Page 40 of Sweet Venom

Like a magnet.

No. A moth.

Violet is a flame in its most delicate form. She’s not a raging and absolutely destructive orange, but she’s blue. Discreet, seemingly safe but actually dangerous.

Just like the fucking blue umbrella she put in my hands.

“Death doesn’t scare me.”

That’s what she said, but now she’s staring at the man’s corpse as if she personally killed him.

I’ve never understood people who…feel too much for others. Could be due to my upbringing. Even Mom couldn’t have been accused of being emotional.

My father, Regis Callahan, made me kill a guard who’d betrayed him execution style when I was nine years old.

That happened two months after he told me to kill Mom’s personal butler in the same style for leaking information about our medical empire to a rival company. I refused and even shot a vase, making the glass fly and injure his face.

Mom’s personal butler wasn’t only a great part of my life but also Mom’s only friend, who followed her after hermarriage to Regis. He was the one who listened to her and joined her on walks in the garden.

I didn’t give a fuck about an empire I resented, because Regis gave it more attention than he gave Mom, no matter how much she tried to win him over. But I cared about Mom’s friend because she loved him and he made her smile.

Still, Regis insisted I kill him, shoving the gun in my hand and saying in clipped words, “This man jeopardized your and our entire household’s safety as well as the empire we spent centuries building, Jude. I need you to not hesitate when you pull the trigger on traitors. Do you hear me, son?”

“No!” I screamed and fought even after Mom begged me not to.

I actually wish I’d killed the butler. A bullet to the head would’ve given him a quick death, unlike the torture the butler had to go through while my mom and I were forced to watch, gagged and strapped to chairs until he spit his last breath.

And then Regis scolded Mom for bringing him in and for not raising me ‘right,’ for teaching me ‘bad habits’ and allowing me to ‘throw tantrums to get what I want.’

Later that night, my mom overdosed on sleeping pills and I found her foaming at the mouth. She almost died.

Because of me.

So after that, I mindlessly killed whoever Regis told me to, because he realized he could threaten me with Mom in order to put me in the lane he’d specifically carved out for me.

We also made a deal. If he’d stop threatening to divorce my mom and give her the date nights she’s always begged him for, I’d become whatever he wanted me to be.

A weapon for power within Vencor.

The muscle who carried out his kills.

Top student.

Top athlete.

The Callahan empire’s perfect robot and the spare to Julian’s genius.

It didn’t matter as long as I got to protect my mom.

Julian called me an idiot for offering our dad my weakness on a platter, but Julian didn’t have a mom or a heart, or the feeling that he needed to protect someone with everything he had.

But that someone whom I shaped my whole life to shield from Regis’s cold shoulder and the whole fucking world is gone now.

And I’ve been on this killing spree to avenge her.

Bring her justice.

Fuckingfillthe hole her death has dug deep in my chest.