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But why not? He hurt Aidan’s mother, why wouldn’t he hurt mine? He gave me to a man he probably assumed would hurt me just like Aidan’s dad. So why would I ever doubt my lying eyes?
I hear a crash and race in the direction of the sound. I find Aidan and my father struggling in the practically empty game room. There’s a revolver on the floor several feet away, and they’re fighting over a knife, each of them trying to force the weapon into the other’s flesh.
I fire my gun into the wall. “Stop!”
They only stop briefly, look at me, then at each other, and then they go back to it. Each of them is determined to kill the other and both of them know I can’t bring myself to hurt either of them. Finally my dad somehow gains the upper hand, and has the knife pressed against Aidan’s throat.
I don’t think. I just fire the gun until I’m clicking against nothing. Four bullets straight into my father. I drop the weapon. My hands are shaking, and I collapse to the ground. I crawl over to him and flip him over. His eyes stare blankly up at the ceiling. Did he know I shot him? Or did he die before he realized?
“No, I’m sorry! Daddy! I’m sorry.”
I couldn’t stop pulling the trigger. I hold my hands over the multiple bleeding wounds as though I can somehow get all the blood back inside. I know he’s dead, but somehow I can’t quite believe it. How can he be here one minute and gone the next? Even if I know what bullets do, my brain won’t accept that there’s nothing that can be done to change this. I can’t rewind time. And it’s still so fresh, still so recent. Only a minute ago. It seems like time should be able to go backwards just a minute. It’s not that much.
I just need that one minute back, please.
But I couldn’t let him kill Aidan, I just couldn’t. Not after what he did to Aidan’s mom and my mom, and me. I was going to lose one of them tonight, and it couldn’t be Aidan, but I still don’t know if I can live with what I’ve done. I wish there was another bullet left in that gun for me. Why couldn’t I stop pulling the trigger so I had just one more for myself?
Suddenly Aidan’s arms are around me and he’s rocking us back and forth. I’m dimly aware that he seems to be having his own breakdown of some sort, but he whispers in my ear. “It’s okay, Maddie. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
It feels suddenly like we’re both small children, together surviving some awful adult situation. He feels too innocent, like that small boy that made me a valentine.
I would laugh at the absurdity of Aidan telling me we’re all okay like some sort of self-help pop psychology guru. I’m Okay. You’re Okay. But nobody’s okay, and I don’t know if we ever can be again.
But I love him. I had to do it. I had to save Aidan. But I also loved my dad, even though I know I shouldn’t. He doesn’t deserve my love after all the awful things he’s done, but I can’t stop the mental images in my head of all the good things about him that are now lost forever. All the memories now don’t even seem real as though they all became untrue, the moment his soul left his body.
When I saw what he’d done to my mom and what he was about to do to Aidan, I just… lost control.
Luca rushes in, his gun drawn. He must have heard the gunfire. Someone in this neighborhood wouldn’t know the difference in the sound of fireworks and gunfire, but Aidan’s men would.
I told that motherfucker to stay in the car.
Aidan holds up a hand to stop him. “It’s fine.”
He continues to stroke his fingers through my hair, but all I feel is numb.
Thirty
Aidan
I’m trying to comfort both her and myself. My ritual is broken, and her father is dead. How is she even here? Where did she get a gun? I can’t believe she just shot her own father.
When Albert got the upper hand, I was sure I was about to die. This one fucking stupid choice. The compulsion to “finish things” was going to be my own personal bullet where my luck had finally run out.
I got here about fifteen minutes ago. I was clearly interrupting something between him and his wife. When I looked at Margot, I got a mental flash of my mother. The look in her eyes. The way she rushed to cover herself and turn away so I wouldn’t see the bruise forming—or any of the other evidence of what I’d walked in on.
Too late.
I pulled the fucker off her and dragged him to the stripped down game room. I was fueling on pure rage, rage over what he did to my mother, what he was doing to Maddie’s mother... And surely he suspected I might be like my father… with the apple not falling far from the tree. I look so much like him, after all, I must be an extension of him. I must be the same. And yet he still handed his own daughter over to me without any real protest.
He didn’t even try to escape. They could have run away like Maddie had suggested. But he was too big of a coward for that. I would have found them, but that’s not the point. A real father would have tried.
I secured Albert with some rope, but I was distracted and angry and arguing with myself about what I had to do. He had to die for all the sick shit he’d done. I needed to finish it, but was he worth losing Maddie over?
Could I allow this fucking need for vengeance to take away the one bright point in my life?
Deep down I knew that he wasn’t worth it, even as my brain screamed at me that I needed to mark the last name off the list. I needed the completion of it. But how could I trade what I had with Maddie for that piece of shit?
I went through the entire routine, the “I know what you did, asshole” speech, followed by the revolver. The blanks. Each flash bang drew a flinch from him as he waited for the chamber with the bullet, the tension rising each time, knowing his odds were shrinking with every pull of the trigger.