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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.

He begged and pleaded, claimed it was unfair because he gave me Maddie and that should be enough. This pissed me off even more. Then when that shit didn’t work, he got angry and began to impotently threaten me.

I had just unsheathed my blade, still debating with myself if I could go through with it. I hadn’t tied the knots as well as I should have, but even with that mistake, if I hadn’t hesitated for that one extra second, Albert Prescott would have died at my hand tonight, instead of his own daughter’s.

But I’m not sure her walking in to witness it would have been any better than the current situation.

Luca stands awkwardly off to the side, not knowing what to do as I stroke Maddie’s hair, murmuring soothing nonsense to her. Even I don’t believe anything I’m saying.

It’s not going to be okay. We’re not going to be okay. She’s not going to be okay. I can’t imagine what she’s going through right now.

She knows what her father is, and clearly she picked which one of us she would rather have live, but I wonder if she’s regretting her choice now.

I wonder if my life was even worth what she had to do for this questionable prize.

She will never forgive me for this. I wonder which sin would be worse?

Me killing her father, or putting her in a position where she had to do it?

Finally I turn to Luca. “What happened? How did she get here?”

Now he looks terrified. His eyes are wide.

He talks with his hands a lot when he says, “She had a gun, boss! I don’t know how she got it, but she killed Sal and injured Nino.

I-I brought her because I didn’t want to get shot.

She wasn’t playing around. It wasn’t like we could stop her, she was going to just keep shooting us until she got what she wanted. ”

The gun she brought holds eight rounds, so she could have run out of bullets. Then again, by the time she drew the attention of more guards, she could have taken a gun off one of the corpses. The remaining guards would have all been fish in a barrel.

“Why didn’t you take her somewhere else, or drive around in circles?”

“She said she’d kill me if I didn’t follow her instructions exactly.”

I nod. This impresses me more than I’d like to admit.

The fact that she killed a guy, wounded another, and was prepared to keep going and then was able to get herself here without breaking down…

I knew there was so much more to her than the cheerleader, the blonde with the shampoo commercial hair, the popular girl.

My girl is a warrior. Like me.

“Maddie, I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her hair.

She’s keening in my arms as we continue to rock back and forth, and I’m not sure if she’s even hearing me right now.

I’m not sure if she’s aware of anything going on around her.

I don’t know what to do for her. I don’t know how to make any of this better.

I have ruined her. She’ll never forgive me.

I want to scream and curse and throw things.

I really need to kill someone. I feel on edge from the lack of completion.

He’s dead, but if it was going to be done, it should have been me.

And now it’s over… and… what now? I’m done?

I just go back to running the family business?

I can’t just randomly kill men who work for me for no reason.

Then I’ll just be seen as unstable—a mad king that must be deposed to restore order to the empire.

But this thing, it’s still inside me, and it still needs to feed.

I thought if I completed it, it would be done, that I wouldn’t feel this way anymore.

What the fuck am I going to do? I really was living in denial.

I’m a fucking serial killer.

This realization crashes into me, unmaking everything I thought I knew about myself.

How do you kill over twenty people in a ritual, methodical way and not figure that out?

How could I not have known this was going so much deeper than simple vengeance?

Brian said I would develop a taste for it, but I didn’t believe him.

Everyone I’ve ever killed, I’ve had a justification that made sense in my head.

It was a story I told myself… when I was a teenager it was “the other guy was going to kill me.” With Maddie’s attackers, they touched what was mine.

The business? They were plotting a coup, I had to use shock and awe—a display of power to stop them.

And my mother’s attackers… I was avenging her death.

And now I’ve run out of excuses and justifications, made up reasons why I had to kill this guy or that one. Now there is nothing standing in the way of the truth I’ve tried to hide from myself for so long.

I love the kill. I long for the hunt. Maddie is the only prey I have stalked with the intention of keeping alive.

I hear a rack slide on a gun and look up to see Maddie’s mother standing in the doorway, still looking just as disheveled as before. She’s aiming a gun at me, and I just want to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Fuck my life.

Maddie’s body is blocking her shot. Luca pulls his gun on Margot.

“Maddie, honey, I need you to move out of the way so I can take out this trash.”

“I wouldn’t do it, Mrs. Prescott,” Luca says.

Maddie finally realizes something pretty big is going on in the room and pulls herself together enough to turn around and take in the new unfolding situation.

Margot has seen her husband’s dead body riddled with bullet holes, but she seems unfazed by it.

If anything she’s probably jealous, wishing she could have been the one to take the bastard out.

I wish she’d found the gun in her hand just a little sooner, though she may have chosen to kill us both in that case.

She doesn’t have nearly the sentimental attachment to her husband that Maddie does. Her concern is only for her daughter, now.

“Maddie, get out of the way.”

I wonder if Maddie will do it, if she’ll reconsider her choice… me instead of her own father. I can’t kill her mother, and I can’t let Luca do it, either. So I’m just sitting here, waiting for my fate, whatever it is. What a tragically fucked-up way for this to all end.

“No!” Maddie shouts. “You can’t take him. I love him.”

Wait, she what ? There’s a sudden ringing in my ears, and I’m not sure I heard her right. I knew we were building trust. I knew there was something between us, but after tonight, I thought it would be gone.

Margot is as shocked as I am by this sudden pronouncement.

It’s clear she thought I was hurting her daughter.

What I’ve done isn’t good… forcing her to marry me, keeping her against her will, exposing her to my life of crime, coming here to kill her father, but Margot thought I was doing something much worse.

“What?” Margot says, barely above a whisper.

“Don’t take Aidan,” Maddie begs, gripping onto me tighter.

We remain in this standoff for several tense minutes, Maddie shielding my body from her mother’s gun, Luca holding his gun on her mother.

Finally, Margot sighs and lowers her weapon.

“Luca, drive Mrs. Stryker back home. I’m going to take care of the body.”

“NO! I’m not leaving,” Maddie says.

I take a deep breath. “Maddie, you aren’t going to want to see this.”

She shakes her head, “No, I need to be here. I need… I need to know where he is.”

Fuck.

I finally convince her and her mother to wait out in the hallway while I get the body into smaller pieces. There would be no way she could ever unsee that or look at me the same way again. Luca helps me get the pieces into trash bags and put them in the back of the SUV.