Page 188 of Burning Daylight

He picks up the gun and aims it at my head, and it’s only then I realize he’s wearing gloves. Like he was prepared for this moment.

My breath leaves me in a whoosh.

I stare up at him, my heart racing, my fingers still halfway inside of Merrick’s bullet wound, and my mind trying to claw its way out of this nightmare. “Whoareyou?”

He leans in close, shoving me from Merrick’s body and pressing the barrel against my head. “I’m the one who’s about to inherit everything your family’s built. You signed on the dotted line, after all.”

Jesus Christ.It’s all about money. That’s all any of these people care about.

My eyes flick to Rosalie, who has quieted now, soft sobs coming from her, and she looks broken.

She meets my gaze, but only for a second before she drops her face back down.

I let out a disbelieving laugh, but I don’t have time to think things through right now. Shock wraps its icy tendrils around me. I swallow, looking at everyone one final time, because how is this real life?

My fingers are soaked in a deep, musky red, and nausea churns in my gut when I focus on them, so instead, I stare down at the blood-stained sidewalk, and then to my clothes, where spatters are streaked across the white of my tuxedo like paint.

My hands tremble.

“My father won’t let you get away this.”

Frederick smiles. “Marcus made this town bleed for decades. He was about to gobrokeright at the end, like a dog. The world is better off without him. Your family was never supposed to be the one in power.”

A sledgehammer to the stomach would shock me less. I stumble back, slipping on the ground as I stand. “You killed him.”

He shrugs. “I put the poor man out of his misery. It’s amazing what a few zeros and an underpaid nurse will agree to. Especially if you frame it as a mercy.”

The world tilts.

The blood on my hands is sticky now, tacky and dark. My tux is ruined. My fingers won’t stop shaking.

Lance’s eyes meet mine, and then a noise comes from the side of the building.

Loud yelling and a door slamming closed.

Frederick curses under his breath, standing tall. His grip on the gun tightens.

And I don’t think.

I stand up, and I run.

48

ROMAN

There’s still blood on my hands.

Not physically—I spent the past twenty minutes scrubbing them in the bathroom of the gas station at the edge of campus—but mentally, all I can see on my fingers is red and the memory of a gun I was never meant to hold.

My mind is running a thousand miles a minute.

Merrick’s body.

Tyler twitching on the ground.

Frederick’s smile as he told me my father was dead.

I don’t know how to tell Juliette what happened, not sure if Icantell her.