Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Without warning, she fires a shot into the ceiling, the sound deafening in the small room. Plaster rains down like snow, dust motes dancing in the air. Everyone skitters back. The acrid smell of gunpowder mingles with the woodsmoke, creating a choking miasma that stings my eyes and burns my lungs.
“Fine,” she says, lowering the gun back to point in Lilian’s direction. Her voice is steadier now, her initial panic giving way to a cold, pragmatic acceptance of her situation. “Then we negotiate. How do I get out of this alive? With my money?”
Hector laughs, the sound devoid of any real humor. It echoes off the walls of the common room, hollow and bitter. “There is nothing you can give me that would make me let you walk out of here, Patricia. Nothing.”
“I have offshore accounts,” she says quickly, words tumbling over each other in her haste. “Millions. Information about Hayes Enterprises that could be worth even more to the right people.” Her desperation is palpable now, sweat beading on her upper lip despite her otherwise immaculate appearance. The façade is crumbling, revealing the terrified woman beneath. But there’s something else there, too—a cunning that makes me wary. Patricia Hayes doesn’t beg. Doesn’t plead. This is another manipulation, another fucking angle she’s playing.
“Do you really think I care about your money?” Hector asks, disgust evident in his voice. “What level of insane do you have to be to think you can buy your way out of this? You can just kill someone, and trade justice for cash.”
“Everyone has a price,” Patricia insists, desperation creeping into her voice.
Her eyes dart around the room, searching for an ally, but she won’t find one here. Not in this room. Even Richard won’t look at her, his gaze fixed on the floor, shoulders slumped in defeat or disgust or both.
“Not everyone,” I say, my voice low and controlled despite the rage boiling inside me. Every instinct screams to lunge at her, to end this now, but I stay rooted in place.
Too much at stake. Too many variables. Too many ways this could go wrong.
Patricia’s eyes find mine, and for a moment I see something like recognition there. A mirror image of my own hatred, my own capacity for violence. We understand each other, Patricia and I. Both of us are willing to do whatever it takes to get what we want. The difference is, what I want is justice. What she wants is survival, at any cost.
“I know what you’re thinking, and I promise you won’t get away with it,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper that somehow carries over the crackling of the fire. “None of you will.”
“We already have,” Hector replies, his confidence unshakable. “It’s over, Patricia. The only question now is how it ends.”
The grandfather clock chimes the hour, the sound startlingly normal amid the surreal tableau. Outside, life continues unaware—students crossing the quad, professors preparing lectures, the ordinary rhythm of a college campus on an ordinary day. In here, time seems suspended, stretched taut like a wire about to snap.
Patricia’s eyes dart to the window, perhaps calculating if she could make it out before we reached her. There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Her carefully constructed empire is crumbling around her, and for the first time in perhaps her entire life, she is truly cornered.
The realization settles over her features, hardening them into something terrible and resolute. The gun in her hand steadies, her finger tightening almost imperceptibly on the trigger.
“If I’m going down,” she says coldly, “I’m not going alone.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
LILIAN
Ican’t breathe.
Not because of my blown-out-of-proportion heart condition, but because my mother—the woman who raised me, who tucked me in at night, who held my hand through doctor visits—is pointing a gun at me with murder in her eyes.
Fear constricts my breath, slowly slithering up my spine like a snake. My mouth goes dry, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. The taste of copper floods my senses—I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek without realizing it. My heartbeat thunders in my ears, drowning out everything except my mother’s voice and the click of the safety being released on her gun. I could cower—no one would blame me right now—but I don’t. I force myself to stand straight. To not show it. Not with everything hanging in the balance. Not with Arson and Aries watching. I’ve spent my entire life being the fragile one, the broken one, the one who needs protection. Not today. Not now when it matters most.
God, Arson and Aries. How can it end like this? After everything they’ve been through—the separation, the torture, the years of planning—it can’t all come down to this moment in a crappy college common room with my psychopath mother waving a gun around. The unfairness of it hits me hard, making my knees want to buckle.