“But we do have to do this, Trouble. Don’t you want to know why I left you?”
Her stare finds me in the dim light before she sits back in the seat.
Good girl.
“Now, Mr. Minister, why don’t you tell us why you’re here today?”
“You think I care what she knows?” he chokes out. “She’s nothing but a whor—” The sound of my backhand whipping across his face echoes around the room followed by a muffled cry from Fleur.
“Careful. You don’t have any more nails, and I’ve heard teeth take a lot more to loosen from your flesh and bone. Now, be a good sport and tell her all those plans you had.”
He doesn’t say shit, and although I want to follow through on my threat, I won’t make her witness something like that. She doesn’t deserve to have that shit etched into her memories along with what he was going to do to her. And the only reason I need her to know that is so she understands why I have to make him pay.
Her blood—our daughter’s blood—is something I couldn’t live with on my hands. Fleur has to understand that I would sooner die a thousand deaths, take a thousand lives before I lived in a world without her in it.
“Tell her how you were going to hand her over to rapists and torturers and killers to spare your own sorry life. Tell her! Tell her how you didn’t care what they did to our daughter because she’s not your problem. Go on! Tell her! Fucking look her in the eyes, and tell her that you were going to let them destroy her piece by piece like you destroyed her mother.”
The sobs tearing from her roar in my ears as I pull the chain, lifting him to his feet.
How can someone with so much treat it like it’s so little? Even Judas knew the worth of what he was betraying. He knew the magnitude of his betrayal so much so that he couldn’t carry it. But this man…he is ignorant to the marrow of his bones. Hollow and so worthless that he can’t judge the beauty of what he was given. Her. Fleur.
The kicker is how badly she wants to be loved by him. Enough that she’s weeping for his acrid life. But she won’t be when I’m done. When she knows the depth of his selfishness, the bleakness of his sins…she will beg me to let her destroy him.
“Casper.” She stands, walking to my side where she tries to tug the chain from my hold.
I’ll spare her the blood and gore, but not the truth. Grasping his face, I level it with hers. He has the audacity to look her in the eyes as if he’s worthy, blasé to all he has done, but this one time I’ll allow it. Because it will be the last, and I want him to get a good measure of what he had and discarded for nothing.
Her hand rests on my wrist as though she’s trying to goad me into relinquishing my hold on him.
“Tell her how you murdered her mother.”
I don’t expect him to, but he half laughs and half coughs the words. Telling Fleur how he overdosed her mother and then made it seem like an accident. How he left his wife, for her to find.
“That crazy bitch had no idea how to be a mother.” He coughs so violently that blood spatters onto Fleur’s face. She doesn’t wipe it as she stares at him blankly, her tears the only sign of her sorrow.
I won’t let her break down in front of him. It’s bad enough that he gets to see her tears. Releasing the chain, I let him crash to his knees, the crack of bone on the stone floor almost satisfying.
When I take her hand and pull her into me, she remains motionless. I hate that I’ve done this to her, but she needed to hear it all from him, straight from the demon’s mouth so that there is no doubt of the truth.
Crouching, I tuck an arm behind her knees, supporting her back with the other as I stand, holding her as tight as I can to my chest.
“I’m going to take care of him,” I murmur into her hair as I walk us out of the dungeon. Her sweet scent fills my lungs, making my mouth water as it lingers with the smell of old blood. “I promise, baby.”
“You should be thanking me,” he sputters. “I did you a favour.”
It’s only when we’re halfway up the s
tairs that her hands fist in my T-shirt. Her face burrows into my chest with one long, pained howl. Just one hoarse cry that wracks through me, splintering my control.
Chapter 26
CASPER
I walk her down the corridor to the front of the building where I start up the stairs to the bedrooms. Arabella halts abruptly at the top of the landing when she sees us. Panic strikes her already grave expression when we reach her.
“Oh my God!” She inhales sharply, taking in the blood splotches on Fleur’s face when their gazes find one another. “What have you done?” she asks me between gritted teeth.
There’s no point in answering her—she already knows. Arabella knows how I operate. In many ways we’re the same.