He spun me and when he brought me back, he shook his head. “As long as you’re alive, your father’s only, beloved child, then he still lives.”
“I am as much of his blood as I am yours. You’re just too arrogant and cold blooded to get it. I have the mind to kill you where you stand.”
“We both know why you won’t; because you or I will need to walk away. And when I kill you, there will be nothing that ties it to me, so that I can return to a time when you weren’t such a pain in my ass,” he said.
He was correct, but he didn’t know a fucking thing about me.
“Let’s say you do win, and that you do beat Liam and me, which you won’t, what becomes of you then? You’ll have no family, nothing. You’ll just die.”
He laughed and that grin of his drove me mad. “Who needs family when you have the world? You’re so weak, so reckless. Aviela spoke of you as if you were a force to be reckoned with, but I know now she was as foolish as she was insane. Family means nothing. Look around this room, all of them, each and every last one of them holds me in the highest regard. When I die, it will not be at your tiny hands. The world will mourn my passing. People will come from all over to speak of me in ways no family ever could. Unlike you and your mutt of a husband, I rule without getting my hands dirty.”
This time I laughed. “Without getting your hands dirty? Really? These people don’t know you. You say I’m reckless? The moment we killed Aro, you could have walked away.”
“There’s a balance little girl,” he snapped as his dull, brown eyes sharpened. “We will never get drugs off the streets, but there will not be one family controlling it all. Icarus flew too close to sun and perished, don’t make that same mistake. Take your precious family and disappear. I’ll even let you keep all your wealth.”
“I am a liar, Avian, which means I can spot another liar a mile away. You can take your half-assed deal and shove it up your ass, because even if I were blind, dumb, deaf, and gasping for breath on my deathbed, I’d still tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“May I cut in?” Liam asked coming up from behind me. I let go of Avian as if he had shocked me.
“Please,” I said to Liam, without taking my eyes off Avian. “Oh and by the way, Icarus burned because he flew during the day. He wanted the world to see. We fly in the darkness, where people are afraid to look.”
Liam took my hand and we walked away, leaving him standing there.
“Do you want to leave?” he whispered as he led us away from the doors, I shook my head.
“Not even a little bit, you planned this night and we are going to enjoy it, even with that bastard here. We aren’t running, not now, not fucking ever,” I muttered.
He nodded and drew in a deep breath. “So much for a happy anniversary.”
Squeezing his hand, I said nothing more. I wasn’t sure what to say, he’d gone through so much just to make this night special, and it had been nice. In fact, until we saw Avian, I was having a decent time. Not with the women I’d been talking to of course, but with playing cat and mouse with Liam. Every once in a while, he would look at me and I could feel it. I had to fight the urge to look back at him.
Finding our private box, we sat in a room across the opera house, and from Avian, allowing us to see into his booth.
“You both looked as if you were having a heated conversation,” Liam whispered to me as the lights went down.
“It was nothing useful, he was just trying to fuck with my head.”
“Did it work?”
I bit my tongue and leaned into the chair. “He took jabs at my father, and despite our issues, I loved Orlando. He made me into what I needed to be and never once held back. Avian is just as responsible for his death as Aviela was.”
“So it worked.”
“No. He simply pissed me off.”
“You and me both. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he knew we were going to this opera tonight.”
“Olivia?” I asked, as I turned to him but he simply shrugged.
“I’m not sure, I told no one, but it still doesn’t sit well with me,” he replied as he leaned into his chair as well.
“Did they find Tinker Bell’s body?” I’d almost forgotten all about our last agent. Avian may have finally gotten the message.
He nodded. “They found him. My father emailed me. I’m sure Avian knows.”
“He looked completely at ease.” And that pissed me off even more. He was just sitting there, enjoying my favorite opera as though he had no care in the world.
“I guess we need to turn up the heat,” Liam muttered, as he pulled out his phone. He discreetly snapped a picture before he began typing. “We need to take care of another agent by morning and have someone question why the director of the FBI is watching an opera with Washington’s finest when his agents are dropping like flies.”
“If there was anything I learned from our talk it’s that he cares about his name, his legacy.” It was what he lived for. He wanted crowds to speak in his honor. I was going to make sure that there wasn’t enough of him to be buried.
We both stilled and Liam shot me a glance without moving his head as we heard the ever so slight click of the door.
Someone was coming.
“I’m not sure why you enjoy this opera so much,” Liam said in a higher whisper than before, to make it seem as though we had not heard them.
“Of course you don’t, you wouldn’t know good taste if it smacked you across the face,” I replied, as I felt and heard the shift in the pressure of the floor underneath us.
Before either of us could speak, two people dressed in black had rags over our mouth.
Ether.
I held my breath and relaxed.
“Subjects secure,” the man said before releasing my face. I felt them drag me out of the room. I couldn’t hear Liam and I didn’t dare to look until I felt a change in the lighting.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
My eyes snapped open the moment I heard the door click. I scratched my assailant’s arm as I ripped myself away from him. Liam did the same and once he was free, he took the man into his arms and snapped his neck with ease. The man before me threw a punch much slower than what I would have expected from a trained agent. I punched him square in the jaw not once, but twice, in succession. Kicking him in the knee, I watched him fall as I pulled my gloves off and wrapped it around his neck, pulling as tightly as possible until his body went limp.
“Where the fuck are Monte and Kain?” Liam snapped, as he wiped the blood from his lip.
I patted the man down and found nothing but a gun.
“They were his men. So much for getting away clean,” I muttered.
We both froze when we heard the police sirens outside.
“The motherfucking bastard!” Liam yelled.
“Liam, we need to get rid of them now,” I snapped. “Avian knew we weren’t going to be taken down so easily, he set us up. We need to get rid of them and fast.”
To prove my point, the police started pouring in from below like a swarm of bees. I watched as his nose flared and he grabbed an agent by the legs as I did the same.
“Do you know the layout of the opera house?”