Page 49 of The Queen (Masterpiece Duet 2)
A metallic scent enters my lungs, and I realize it’s the breath of Jonathan Scott. As if he’s been more than bleeding. As if he’s breathing blood somehow. I gag against the smell of decay.
The whispery laugh sends a chill down my spine. “Now what are you going to do?” Jonathan asks. “Are you going to shoot me? Are you going to risk my finger slipping on this trigger?”
My head turns to the side, half an inch, and I can see Damon has produced another gun. He must have had several weapons on his body. His face is a mask of cold determination as he points it at his father.
“Let her go,” he says, his voice betraying no fear.
Nothing about him says that he’s afraid for me, nothing except his hesitation. And his father knows it too, because he sounds almost gleeful. “This is what has made you weak, Son. This is what I’ve been trying to stamp out of you, and today I’ll finally do it. You’ll have to kill her to kill me.”
“No,” I whisper against his sacrifice. “Damon. Shoot him.”
A pause. “Don’t move, Penny.”
He won’t do it. He won’t risk me, which is what Jonathan Scott calls his weakness. But I know better. It’s his strength. The thing that says he’s still human, despite an upbringing of horror and pain. Despite every single card stacked against him, he’s human.
Without moving my body, without averting my gaze, I trail my left hand along the floor. Along the bed of glass that I’m lying in. And find a single shard long enough to pierce.
“Damon,” I whisper.
“I’ll get you out of this,” he promises, but there’s desperation in his voice.
A deep well of sadness runs through me. “No, you won’t.”
And he shouldn’t have to. This isn’t his battle. It’s mine.
With a strength I find deep inside me, I ram the shard of glass into Jonathan Scott’s neck. Even knowing that he might pull the trigger in that split second. That his spasming body might pull the trigger and kill me as it goes.
It takes more force than I could have anticipated. The throat seems like a vulnerable place, but there’s flesh and tendons and cartilage. It violates every tenet of my humanity to do this—this act that Jonathan has been trying to force from his son for years.
The glass cuts both ways, slicing my hand open even as it forges ahead.
But I was made for this. I have cold calculation instead of mercy. I have numbers, that tell me one death is far better than hundreds. I have the certainty, the logical proof written out inside my head, that tells me I need to be the one to kill Jonathan Scott—not Damon.
Even once the glass lodges itself completely into Jonathan’s throat, he doesn’t die. His silvery eyes stare down at me, still seeing, still alive. In them I see both shock and gratitude, both fury and an overwhelming relief. This is an animal who needs to be put down.
It’s the bullet in his head that sends him toppling off me.
The gun beside me blasts loud enough to make my ears ring. It feels like the pain, the boom of it, and I wonder inanely if I’ve been shot. Then there are arms holding me, feeling me all over, checking me. Damon can’t seem to stop running his hands over me, assuring himself I’m alive.
I can’t hear anything, the sound of the shot loud enough to take away my hearing, but I can see Damon Scott’s lips moving. And I recognize the words, in that soul-deep way, because I feel them too. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It takes twenty-four hours for my hearing to return, but in that time a lot changes.
Damon makes the drive back to the bed-and-breakfast, on the phone most of the way. I watch his lips part of the time as he speaks to Hiro in brusque sentences about bringing in the FBI. A few minutes in I fall asleep, the shock and adrenaline overloading my system.
When I wake up again, I’m covered in Damon’s jacket, leaning against the window. The SUV has stopped in the same place it was parked last night, the sun shining. It’s almost like the whole world hasn’t shifted on its axis, but I know different.
There are five black and blue unmarked FBI sedans, two police cruisers, and an ambulance waiting in the dirt parking lot for us. Damon steers me to the ambulance and then disappears, leaving them to do tests on my hearing, tests for a concussion, a thorough physical documenting every cut from the glass, every dark bruise across my torso from the impact of Jonathan Scott pushing on top of me.
It takes hours for Damon to deal with the FBI, and once he does, we’re on his private jet back to Tanglewood. I promptly fall asleep in the cushy leather seat, dozing for the entire three-hour flight.
