“He’s going to prison,” Chance reasoned.
“No he’s not. He’s Barrett Silvermane. Daddy will just pay the right people. Just like he always has.”
Barrett smiled smugly. It was bloody and ugly, but even the sight of his broken teeth and bloodied lips weren’t enough to dampen the rage burning in my head.
Chance crouched down next to me. His voice was calm and sobering. “Killing a man is hard, Cassidy. You need to think this through.”
I had thought it through. Over and over again while he was pushing into my body and taking a little more of my soul from me. But now, kneeling before him, I paused long enough for my courage to wane.
Slowly, I removed the gun from Barrett’s chin.
“I won,” I finally said to him. “I’m going to live this amazing life with a man I couldn’t love more if I tried. I’m going to fall asleep in his arms every night and then wake up next to his warm body every morning. And then I will make love to him, over and over again because I can’t get enough of him. Of the things he does to me. Of the way he kisses me and touches me. And you… you’ll be nothing but a faded memory, one that will eventually vanish completely. I won’t be able to remember what you looked like. How you sounded. Or what it felt like trapped beneath your touch. It will all be gone. Just. Like. You.”
For the first time in my life, I saw the look of defeat cross Barrett’s face. He looked like a child who’d lost his favorite toy. He didn’t know what to do. What to think. Losing wasn’t something he ever accepted, and now that he had no choice, he didn’t know how to deal with it. I could see the mental struggle take place inside of him.
It was enough for me. I rose to my feet and looked at Chance.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “We’ll let the police take care of this.”
Chance threw his arm around my shoulder, and we began to walk away.
“It’s finally over,” I breathed with relief.
But before Chance could reply, Barrett’s blood-soaked voice reached across the distance between us.
“It will never be over,” he mocked. “You’ll always be mine.”
Rage tore through me. But it was nothing compared to the fear that he would somehow get away with this and be free to continue to torture me. Something snapped in my brain. He was right. It wasn’t over. It would never be over unless I ended it.
In that maddening moment, all the pain of what he did to me hit me like a junkie’s high. The rape. The torment. The years of looking over my shoulder. The terror that kept me running. The fear of him finding me.
One moment I was filled with terror. The next I was calmly walking toward him with the gun raised and pointed right at him.
He grinned at me with his broken teeth.
He was right. It would never be over.
He would never stop.
He would find a way to continue his evil game.
So I shot him.
I shot him dead.
CASSIDY
It was a clear case of self-defense, they said.
And to me it was.
Now that Barrett was gone, I was free to move on with my life without the haunting fear of him finding me and torturing me further.
It wasn’t revenge. It was closure.
In the lengthy investigation that followed, further assaults came to light. It seemed Barrett Silvermane wasn’t just a monster to me, he had brutalized several other women, stalking and assaulting them then torturing them with threatening messages and sinister gifts in the mail.
No one ever said a damn thing because he scared them into silence.
As a result of the investigation, Kerry Silvermane, the man who was supposed to protect me, lost his political career and found himself facing charges of his own. As more and more details came to light, the media had a field day and tore his life apart for failing to protect Baby Doe from her psychopathic foster brother.
A week after I shot Barrett, Mayor Quinn was arrested for his wife’s murder. He eventually confessed when all the evidence against him began to pile up. Chance was right. Vander Quinn was having an affair with Laurent de Havilland and was planning to leave her husband. With the mayoral election coming up, and with several business deals relying on his clean-cut, good guy image, Mayor Quinn couldn’t afford to lose his wife of thirty years to a much younger man, and a known drug dealer, so in a fit of jealous rage he killed them both.
Laurent de Havilland’s body washed up the day of Mayor Quinn’s trial. The medical examiner found a bullet in the back of his skull. Quinn had killed his wife as she tried to leave him then waited for her lover to show up so he could plant a bullet in his brain.