Dante looks defeated from where he stands watching them. His normally proud stature slumps in defeat. He doesn’t cast a single glance at Kendra, who still sits sobbing on the floor, quietly now instead of the soap opera act she gave earlier.
We all stand there. For how long, I lose track, but soon the scene changes. Kenzi shakes her head, tears running dry, and she pulls herself from her sister’s embrace.
“I can’t,” she whispers sorrowfully. “I can’t do this.”
Ava releases a small sob of her own when her sister stalks away from her, back turned, gun still firmly in her grasp. She is a trained killer, after all.
A predator.
“Kenzi,” Ava hollers after her, but her feet remain planted in place. “Kenzi, please.”
But it is too late. Everyone has their breaking point, and even though I doubt Kenzi reached hers, the predator in her senses the oncoming weakness and does what a predator does best.
Squashes it.
Because a predator with a weakness easily becomes prey.
thirty-seven
The acrid taste of fury is hot on my tongue as I glare after the silent footsteps of my sister. Seeing her cry, holding her in my arms, it felt almost wrong. Kenzi has always been the strong one between the three of us. The pillar. Now it feels as if she is a shell of the person she used to be, beaten down by the trauma she’s been subjected to.
I can’t begin to imagine what she must have gone through while I thought she was away at college. There are no words of reassurance I can offer her. No flowery platitudes or pretty prose meant to wash over the stains beneath the exterior. The minute Kenzi wrenched herself from my embrace, I knew she was shutting down. Matthias does the exact same thing. She is protecting herself. Hiding her weakness beneath layers of stone so that no one can use it against her.
“Is she—” Kendra’s voice filters through the silence. “Is she gone?” The bitch’s tone is soft and hesitant. She is playing at being the damsel in distress when she is nothing but a viper.
Growling, I bend down and grab the collar of her dress, dragging her up from the floor. Dante steps forward to intervene, but the icy glare I cast his way freezes him in place. I won’t hurt her, but that doesn’t mean I won’t give her a piece of my mind.
“You can quit with the act, Kendra,” I snarl, shifting my hand to her hair and wrenching her neck back. Without her heels on, we are eye level with one another. “You aren’t the victim here; you’re the villain. The sex trafficker. And if you weren’t pregnant with an innocent baby, I would gut you from stem to stern.”
“I didn’t?—”
I yank harder on her hair, cutting off any excuses she is about to offer me. “Fuck your excuses,” I snarl. “You sold your daughter to become a fucking assassin. To learn how to seduce and kill people for a corrupt corporation you profited off. Don’t pretend like you had no idea, because I have proof that you were complicit.”
“You don’t understand,” she whines. “I didn’t have a choice.”
I laugh, the sound grating and devoid of warmth. “We all have choices, and you chose the wrong one. You should have protected her.”
“Like you protected Libby?”
My breath stalls in my lungs as my gaze darkens.
“What did you just say to me?”
“Ava…” Dante warns from beside me. I ignore him.
“You blame me for not protecting Kenzi,” she hisses at me. The viper’s fangs are starting to show. “But you did nothing to protect Libby. None of you did.”
“Neither did you,” I remind her, my tone deathly low. “It was your son who had her murdered.”
“And it was you who led him to it,” she sneers. “You are just like your mother. Prancing around and ensnaring other people’s husbands. Seducing them with your innocent smiles and biggreen eyes. You are both nothing but home-wrecking whores. If it wasn’t for you, Kenzi would never have had to be sold, and Christian wouldn’t have been driven to kill Libby.”
She spits at me.
“You led her down the wrong path. Seduced her to your side, and now she is dead,” Kendra keeps on, her face growing to be a plum shade of purple as her ire mounts. “Your mother is no better. It seems Ward men have a sickness when it comes to McDonough women.”
Oh, this bitch is unhinged. She is still talking about my mother in the present tense, as if she is still here. Still seducing her husband. But she isn’t. She is dead, and Kendra knows it.
“My mother was a victim,” I hiss. “Your husband stole her, she didn’t seduce him, and she sure as hell didn’t love him. The only one seducing other people’s husbands is you.” I shoot Dante a cold look. The man at least has the decency to look ashamed.