Page 91 of The Hitman's Prince

“Enough aboutthis life!”

Orion’s eyes widened, and he tucked his gun back into the holster beneath his arm.

“Tell me how you really feel, Caspian,” he said, clearly amused by my outburst.

“All day, all it’s been is people telling me this about this life and that about this life. It’s not any fucking life. My father was planning to marry me off and when that didn’t work, he decided I could just die. It’s just mine. It’smine!” I smacked my hand against my chest, eyes filling with so many tears it was hard to focus on the man standing in front of me, real as anything I’d ever known.

“It’s yours,” he agreed. “But if it’s his...”

Orion left the other part unspoken, that if my life was in Vince’s hands, he would do this again. He would ignore the plans, forget the rules. He would act out and act for himself. He would put himself in danger, and we would put ourselves in danger for him in return. There might be a peace in it someday, but it would never be normal.

And I had to decide before we walked out the door if that would be enough.

Chapter 67

Jacob

Kneeling down at my father’s side, I made the sign of the cross. I whispered a prayer he didn’t deserve. I confessed to him my own sins—that I did not honor him, that I had murdered. I would probably do it again, all things considered. I told him I was in love with three different men, and that we’d be happy to see his downfall. That one of them was responsible for the bullet currently draining the life out of him. Anger flashed in the depths of his eyes, then he choked on his breath and his face softened into a kind of pathetic desperation that would go ignored.

I stood up and brushed any dust off the front of my jeans when the door to the office opened. I didn’t look up and I didn’t flinch. I knew it was Vince before I saw him, before I smelled him. He closed the door after he came into the room, then gingerly stepped over my father’sslowly dying body, pivoting on his heel so we stood shoulder to shoulder.

“You’re alive,” I said to him.

“Of course,” he said simply. “So are you.”

I huffed a sound out of my mouth that might have been a contradiction or an argument if we’d been anywhere besides where we were.

“Caspian is alive. Orion is alive,” he said. “Daren also.”

“My uncle?”

“That’s up to him at this point,” Vince said. “Up to your cousin.”

My father made a gurgling sound, and Vince dropped down into a squat, frowning at the mess of blood spreading across the floor.

“Caspian is a horrible shot.”

I laughed, because it would have been impossible not to. “Yeah, he is.”

“Your father is going to die here.”

“Yeah,” I said again, “he is.”

“Do you want to talk about how that makes you feel?” Vince asked, shooting a quick look up at me.

“I don’t know why I care,” I admitted. “He was making plans when we got here to…”

Vince hummed, pushing at my father’s shoulder and rolling him onto his back. My father groaned, eyes fluttering open, but not quite making it to a state of complete alertness. He was definitely still conscious, just too weak to do anything about it. He’d lost a lot of blood; Caspian must have nicked an artery.

“Do you want to kill him?” Vince asked. “Would it make you feel better?”

“I don’t know.”

I’d asked myself the question a hundred times over the years, maybe more. Not because my father had been a bad parent, just strict, just absent. It had always felt unfair we lived in the shadow of his rules and his presence and nothing more. There wasn’t love in the house. It was why my mother had left him as soon as I turned eighteen. Disappeared without a trace. For a while I’d wondered if he killed her, but I overheard a conversation once confirming she’d been lucky enough to escape him with her heart still beating.

“You could wring his neck,” Vince suggested.

My father protested with a low groan that turned into a bloody cough.