Page 50 of The Castle (Endgame 3)
I answered back: Not sweet. Salty.
A laugh filled the room. That means you’re all grown up.
My stomach churns, and I’m afraid I’m going to throw up. There’s nothing in there. I haven’t eaten in hours, but then my diaphragm spasms and I bend over, gagging.
“Go outside,” Gabriel says in a low voice. “I’ll take care of him.”
I manage to straighten, still breathing hard. “By killing him?”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I am thinking about it. You can’t. I mean you can but—don’t. For me.”
His eyebrows lower. “You’re asking for his life?”
“Please.”
I don’t know whether I want Jonathan Scott to live because he’s my biological parent or because killing him would irreparably harm Gabriel Miller. All I know is that if this night ends in death, my soul will be imprinted with this night.
“It will break me,” I whisper.
Gabriel is silent a moment. “Go outside. I promise not to kill him.”
I eye the torture implements strewn over the broken tiles. “What will you do?”
“I’ll make him go away. If that’s what you want.”
“But how? You said the prisons couldn’t hold him.”
“He already told us the answer. We put him in a mental institution. That’s where he belongs.”
“Won’t the people who helped him out of jail help him out of that?”
“Only if they know where to find him. He isn’t the only one with influence. If you want him to stay alive, then he can spend his days in a Russian psych ward, his name changed, where most of the nurses don’t even speak English. He’ll be drugged. Restrained. God knows he’ll fail any test they put in front of him.”
I glance at Jonathan Scott, at the endless network of scars on his body. “I know he’s evil. What he did to my mother, what he did to me. Even Penny. For that he deserves anything that happens to him, but…”
“They won’t torture him,” Gabriel says gently. “He’s been through enough of that.”
“What about the price on my head?”
“I’ll call it off,” Jonathan Scott says, his voice rough. “There’s a number. A code word.”
“Why?” I ask softly.
“It was never about killing you. My own flesh and blood? It was closing off the exits.”
Like the hedge maze on Gabriel’s estate, this one built around me, with guns instead of branches.
“How do I know it’s real?” Gabriel asks, expression hard. “The code word.”
“You don’t. I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
I put my hand on Gabriel’s arm. “It’s okay, Gabriel. I’m not afraid.”
And for once that’s not a lie. I’m not afraid of dying, because I’m more afraid of living. It isn’t Gabriel who’s going to survive. It’s me. Gabriel murmurs something about handling the logistics of moving Jonathan Scott. I think I manage to respond back coherently.
Then I walk out the front door and cross the cracked lawn with its thick-stemmed weeds. My knees hit the earth a second before vomit presses into my throat. I throw up everything and nothing beside a sign with faded lettering that reads Midtown Asylum.Chapter Twenty-EightTime passes in a blur of black boots and hushed words. Apparently Blue Security is full service, because the boss himself arrives to transport Jonathan Scott to a secret holding facility and clean up evidence that we were ever there.
In twenty minutes a limo glides to a stop in front of the asylum.
Gabriel’s dress shoes appear in front of me, still shiny despite the events of the evening, my sunshine-yellow ballet flats blackened and torn in contrast. “Let’s go,” he says, his voice low.
Where are we going? I think the words, but sometime while watching Jonathan Scott, still bleeding and feral, wrapped in chains and transported in an unmarked van, I seem to have lost the ability to speak. How long did he exist in my mind, whispering suggestions?
How long did I obey my father, even without knowing him?
“Home,” he says, hearing me anyway.
It’s his house, though. His estate. His million dollars sitting in my bank account.
I don’t have anything left, not even myself.
He bends, scooping one arm beneath my knees, the other supporting my back. Then I’m in his arms, being carried down the lawn toward the waiting limo. It might have been romantic if I didn’t know the brown stains on his shirt were blood. My father’s blood.
Without speaking he settles me onto the plush seats. They feel almost shockingly warm, burning, as if the leather will melt my skin. And then the blessed numbness surrounds me, cotton and cool breeze, where nothing can touch me.
Not even Gabriel, when he climbs in beside me and pulls me onto his lap.
His mouth presses against my hair, not quite a kiss.
“Don’t let him win,” he whispers, fierce, almost desperate.
It isn’t about letting Jonathan Scott win. That contest ended when I was five years old, the first time I heard a voice speak to me—and opened my mouth to speak back. My lips are too starched to explain, though. My eyelids too heavy to open.
