Page 57 of The Dearly Departed

Dean nodded, keeping his gaze downward. "Yes, sir. But there's been … an incident."

"An incident? What the hell do you mean by that?"

Lifting his head, the guy flitted his eyes toward me suspiciously before looking at my father. "If you could come inside, sir, I'll—"

"Gerry!" a woman who sounded a lot like Virginia screamed from inside.

Abruptly, Gerald looked toward me for a split second, his gaze widened with concern and panic. It was the first time I'd ever seen him afraid, and despite my hatred toward the bastard, it stirred something in me. Something urgent, something young and innocent, buried deep down inside my heart, where the boy in my soul slept, hidden away from the harshness of this cruel world.

Then he ran into the house with Dean—whoever the hell he was—following closely on his heels, and on instinct, I went after them.

We hurried through the back of the house and toward the library where I'd first met Analise.

Earlier, the room had been quiet and empty, save for us, a dark and private refuge, where a mysterious man met an off-limits woman in a moment that would live forever in the dusty, cobwebbed corners of my mind.

But now, the last of the party guests had converged inside the brightly lit room. They were all crowded on one side, their attention on what was happening on the other side of the library, while two men kept them held back with outstretched arms.

Curiously, I turned my sights toward the scene that had them looking on with intrigue, and at the moment my vision focused, my heart leaped into my throat.

A man in an expensive Joker costume stood over the unmoving body of another man.

There was a gun in the Joker's hand.

I didn't hear gunshots, I thought, but then I spotted the silencer at the end of the black pistol.

With wide eyes and a heart thumping harder than it ever had before, I studied the man on the floor and the pool of blood that had slowly begun to spread from beneath his head.

His hair was tinted red, but I could see those telltale bits of silvery gray trying to peek through. I could see the familiar rounded curve of his belly that I knew shook when he laughed, the short stature of his motionless frame that was overshadowed by the amount of love he held in his heart. I saw his shirt and his pants, and although they were clothes that I had seen a thousand times before, it took a moment, maybe two, for what I knew to be true to settle in.

But when it did, I slumped against a bookshelf, using its sturdy structure to hold me upright as the air left my lungs and the fragmented remains of my heart fell to the floor and bled at my feet.

Because Leonard Llewellyn, the only real father I had ever known, was dead.

He was gone.

And I’d been too distracted by a view and a beautiful woman to stop it from happening.

I had failed him, just as I had failed Anna, and I knew in that moment, as I stared helplessly at his corpse, that I would be punishing myself for it for the rest of my life.

CHAPTER NINE

The mask threatened to suffocate me as I leaned against the bookshelf and stared at Leonard’s lifeless frame. I watched his chest, seemingly oblivious to the pool of blood continuing to spread across the floor, as if it might be at all possible for him to defy the laws of science and find the ability to breathe.

Please, please, please breathe.

He couldn’t be dead. Denial held tight to my psyche, protecting what little was left of my sanity. I had been around plenty of dead bodies in my life—God only knew how many—but none of them had ever been him. And in that moment, all logic seemed to escape me, as I was suddenly a little boy once again, begging the only person I could rely on to please, please, please wake up.

But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t.

He would never wake up again.

I can’t just stand here, I told myself. I need to do something.

Somehow, I regained my strength and found my grasp on reality, standing to my full height. A cold rush of hatred pulsed through my veins to wash away the paralyzing despair, chilling my blood and taking control of my limbs as I stepped toward the man in the Joker costume with the gun still in his hand. Quicker, quicker, I moved through the room, over the mismatched carpets, over the spidery limbs of Leonard’s blood reaching across the floor, until my hands could reach the lapels of his Joker suit.

He lifted the gun and pointed the barrel at my chest, digging its gaping mouth against the pressed lines of my suit.

"Hey, man. It's not my fault. He came at me."