Page 54 of Tempt Me

Ezello nodded. “He has definitely been acting out lately.”

There was a knock at the door, and Lith let in the person with a gruff command. The guard from the visitor’s section walked in, sporting a bandage on his neck now.

“Pharaoh, this is Randall. He is a new recruit to Hospital Thirteen’s guard unit.” Lith said, and I reached forward to shake his steady hand.

“Sorry about our brother,” I said, and he laughed, showing that he was a good sport.

“I’m used to the Masters brothers’ antics. There’s nothing he can do to me that I haven’t had to deal with in the past.”

I respected him instantly, his gruff voice and something in his eyes showing he had lived through some shit.

Good. A guard for these specific patients needed to have some grit to him.

“Randall used to work in New York,” Lith continued, and I frowned, wondering where this was going. “He was working for our Quinny Pie, actually.”

Randall scoffed. “That man is a dick.”

I raised my eyebrows, shocked to hear anyone bash the white knight’s name, and that made me like him more.

I laughed. “We will get along.”

“What the fuck does your brother keep calling me?” the man said, rubbing his fingers over the bandage.

Goliath and I both looked down, the memory of the nickname not the best in our past. Our mother. Our bio womb. All any of us could remember was that word. She was German and calledus all darling. I didn’t know if I wanted to inform this big man of Judas’s pet name, so I shrugged.

Lith cleared his throat, clearly not wanting to traipse down memory lane either.

“Randall isn’t just the new guard here, Roe,” he said carefully, studying my face.

I inhaled and held my breath, not realizing I was waiting to release it with his words.

“Remember how I said I hired a private investigator? Well, Randall is one of the best, but he is completely off the record. He is the one who found out that the murders of your family were all from the same person.”

I coughed, and that breath released into some pitiful ass cough-swallow fit. Great, now I was wheezing to catch my breath.

“I…I…see,” was all I said.

The guard looked empathetic. It made me quite aware that he knew about the very story of how my life lost meaning.

The question formed in my head and hung on my tongue. I wasn’t sure whether or not to ask it because knowing could be harder than not.

Fuck it.

“Do you know who it is?” I said, feeling my nails slice into my palm as I held them tightly balled into fists. I imagined the blood of their killer in my grip. I wanted to rip them apart with my bare hands, wanted to throw their dead corpse into a fucking meat grinder so that a million sunflowers could be born with their fucking demise. I wanted to watch the soul drain from their eyes just as they did to her.

I wanted Xenia.

Her sweet little voice drifted to me like a song in the air, her warmth palpable in my hands from the heat of my blood.

“Daddy. It’s okay,” she said, in her little sunflower dress while sitting primly on the desk by Lith.

I smiled at her, noticing her beautiful black curls glowed in the overhead lights in here. I released my fists and wiped my palms on my jeans.

“Did you find me, Daddy? I am waiting.”

I frowned at her. She still thought we were playing hide and seek?

I shook my head.