’t watch people suffer.”
I honestly didn’t know what would have happened had she found my father first. She told me how she’d threatened him, how she’d met with him and warned him. She’d said if he messed with our family, she’d come for him herself, and that was exactly what she had done. Would she have been able to go through with it? I didn’t know, but gratefully, she wouldn’t ever have to find out. She’d been kept out of this for a reason, all our wives had been. If someone had to get blood on their hands, it’d be my brothers and me. It was our sacrifice and cross to bear. My father may have helped bring me into this world, but I had no problem taking him out of it. The world and our families were better off without him.
“That’s why you gave him another chance too,” she said, her smile small. She touched my face, her fingers gliding over my stubble. “Because you’re a good person.”
She used to have to tell me that all the time, nearly every night when she did. She used to have to remind me, and it had taken me a long time before I’d actually started believing her. My father and his abuse had left me with so much rage over the years. He’d blamed me for things and his own suffering my entire life. The loss of my mother and sister had broken my father, and he’d chosen to turn into that monster he ultimately became.
But that didn’t have to be my story.
I had a wife I adored and a wonderful son. I had a built-in family of friends, and a new story I’d been at the forefront of creating. I’d chosen a different path. Em and I both had. We could have suffered under the brevity of our pain.
We’d chosen to rise.