Page 22

Blood.

After all the numerous times he had cleaned his father’s guns, not once had he thought about the lives they had taken. Did this mean the blood was not only on his father’s hands but his too?

He rubbed the red mark again with the pad of his thumb until it disappeared. “Me and Cassius are brothers, aren’t we?”

The band that had been snapped before the words had left his lips was the only thing you could hear as they all went quiet. Even his twin brothers, who were changing the wheels on their skateboards on the floor, didn’t make a sound.

Lucifer lifted his black eyes from the green paper. “Of course he’s your brother—”

“No,” Dominic stopped his bullshit answer. “We have the same mother. We’re full-blooded brothers, aren’t we?”

Picking up another stack of bills, Lucifer licked his pale, skinny finger to begin counting them, blatantly ignoring his son’s question.

“Answer me!” Dom pounded the old, wooden table, causing a stack of unsecured cash to fall when his father’s lips had yet to move. “You won’t tell me because you killed her, just like you killed Carla, huh?” Dominic didn’t hesitate to say that, even though Angel and Matthias were in the room. He had told them stories about their kind mother ever since they were babies, and when they got older and asked where she was, he told them the truth. Sugary, cute lies about how their mother had grown wings and flew to heaven was what you told normal children, not those who were born in hell.

“Yes, he’s your full brother!” Lucifer roared back. “Is that what you want to hear?”

Dominic glowed back at him. “I want to hear the truth.”

“Okay, here’s your fucking truth.” His father stood up so that all his sons could see him as the harsh words fell from his evil mouth. “Carla was weak, and the only reason I chose her was because I knew twins ran in her family. I thought, since I was the father and would be the one raising them, there was no way they could be weak, but clearly, I was wrong.” Lucifer looked at Angel when he said the last part. “When she was delivering them, there was a complication, and the doctor made me choose between saving Carla’s life or theirs. I didn’t hesitate in my decision, as it saved me a bullet, because I had decided her fate before we even left for the hospital. I didn’t want her babying my sons.” He emphasized his belief that his sons weren’t meant to be shared, like they were his property and his alone.

He looked at Dominic. “Yes, Elena was Cassius’s mother … and yours. Unlike Carla, she was a strong woman, and when her younger brother joined the family, she asked me to let him go. I told her I would under one condition, and she paid the ultimate price a woman and a future mother could pay. After Carla birthed these sons”—he waved at the twins, who were fiddling with their skateboards, then looked at his oldest—“I wanted another soldier.”

When his father finished, Dominic watched him proudly sit back down. If there had been a bullet in one of the guns laid out in front of him, he was certain Lucifer’s brains would have been splattered on the wall behind him, while his soul would have been on its way to hell, where it belonged.

Their father had said some sick shit to them over the years, but for him to make his twelve-year-old sons believe they were lesser than their brothers was something Dom wanted to blow him to kingdom come for.

Thankfully, for Katarina’s sake, none of the guns were loaded. It gave him a moment of clarity.

“You said was.”

“Was what?” Lucifer spat back.

“You said, ‘she was a strong woman.’”

“I told her, if she gave me a second son, that I’d let her see you both. I would have kept her around to give me my army, but she ended up being too strong for my liking. As soon as Cassius popped out of her, she asked to see you, and when she didn’t want to hand over my newborn son, I knew I had to get rid of her.”

Dominic bunched his hand into a fist, squeezing tightly, his tanned knuckles going pale white. Every pore in his body steamed as the world around him went red. The only thing that remained in color was the revolver.

He picked the heavy weapon up by the muzzle and bashed the butt over his father’s head, as if it were a club. Dominic wanted the last Luciano he created to be his true and final one, not wanting another woman to lay with the devil or have a child born by the creature ever again.

The liquid that spewed from Lucifer’s helpless head dripped down onto the pile of money with a thud, matching the coloring of his new world ….