I looked at him, and I saw the little boy who beamed with pride and stuck out his chest, once upon a time simply because someone called him Liam, Jr. Who would have thought that little boy would become this man that could threaten his own father so easily?
“No matter what your feelings are about your mother or me, don’t let it cloud you from seeing the truth—Calliope’s betraying you. Do you think today was an accident? Do you really think that you started to lose face the moment she came into your life by accident? She’s pretending to help you with one hand and destroying you with the other. She won’t just take you down; it will take down the whole family, Ethan.” I tried once more to reach him as I got out of the car.
“You don’t seem to understand, officer,” he stated. “You are nothing…no one to me. But the woman you are slandering is Mrs. Callahan, my wife, and the woman who stood beside me when everyone else left.”
“Stood beside you? Really? Then as your business burns, where is she right now?” I asked him.
“I do not answer to you. Nor am I blind to anything. I am not a child in need of your protection anymore, Liam. So, stay the fuck out of my car and take your shit with you.”
He tossed the phone at my feet, his lanky driver coming to close the door before walking back over to the driver’s side. Just like that, they pulled back onto the main road and down the street.
I stood there for a moment before heading back into the trooper. My heart rate rising, I slammed my hand against the staring wheel.
“He hates us,” Mel whispered from the back seat, still just lying there.
“We already knew that,” I said, turning off the communications which had let her hear everything, too.
“He hates us so much that he won’t listen about that woman,” she sneered. “I never thought he’d be the one to be blinded like this.”
“As long as we told him, we can count on it to eat away at him. There is nothing more painful than being betrayed by a lover.”
“And you know that how?”
I glanced up into the rearview mirror to see only redness in her eyes. What caused it? Lack of sleep? Anger? Or tears? She’d never admit to the last one. However, she’d spent all of her time hacking, listening, and tracking every move Calliope had made since we had found out about her.
“If he can’t do it, we’re going to have to,” she whispered.
“And then he really may kill us,” I whispered, taking off the damn hat and tossing it to the side.
“We failed him by letting her get this close. Whatever the cost, even if he hates us… She needs to die.” Her nails dug into the seat.
“If he does kill us, at least we know we’ve had a nice run,” I muttered, starting the car.
“I’m not ready to die.”
Whoever really was? I thought. “If anyone had told me it would be Ethan that would fall over a woman, I would have laughed so hard, I’d be crying.”
“Maybe that’s why we didn’t see it coming,” she said, lying back down. “Because he was so smart, so gifted, so cold, we kept treating him like he was Superman and not simply a man. That woman saw it and wiggled right in like a goddamn virus.”
“The sooner we get rid of her, the better.”
Ethan would overcome this. If not, maybe it really was left for the second son. I couldn’t tell her that, though.
She loved Wyatt and Dona. But Ethan, as her first—her faith in him was almost biblical. She’d drag him to greatness, even if it killed her. I loved Ethan, but I couldn’t let him destroy the whole family over a woman, not when my own father gave his life to make sure the family survived.
I gripped the steering wheel in annoyance, pain, and anger. “He’s stupidly going to fight to protect her, isn’t he?”
She didn’t answer.
Closing my eyes, I nodded slowly and bitterly. “We are going to war again, Mel. I knew we had one more fight, at least. I just wasn’t expecting it to be with our goddamn son.”
“You know what they say, die a hero or live long enough to become a villain,” she muttered from behind me.
“We started off villains, so maybe we’ll end up heroes,” I tried to joke.
But she closed her eyes. “No one is going to win in this war, Liam.”
Yeah, I had the same fucking feeling.