“W-what do you mean?” She stares at us with a lost expression.
“Write down everything you did to him,” I say. “In detail. Confess your fucking sins.”
“Including the grooming.” Landon grabs her hand, shoves the pen between her fingers, and slams them on the paper.
She tries to shake her head, but my gun at the back of it stops her.
“Make it quick. We don’t have all night.”
Grace cries the entire time she writes, her hand trembling and blotches of tears smudging the words.
After she’s done signing it per my order, she releases a choppy breath as if she’s run a marathon. Landon reads her letter and then puts it in front of her again. “Ask him for forgiveness. Ask Mum for forgiveness for breaking her trust. Write about how you know nothing you can say can forgive what you’ve done, but you’ve been tortured for years and have never forgiven yourself for it.”
She jots down the words, sniffling. After she’s finished, Landon reads it again and nods in approval. Then he grabs her by the hair and drags her to her bathroom as she screams.
I follow them to find him shoving her into her gigantic bathtub and turning on the faucet full blast.
She thrashes, sending water everywhere. “What are you doing? Let me go this instant! I already did what you asked!”
“You thought that was a punishment?” I grab her left wrist while Landon takes the right one and we pull her arms apart as if she’s about to be crucified.
Her feet slide in the tub as she tries to get away, but there’s no escaping us.
I bring out my knife first and slash her wrist so deep, blood explodes onto my face. “That’s for every drop of blood he shed over the years, for every time he looked in the mirror and hated his reflection because of you.”
Landon cuts her other wrist. “This is for putting your hands on him and driving him to the fucking edge. You better wait for me in hell, bitch. I’ll fucking murder you all over again.”
Blood splashes on his face and fills the bathtub, turning the water red. Grace tries to thrash, her survival instinct kicking in at full force, and she screams.
She screams so loud, Dad shows up at the doorway, but he doesn’t make a move. No, he just watches his son and his future son-in-law take the life of a woman and smiles.
I smile, too, viciously, as I slam my palm against her mouth, just like she did when Bran begged her to stop.
And then I peer down on her as her muffled screams turn into moans.
I peer down on her until she finally goes silent and her lifeless eyes stare at nothing.
I don’t believe in justice. I believe in fucking vengeance. And this woman signed her death warrant the moment she touched my Bran.
My dad and his people will make this look like a suicide, and the note she wrote is her reason. I could’ve tortured her to death or made her disappear, but no, this isn’t about her. It’s about Bran.
I hope he feels closure if he sees that she regretted her actions and was tortured by them for years to the point that she took her own pathetic life.
One demon down. A dozen more to go.
38
BRANDON
The first feeling that surges through me when I blink my eyes open is crushing relief.
Not the burning in my neck, not the sandy feeling at the back of my throat.
As I stare at the ceiling and the four holes from which light shines down on me and hear the machines beeping, my eyes burn from the sense of relief that floods me.
When I lay in my blood and watched Nikolai cry out my name and beg me not to leave him, I regretted everything. I wanted to stay, to think that I could have a future, after all.
But it was too late.
The ink submerged me and I couldn’t take being seen like that by him. I wouldn’t have been able to live it down.
So I did the one thing that could end it all.
But it didn’t end.
The second feeling comes rushing in with Mum’s voice. “Bran…？”
Guilt. That’s what’s etched on her usually radiant face, her eyes bloodshot, her lips puffy.
The guilt she projects in waves slams against my own until I can’t breathe.
“Son?” Dad is on my other side. “You came back, oh, thank fuck.”
He reaches above my head to push something.
Failure. That’s what Dad looks like. He feels a sense of failure. Like I did for almost a decade.
“Bran?” The broken sound belongs to Glyn. She’s crying, rivulets of tears streaming down her rosy cheeks.
Her feelings of grief mix with the myriad of emotions rippling through me until I choke.