Page 45 of The Demon’s Due (Bedeviled #5)

“Aviva is not a thing ,” Ezra snarled from inside the room. “And Mamá killed herself because of you.”

“Don’t eavesdrop, Aviva,” Natán said. “Michael raised you better than that.”

I steeled my shoulders and joined them.

The two walls of the cozy sitting room that weren’t glass were made of warm honey-colored stone, complementing rich hardwood floors.

A pair of deep-seated linen armchairs faced a low-profile sofa in a textured ocean-blue fabric, and a striking teak coffee table sat atop a handwoven rug in muted geometric patterns.

With the vintage rattan bar cart and built-in bookshelves, the room was equally ideal for a cocktail with friends or curling up alone.

The one discordant note was the hospital bed angled for its languishing patient to gaze out the tinted windows.

Natán wasn’t a shadow of himself, he was painfully solid. The Luce had made the vampire so hyperreal, it was as if every atom in him had been polished to an unbearable shine.

He lay against silk pillows like a Renaissance painting.

His skin gleamed like burnished metal, each eyelash and pore captured with a vividness that crossed into the grotesque.

His eyes had darkened from their cornflower blue to a shifting mercurial color that mirrored the wildness of Ezra’s eyes.

They stood out like burning coals under his plain black cloth kippah and hair that had also darkened.

The resemblance to Ezra was a physical blow. It was like stumbling across my boyfriend’s body laid out for a funereal viewing.

My heart screamed at the sight of those familiar features rendered into this ghastly doppelganger.

I tore my gaze away, seeking Ezra like a lifeline.

He was pouring himself a drink from a bloodred concoction in the decanter. He took the crystal glass to one of the armchairs, angling the seat to stare directly at his father.

“Are you just going to sit here and watch me die?” Natán said.

“Yes,” Ezra replied in a gruff voice. “I want to make sure you don’t weasel out of it.”

His father snorted softly, the corners of his mouth lifting in a brittle smirk.

I took the chair next to Ezra. “When did this happen?”

“Right after my announcement about the Vampire Care Initiative.” Natán’s blue eyes tracked me with a terrible smoothness, like polished glass spheres rolling in their sockets.

I suppressed a shiver. “You were on TV after that, including yesterday. You looked fine.”

“Deepfake technology is a marvelous thing.”

“I bet the NDA on that job was deadly,” Ezra said wryly.

His father laughed, the sound twisting into a cough. He covered his mouth with his arm, but it fell immediately back to his side, as if his flesh was too heavy to hold up.

I’d spent the Endless Night surrounded by Luce-affected vamps. Hell, I’d witnessed its effects on Darsh and Silas days ago, and yet I struggled with the idea that Natán Cardoso could be so easily felled.

Given how Ezra’s hands trembled as he drained his glass and went for round two, he wasn’t merely struggling—the reality of his father’s mortality was tearing him apart.

Natán jerked his chin at me, then sagged against his pillows like even that tiny gesture was all-consuming. “Did you come to kill me?”

“Is that why you pulled all your guards?” I said. “Hoping I’d put you out of your misery?” I looked around the room. “Is there a final last deepfake message to go out after your death about how if people are viewing it, it means the Maccabees murdered you?”

Natán gave me a lopsided smile. “That one isn’t a deepfake. I made it ages ago as an insurance policy, but no, I haven’t deployed it yet.”

“You will,” Ezra scoffed. “You want your revenge even if it’s from beyond the grave.”

I sat in the tense silence twisting my hands painfully, darting glances between my boyfriend, who was committed to getting drunk on a Prime’s metabolism, and his father watching him impassively.

“You and Ezra met once when you were about two and he was four,” Natán said. “You ran after him, chattering nonstop about a stuffed panda you wouldn’t let go of.”

My face lit up. That toy was my best friend, carried with me and lovingly repaired time and time again by Michael until he was more replacement parts than original toy. “Fangsley.”

Ezra almost dropped his glass. “Fangsley was my stuffed lion.”

“Sí.” Natán nodded. “Aviva called her panda ‘Panda’ but you told her it was a stupid name.”

Ezra sat down next to me.

I nudged his leg. “That tracks.”

“Then you presented your lion, and she decided to call her doll Fangsley too. Cono, the fits you both pitched. Ezra screaming it was his name and Aviva screaming back ‘Mine!’”

Ezra nudged my leg back. “That tracks.”

I leaned forward, my arms braced on my thighs. “What happened?”

“We bribed you both with the Jungle Book cartoon, went into the kitchen, and drank heavily.”

“I loved that movie,” my boyfriend and I said in unison.

“You used to sneak up on me,” Ezra said to his dad, “and recite Kaa’s lines about finding a delicious man cub.”

Maybe between the two of them it was a cherished memory, but to me it just sounded unbelievably creepy.

“You remember.” Natán tried to sit up but barely lifted his head off the pillow before falling back against it. “You’d laugh and laugh and then push me away just like Mowgli did.”

Ezra wiped the wistful look off his face in favor of a cold mask.

“I appreciate you sharing that memory with us,” I told Natán, “but I’m still not going to kill you.”

“I’m dead from the waist down,” he said conversationally. “No hope of recovery, and I’m not looking forward to the Luce slowly claiming the rest of me as it crawls up my body. How long will I remain aware? Weeks? Days? I want to be put out of my misery.”

“We can’t always get what we want,” Ezra said.

“What do you want, papito?”

Ezra blinked, then shook his head. “It’s a little late to be asking me that now.”

“To lead the Kosher Nostra?” Natán pressed.

“Not in any reality whatsoever,” his son answered.

“Good, because I sold it to a colleague, with the main condition that my Maccabee son, that traitor, was to have no part of it.”

I narrowed my eyes. All of his antagonism, his every play, was a giant fake out? This wasn’t about revenge? It was about atonement?

Natán’s laughter at the shock on our faces turned into a hacking cough.

I poured him a glass of water and helped him sip it.

“When did you broker those deals with the whack job politicians? Before you fell ill or after? Did you ever intend to follow through with your promises to set up these puppet governments or was all of it a ploy to have the Authority send someone in?”

“You really do remind me of your mother,” Natán said. “Sharp as a tack.”

“The reasons don’t matter,” Ezra said. “All the things you’ve put into motion against the Maccabees won’t miraculously disappear when you’re dead.

When the public and governments turn on them and they’re dismantled, the world will be fucked.

I have no great love of the Maccabees anymore, but we need them. ”

“The world will flock to their side as soon as they stop the Luce. And if they don’t…” Natán gazed out the window for a long moment. “It won’t matter for long.”

I flinched at that cold, hard truth.

“You’re lying,” Ezra said. “This isn’t about protecting me for the first time in your life.”

“It was about revenge at first, but…” Natán touched his kippah, his hand immediately falling away. “Dying changes you.”

“Riiight.” Ezra had never sounded so bitter. “In the face of your impending mortality, you sought to better yourself before you met God.”

“Before I met your mother again,” Natán said quietly.

“ No .” Ezra slashed his hand through the air, his voice cracking.

Natán studied his son for a moment then turned to me. “Ezra will inherit a lot of money. He’ll say he doesn’t want it, but you take it. For your children. Education is expensive these days.”

“I’m not killing you,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Use the stake I commissioned. It’s in the desk drawer. Cost me a fortune. You can keep it. Tell your nino or nina that it came from their abuelo.”

“What a gift,” I scoffed. “The hypothetical half-vamp babies can play with a stake.”

“Half-Prime. They’ll be fine. It’s next to the drive with the final recording on it. Take that too.” A corner of Natán’s mouth lifted in the ghost of a smile. “Tell Michael that I didn’t always have to have the last word.”

Natán seemed indomitable—Ezra’s personal villain who’d also become mine, much like Delacroix had become Ezra’s. Our fathers’ actions had set our mothers on courses that irrevocably impacted our lives: Eva and her suicide, and Michael’s gross overprotection of what I was.

My wounds from my mother were fading, but I had the luxury of working things out with her.

Ezra didn’t.

Eva had been shattered when she made her choice that tragic day.

If someone else had been with her after she learned the truth, would they have supported her to work through it?

Would Ezra not have been left alone with a man who took his guilt and his grief and twisted it into a blade he wielded at the world?

A man who was trying with what little time he had left to fix the devastation he’d wrought. I sighed. It wasn’t for me to say this was a matter of too little, too late.

Suddenly, Ezra threw his glass against the wall. It shattered with a devastating sharpness, a punctuation to the heartbroken look on my boyfriend’s face.

I reached for him again, but he stood up without looking at me.

“Leave us, please,” he said.

“No way.” I stood up and planted myself in his path. “You are not in the right frame of mind to make this decision, and it’s not something you can undo.”

“Mi cielo.” The charming smile he unleashed on me was edged in darkness and desperation.

“This isn’t closure and it isn’t mercy,” I said.

“She’s right, mijo. You’ll hate yourself for this,” Natán said.

I propped my hands on my hips. “But I’ll live with it, no problem? Why? Because I’m a half shedim?”

“Because if you don’t, I will leak it to the Authority that Natán Cardoso is unprotected, and they will send someone else. Someone who won’t show compassion when they end my life.”

“You don’t deserve compassion. And you certainly don’t deserve it from me.”

“That is true,” Natán said. “But Ezra does. Please, Aviva. Do this for him. Help him put the past behind him once and for all. Tikkun olam.”

That wasn’t—I clenched my fists. Orthodox Judaism prohibited suicide, and for Natán to ask for it when he’d kept up his faith all these years as a vampire?

I closed my eyes. I was a firm believer in a person’s right to die on their own terms, and with anyone else, even my own mother, I’d like to think I’d accede to their last wish, but this situation was too fraught with tragedy.

It was inconceivable that Ezra would look at me the same way. He might be grateful now, but one day, the loss would hit him, and he’d remember that I took his father from him.

I opened my eyes with a slow exhale. “I can’t.”

“Avi.”

The stake Ezra held spoke of time and patience, whittled from a pale wood with such care that its natural grain had become part of the artistry.

Delicate whorls spiraled up its length, each ring worked into the piece in such a way that it seemed almost liquid.

The grip was lovingly worn to a subtle hollow that would nestle against the palm, while the tip sung with deadly precision.

It was beautiful in the way of things that had been reduced to their purest essence. A masterpiece intended for one thing and one thing only: death.

Ezra stepped forward. “We’ll do it together.”

I gnawed the inside of my cheek, studying every nuance of his expression. Had he displayed cautious hope or steely determination, I’d have refused, but there was only love in its most fundamental form.

His eyes held mine, steady and clear.

This wasn’t him asking me to carry his burden or trying to shoulder it alone. We’d carry this weight the same way we carried everything else from now on: together, until the end.

I nodded and followed him to the bed.

Ezra took his dad’s hand.

Natán attempted to close his fingers around Ezra’s, but they wouldn’t take hold. A tear streaked his cheek. “Perdóneme. Te amo, mijo.”

“Te amo, Papá.” Ezra said in a rough voice, his eyes damp. He kissed his father’s forehead.

Natán hooked a shaking index finger around Ezra’s pinky. “Thank you, Aviva. There’s a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Glenfarclas in the living room. Give it to Michael for me, please?”

“I will.” I tasted tears when I spoke.

He closed his eyes. “Then I am ready.”

Ezra held the stake out, and I placed my hand above his on the grip. We lowered the tip to Natán’s heart.

I managed to lock eyes with my boyfriend, despite him being a blurry lump right now.

We pushed the stake in. It really was exceptional craftsmanship. I’d ripped up pieces of paper with more effort.

The vampire gave a shuddery sigh and fell still.

Natán Cardoso was no more.

Ezra gazed down at his father for a long moment, our hands still on the stake. “Tell the Authority it’s done,” he said and walked out of the room.