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“Yup.” Taking his lighter out, he flicks it on and off. On and off.
Before I register what I’m doing, my knees hit the floor at his feet. “You need to stop this.” I grab the lighter and throw it on the ground beside me. “I’ve told you what happened. It was all me. He did nothing.”
I’ll never tell him of the conversations we had, or the things Ryan told me. They don’t matter. It would be adding fuel to a fire that has no purpose. Because I know where I belong. Where I have always belonged—with Casper. At his side.
“If you can forgive me, then—”
“We’re not having this conversation. It’s done. We’re done. He overstepped the mark.”
“And you didn’t?”
He looks down at my hands on his knees before closing his around my wrists. “You want to know what to do about Leo? Do nothing. Lucian? Ask him what he wants. Charles? I’ll handle him. That’s it. All your problems solved.”
The gritted words fade, leaving nothing but silence in their wake.
“Ryan looks at me like I’m salvation or penance. He cares because I was his chance at making up for what happened with Arabella, not because he loves me. Even if he believes he does. I know you like black and white…clear lines, but this entire situation is a tainted palette. All the colours have mixed together, lines have blurred. It’s all murky.”
He studies his grip on my wrists, tightening and loosening, squeezing and easing.
“Ryan is loyal to you. You saved his life, and he loves you for it. Don’t be the idiot that sees what he wants to see and not what’s in front of his eyes. That’s not you, big man.”
Casper pulls me onto his lap, arms folding over me when I lean into his chest. “I’m not sorry for what I did. I’m never going to be sorry.”
“You don’t have to be. I don’t want you to be sorry. Ryan isn’t looking for an apology either.”
“Then what?”
“He works for Christopher and Arabella—maybe a modicum of reasoning? You’re grown men who have fought together and killed together. He took care of me so you could find my father…”
“Charles is not your father. He’s nothing. Nothing but a rotting corpse.” The venom in his voice chills me enough that I shudder in his hold.
“Until today, he’s the only man I’ve ever thought of as my dad. Regardless of what he did and didn’t do.”
“So, what do you want me to do about him?” Looking down at me, he searches my face as though my expression might answer his question. It’s not that simple though.
“You asked me what I said to Arabella after you took me to see him?”
“What did you say?”
“I promised her that he would pay. That she could gut him the way he did her. She could take his life the way he took her daughter’s.” My heart pounds deafeningly in my ears as I recall the callous way he told me what he did to my mother.
Sedating her with her own pills and then leaving her to drown. Well, it’s his turn to die. His turn to see it coming and not be able to do anything about it.
“I want to watch him die, Casper. I want to hear his lungs fill with his blood until all the air is drowned from them.”
“I can do that.”
“No, not you. Me. Me and Arabella, and if Leo wants to beat him like he had his brother beaten…then he can do it too.”
The words war with the echoing knowledge that although I hate the man I grew up calling Dad and father, a part of me stupidly aches at the thought of hurting him. And yet, my thirst for his blood grows. It’s consuming. Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing offering me closure from all these secrets and lies I’ve lived. Maybe it’s because I feel a responsibility to Grace, my baby, to hurt the man who threatened to hurt her.
“What about Freddie?” he asks, cold and collected.
An imperfect soldier. A killer. My very own assassin.
“We need to talk to Christopher and Leo on their own. I know Christopher. He wants his turn as I do mine.”
“And how are you going to convince him to go against Freddie?”
