“No!”
“Or—” I tilt my head, eyes wild. “You can tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave your family alone and give you a nice, quick death. You decide.”
“I can’t…” He shakes his head mournfully. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“I’ll give you to the count of five.”
“Listen—”
“Five.”
“Their organization runs deeper than you can imagine.”
“Four.”
“If I give them away, they’ll come after my family. Even if I’m dead.”
“Three.”
“You don’t know what they do to women and children.”
I give a throaty, venomous laugh. “You don’t know what I do to women and children.” My finger slips over the trigger. “Two.”
“Mercy. You have to have mercy.”
“One.” My finger begins to pull on the trigger.
“Magnus Cartwright!”
Abram sighs in relief when I lower the gun.
“Who is Magnus Cartwright?”
“The new chief of police,” Sully answers for him. “Fucking bastard of a man if you ask me. Dirty as they come.”
Abram nods.
“Why would he want to cover up my mother’s death?”
“Because whoever wanted it to look like a robbery set him up for life,” Abram rasps. “I can see it now.” He smiles sadly. “You look so much like her it’s uncanny.”
“The only time you saw her was dead on your table,” I snarl. The doctor nods solemnly and huffs a sad breath.
“Whoever killed your mother,” he tells me, “It wasn’t a robber.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the wounds were too personal,” he hiccups. “Someone without attachments to her would have stabbed her or shot her and gotten it over with. Whoever killed your mother went into a fit of rage doing it.”
You had everything I wanted. Everything. Why couldn’t you just lose for once in your fucking life?
Another memory. Another mirage of the past. A woman’s voice cutting through the haze of memories I locked away.
“What else did you lie about on the report?” my father grits, hand clenched tightly around the gun. His knuckles are white, the tendons in his neck taut as he holds himself back.
“Cartwright wanted the report to reflect that it was a man who killed her,” the doctor divulges. “But it couldn’t have been. The blows were too weak to be a full-grown man.”
“What about an older gentleman who walks with a limp and a cane?”