Page 92 of Villainous Kingpin

My father, on the other hand, he’d break her. Bitterness was like fucking acid, eating away at my insides. It was a fucking joke that I hoped that the Russians had her rather than my own fucking father.

Fuck!

If he touched a single hair on Wynter’s head, I’d fucking kill him. Rules be damned, I’d end him.

“Maybe we reach out to Brennan,” Dante suggested. “It’s his family, after all.”

“Then why isn’t he tearing apart the city, looking for her?” I hissed. “We can’t trust anyone outside the three of us, and Emory.” I wouldn’t risk it. If Father indeed made a deal with the Russians, Brennan would lose his shit. Attack us, and it would distract us from looking for Wynter. “We keep looking for Wynter, keep our focus on her and the elimination of Gio from the Syndicate.”

Priest and Dante nodded their agreement. “If we’re to remove Gio from the Syndicate, it’s the best plan,” Dante muttered. “It makes me fucking sick that we have to play this cat and mouse game with him. I wish Liam would have just shot Gio decades ago and ended it all.”

I agreed with the sentiment. He might be my father, but it was in name only. In my entire life, he hadn’t shown a single fatherly emotion. To me nor Emory. He destroyed her life before it even began.

Screams rang throughout the house, startling me out of my nightmare.

It was always the same one.

The first death I witnessed. The way she gurgled and choked on her own blood as my father stood over her with a harsh smile on his face.

It had been seven years since that day. I was no longer a five year old boy. Mother was a faded memory on the floor of a dirty motel room. Emory didn’t even know what she looked like, because Father had removed all evidence of our mother’s existence.

But when he wasn’t around, I’d whisper to her about Mother. What little I remembered. And when she’d ask me how pretty our mother was, I’d tell her to just glance in the mirror. Because Emory was as beautiful as our mother was.

My door swung open and seven-year-old Emory ran to my bed, her eyes wide with fear and her hair disheveled. She padded across the room barefoot, the light of the moon guiding her way.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her in a hushed tone. “A nightmare?”

She had them too. Courtesy of our fucking father. Though hers was slightly different from mine.

“There are screams,” she whispered. “Downstairs.”

I wrenched my gun out of the nightstand and shot out of bed. “Hide under the bed,” I ordered her. “And don’t make a sound. No matter what.”

Father would have dragged her into the middle of whatever the fuck was going on. But I refused. Emory’s fears were bad enough already and she was only seven.

Once satisfied she was hidden, I crept downstairs. My pulse thundered in my ears as I inched toward the kitchen where the sounds were coming from. It was then that I saw it.

A woman tied to the chair. She was naked, her legs spread open with some tool I didn’t recognize. Blood smeared all over her inner thighs, stark against her pale skin even in the dim light.

My father crouched behind the table that was turned over. Two other men on the opposite side of the kitchen. One hiding behind the large Subzero fridge and the other behind the island where we ate our breakfast. His back was to me and it would have been the easiest one to end.

Father’s eyes flitted to me. There was blood on his shirt and his face. Instinctively my eyes darted to the woman still tied up, her chair in the middle of the crossfire. Was he trying to save her?

I had to save her, yet the need to kill my father was even stronger. I hated him. He hurt Emory and me, chipping away at our humanity one day at the time. But I couldn’t let my hate outweigh the right thing to do. I couldn’t sacrifice the woman that whimpered, bloodied and naked, in the middle of our kitchen.

So I raised my hand and shot one of the men. Then I aimed for the next one, just as he spotted me. I pulled the trigger and he attempted to dodge the bullet. But it hit him, lodging itself into his collarbone.

He fell to his knees, clutching his shoulder and neck, while my father jumped out of his hiding spot and rushed to him. I did the same, kicking the gun away, then rushed to the woman tied up.

She whimpered as I approached her.

“It’s okay,” I whispered as I reached for the knots on her wrists.

Father shot the surviving attacker in both knees. The scream pierced the air, both man’s and woman’s, causing me to cry in surprise. Why was she crying and looking at the attackers like that? Like she-

I swallowed hard. Like she cared about him.

Bile and acid stuck in my throat. Miscalculation. I killed the men who tried to protect the woman. My heart thundered against my chest and guilt was quick to lodge itself deep inside my heart and my soul.