Page 74 of His Toy

“Admirable of you to take after your mother,” he said. “A pity that you took after her weakness too. Great things could have come to her, you know, and to you. But in the end, she was just a whore. And you are nothing more than a whore’s child.” I clenched my fists, and the guards tightened their grips on me. “Now, now, Vander, I know I should’ve killed you a long time ago, but please, don’t make this any harder than it already is. You are still my son. And I am rather fond of you, you know. Your plan to overtake me was quite reckless, and I admire that.”

He walked back and forth between the cells, glancing at the cages. “So this is where you kept them? Quite sadistic.” He grinned to himself. I wanted to punch that smug look off of his face. “You planned to kill my people in front of me?” Eric laughed. “They meant nothing to me. Did you realize that?” Heather had helped me figure that out. Their lives wouldn’t affect Eric, like my mother’s hadn’t. The men standing by his sides barely flinched at those words. How could they take this? Fear kept them in place too. Like fear had done to me, so many years ago. We were the same, weren’t we? “It is interesting though,” Eric continued. “The owner of a billion-dollar security company. I do take some pride in your—” he looked at me, scrunched his nose, then said, “—relations with myself. But taking my people was quite a pain. I don’t care about their lives, but what they fulfill, you know? Rebuilding my army. My horde. It’s not easy at my age.”

Like I gave a shit about how old he was or how hard it was to build a new army of fear-filled followers.

“We looked into taking your men, executing them one by one, but what is the point in that?” Eric laughed. “With you dead, and me as your father, I can arrange for the acquisition of your company. And those men? That capital. I’d be a fool to let it go to waste for some petty revenge.”

He stepped closer, close enough that I could see the stains on his teeth. Step closer, fucker.

“But then I had an idea. There was one woman missing from the group, wasn’t there? She was new to me, but still, she had been taken away, put in a hospital. She didn’t mean anything to you either, but her sister now, her sister was close to you. You even invited her into my home.”

Heather.

“Grant will protect her,” I said.

“But if Grant is occupied, what then?” he said. “A car accident? A fire at the clinic? Tell me, Vander, what will you do when you watch her die in the same way I killed your mother?”

I would burn the fucking world to the ground.

I broke free, thrusting my whole body towards him, my fists knocking into his chest, but a pistol shoved hard into my skull. Darkness overcame my vision, Eric looking down on me. But my only thought was her.

Heather.