Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
That is presuming he didn’t try to have me dealt with first.
The problem with this situation and situations like it is that until and unless everyone involved in creating it is resolved (by which I mean dead), there is never rest. There is never peace. And all those in this room know it.
I don’t know if my father’s absurd “offer” is based exclusively on retribution or if there’s some hint of sincerity behind it, but I do know that he never intended it as a real proposal. I know because I am him and he is me. I know much of what I know because I learned it from him. Give someone hope and belief and then take it away. That’s the formula for maintaining power. Control. Not just over others but over yourself.
It is how you convince yourself time and again that you are indestructible and untouchable. You engender an irrational self-belief in your own invincibility and fear in others that you might be all the things you project yourself to be. It is a vicious and exhausting cycle that requires constantly feeding on the destabilizing energy of chaos.
It’s fokken tiring, man.
I counted on my defeat to be enough. Just moments ago, when I let my bravado fall and handed the rifle back over to dear old Dad, I counted on him seeing that I was beaten to be sufficient. I thought there was a chance he would simply give Christine and Danny their last, fair chance at retreat. I thought he would revel in his victory, allow them safe passage, return the child, Andra, to her mother, and wash his hands clean of the matter in the waters of my disgrace. But I miscalculated. Badly. And now…
When he shot at Danny, I was surprised. Not shocked, but definitely not prepared for it. Now, in this moment, as he fires upon Christine, having just found out—as I did—that she is pregnant with Danny’s child, I am beyond shocked.
I am gutted. Dashed. Torn perhaps beyond repair.
Because her pregnancy is what I have wanted. What I have hoped for. It is what I have been trying so hard to negotiate. To compel them further together without being away from them all at the same time. To redraw the lines of the triangle. To make myself the shortest side. To find a way to honor their first, true, primary love for one another while not excluding myself from the love we share.
To try to do something, if not selfless exactly, then at least a bit generous perhaps.
But the transgressions of the past have kept pace and will not allow us to escape.
That he has fired into my two true loves—the two people I’ve ever known who have shown me what it means to love honestly and without regard for self—is not to make them pay a price.
It is to make me pay one.
By taking their lives, it is Zander’s ultimate intention that he will take mine. Or at least the part of it that matters.
I hear a scream. A loud, prolonged, “Nooooooooooo!”
And I realize, suddenly, that it is I who am screaming.
There is nothing I can do. I am too far away from them to intercede. I am too stifled by my own disbelief to reach out and swat the rifle away. I am not sharp, present, or nimble enough to snap to action. Nor am I the superman I once, not so very long ago at all, perceived myself to be, that I can stop a speeding bullet.
But someone is.
Someone whose nimbleness is historically well known.
Someone whose strength in the face of crisis is well established.
Someone who understands sacrifice for the sake of another better than I have yet learned for myself. Because there are instincts inside some people that are borne of having known literal birth.
And someone who had the presence of mind to be able to see the inevitable before it happened and was already moving to intercede.
Faster than a blink—or the pull on a trigger of a Kalashnikov—Eliza throws herself between Christine huddled on the ground and the streaking bullet headed her way.
And as it strikes her in the stomach and she falls violently back and to the side of my two true allies and intimates, I swear there’s a moment where I can see her smile.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The events unfold so quickly, I’m not completely sure of the order. All I know for certain is that in some kind of sequence, the following happens:
— Eliza, anticipating the shot, hurls herself in front of the bullet and it hits her in the abdomen, just below her sternum.
— Danny, blood all over his face, tosses me to the side, near where Eliza has just fallen, and sweeps the leg of the kid, Liam, with his own leg, knocking Liam to the ground as well and ripping his rifle from out of his hands.