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Chapter Twenty-three
V
“Tell me about your first time,” he said as we lay there, waiting for sleep to claim us.
I looked to him, propped myself up on my elbow, and lifted my eyebrows. “Seriously? It was a quick fumble in the dark with some boy from my neighborhood whose name I barely remember. Is that what you want to hear? It’s not exactly some hot tale of kissing my girlfriends, if that’s what you’d been hoping to get off on.”
“I wasn’t talking about your first time having sex, Vee, though I do like the image of you making out with another girl. No, I meant the first time you killed someone.”
My body went rigid and I looked away. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Why? Do you feel guilty?”
“Not at all. He had it coming.”
“So why won’t you talk about it?”
“Because the reason it happened wasn’t about me. I did it for someone else. It isn’t my story to tell.”
“Okay, so just tell me how you felt when it was done.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you like talking about death?”
“Not the death itself. But I find it incredibly sexy that you’re someone willing to go to such extremes for someone you love.”
There was always such a steeliness behind his blue eyes, a hardness. I supposed I shouldn’t expect anything else from a killer. Did people see the same thing in me? Was that why I never had any friends, and most people had the good sense to give me a wide berth? I guessed it was.
“And how did it make me feel?” I took a breath. “Strong, fierce, brave, ruthless. Self-righteous and powerful.”
“So you understand why people get addicted to killing?”
But I shook my head. “That was only at first. Later, when all the adrenaline had worn off, I felt sick. I replayed it over and over again, how the gun had bucked in my hand when it went off, how he’d had this confusion in his eyes before he fell. The blood smeared across the ground. I replayed it so many time over the next few weeks that I thought I was going crazy, caught in some kind of time loop where I couldn’t get my brain to focus on anything else.”
“But yet you did it again.”
I looked up at him sharply, locking his eyes with mine. “That was different. I was forced to do that.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Forced?”
“Yes, forced. Why do you think I went to the police? I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew I couldn’t live with my father after he’d put us through that. He was trying to get me to prove my loyalty to him, but all it did was push me even further away.”
“That’s not what your father is saying.”
“Fuck him. He’s a liar and a murderer.”
“Couldn’t the same be said about you?”
I pushed myself upright on the bed, anger raging through me. “Are you saying you believe my father more than you believe me?”
Frustratingly, he gave a shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve only heard one side of the story. Your father told me he wanted you dead, not only because you are going to testify against him, but because you killed your mother and stole his only other daughter away. He said you betrayed the whole family. He said you hated him enough to want to take away the two things in his life most precious to him. You went to the cops for protection and asked them to hide you and your sister in return for information about him that would get him put away for a very long time.”
I stared at X in amazement, my mouth hanging open. I could barely believe the audacity of the man who called himself my father. To create an image of me that was so sick and pass it off as the truth. That man lied for a living; no wonder he got people to believe him. How many others thought that was the truth about what happened? There were the other men in the room, who knew what really happened, but they would do and say whatever Mickey Five Fingers told them.
“That isn’t what happened at all,” I managed to say. “Yes, I went to the police and told them I would spill my guts about everything I’d ever known about his business, and the next thing I know, I’ve got U.S. Marshals at my front door, telling us to pack a bag ’cause we’re leaving then and there. But I didn’t kill my mom to get back at him. He found out she’d been having an affair for the past two years, and it was an affair I knew about. The guy my mom had been seeing spilled his guts right before my dad killed him, and told him that I knew about the affair. In my father’s eyes, this betrayal was almost as bad as the fact my mom had been cheating on him. He said I was no longer loyal to him, and I needed to prove my loyalty. He took me and my mom and my sister into this big warehouse. My mom and my sister were crying. He had a couple of his big sidekicks training guns on us and said they’d shoot us all if we tried anything.” My voice broke and I swallowed back emotion as I relieved the horrifying events. “He gave me a choice.” My voice sounded smaller now. “I could shoot my mom, or my sister. If I chose to kill neither of them, then we would all die. He knew me and my sister didn’t get on so great, but I think deep down he knew I would never choose her. He loved her, though he had a sick way of showing it. But my mom knew she’d done wrong. She’d put us all in a terrible position by betraying my dad, and it was never going to end well. I loved her. I didn’t want her to die. But I also knew that she wouldn’t want me to choose Nickie either. She would want to die before either of her children did. They would have shot us all. So I had no choice. I killed my own mom.”
I paused, gathering myself together before I spoke again.
“When it was done, he pulled me into a hug and clapped me on the back, said he knew I’d see sense. I’d been splattered with my own mother’s blood, while my sister was wailing over her dead body, and would hate me forever, and he actually hugged me. He told me he trusted me again, but I hated him. I hated him with a fury I’d never felt before. Looking back, I’m amazed I didn’t turn that gun on him there and then. I wanted to, believe me, I did, but it was only because I knew both Nickie and I would end up dead in a revenge killing that I managed to control myself. The first moment I got, where I could be sure I wasn’t being watched, I went to the cops and told them everything I knew, and that I was willing to testify if they arrested him.”
