And I didn’t give it to him. I couldn’t. Dad wouldn’t have wanted it. Mike and Josiah wouldn’t have understood it. The weight of my name suffocated me under the burden of our revenge. Max wouldn’t die, but they’d expect me to forget that he lived.
And I couldn’t.
Reed helped me into the car. Bumper bumped as Nicholas quietly gave instruction to his brother. She was too used to her father and uncles’ voices. Loved the sound.
She wouldn’t remember them once she was born. Once it was over.
Once I was gone. If I could leave.
It was too much to think of now, not while my hands shook and the chills overwhelmed me in shock.
The car pulled from the estate and passed through the redwood forest, clutching at the shadows in spindly branches. I let my eyes drift to the mirror. One last look at the source of my nightmare, and then it’d be over.
The orange fireball filled the sky, spreading over the top of the mansion in ghastly flames.
The harrowing soundwave of the crash followed.
“Nick!” I gripped his arm. “Oh, God, the helicopter!”
The car squealed to the stop as Nicholas jammed the brake and spun us one hundred and eighty degrees to face the Bennett Estate once more.
Flames leapt into the sky, and a quick spray of metal debris rained against the front yard.
The helicopter crashed in a dire ball of flames.
The Bennett Estate was burning.
The flames lashed the estate.
Thick, enraged towers of crackling orange and violent gold rippled over the roof of the mansion, blazing waves of fire into the sky.
Nothing remained of the helicopter.
Chunks of charred metal littered the front lawn. Nicholas parked, but he pointed at me.
“Stay in the car.”
I rarely listened to him before. I wouldn’t start now.
But it was a mistake. The acrid smoke soiled the air. I tasted the grimy, oil-soaked particles in my throat. My chest ached without the bitter thickness.
I coughed and ignored it.
“Fuck!” Reed stared at the roof. “Jesus…did he…is Max—”
Nicholas shouted. “Sarah, stay here! Reed, let’s go.”
“Max is a better pilot than that,” Reed said. “He wouldn’t crash…no one could survive that.”
Fire tinted the world a terrible orange—charred and ashen and cratered with pitted rage.
No. It wasn’t about survival. It wasn’t about death.
The flames didn’t carry Darius Bennett home.
They heralded his return.
“He’s alive.” My words blazed with despair and finality. “He survived.”
Nicholas pushed Reed, shaking him from the trance that trapped him within the flaring orange. “You go look for Max.”
Reed didn’t answer. He bolted into the house, sprinting to the stairs to reach his brother.
I knew what he would find, and it wouldn’t be Max. Only evil. Only a monster strengthened by the hell he wrought on earth.
Nicholas pinned my arms at my side. “Sarah, stay here—”
“He’s alive.” I shared Nicholas’s gaze, fierce and gold, fueled by the same flames that roared from above. “I can feel it. Darius is alive.”
“He’s not—”
“I was wrong to let him go. I thought it would end without me. I was wrong.”
“Sarah, you aren’t making sense.”
“He killed my brothers.” I broke down and screamed the word. “Josiah and Mike and Max! He killed my brothers! And now he’s waiting for me.”
“Sarah, no.”
“I thought we could escape it, but I was wrong. This feud consumes us. Every minute of every day. People get hurt. People die. It ends now. Like it should have ended before.”
“What end, Sarah?” Nicholas grabbed my hand. “There is no end to this. There’s only more blood and murder and nightmare.”
“That’s all there’s ever been!” I didn’t let him hold me. Didn’t let him stop me. “There has to be something else in this life!”
“There is! There’s us!” He followed, shouting, forcing me to listen to words I couldn’t handle and a truth I refused to accept. “Stay here. Wait for me.”
“He’s not yours to kill.”
“He’s isn’t anyone’s to kill! He’s only a monster to those who let him control them. His death won’t bring your brothers back. It won’t save Max.” His voice cracked over the name, jarred and broken. “He has a power over you because you let him possess it.”
Then why shouldn’t I be the one to end it?
His power, the fear, the rage. The feud between our families.
It answered in vengeance and revenge and blood.
I had no other way to accept what had happened. I couldn’t grieve and mourn and hate if I didn’t kill Darius myself.
Because otherwise, the forgiveness and pain and healing had to come from me. And no matter how much I survived, no matter how many times I faced the devil and scarred from his touch and stood up after I had been tossed to the ground, I wasn’t strong enough to accept what happened.
The Bennetts stole my family.
They humiliated me, hurt me, raped me.
They forced me to betray my name.
I loved them.
I hated them.
And the obsession consumed me just as the fires chewed through the barren estate filled with vile truths and bloody memories.
I needed Darius’s death because I had nothing else.
The flames leapt through the rooms and halls, feasting on the wooden frames, warped and rotted beneath the pristine stones. The fire spread too quickly. Rolling, thick smoke poured from the floors above. The electricity popped, plunging the estate into unnatural blackness.
I rushed for the stairs.
Damned my lungs. My coughing. The aching agony.
Reed’s gun trembled in my hands, loaded with a terrible purpose.
Nicholas followed me through the estate, his hands wrapping over me as I faltered, tripping over the darkness and sinking to my knees in a blinding cough. The hacking wheeze dizzied my vision and wracked me in a quick pain.
I didn’t stop. Nicholas called for me, and the desperation in his voice turned to a shout.
I knew where to find Darius.
And he waited for me.
I burst through the parlor, a smoking room, where the Bennetts had first captured me and forced me to present myself, my body, my very pride. The room was dark, haloed by the only contained fire in the estate, tucked within the mammoth stone hearth.
Darius limped, bloody and bruised and weakened. He hobbled, almost broken, covered in burns. He survived the crash by a curse of pure hate and sin.
He turned from the mantle, rearranging the delicate garland that had reserved a hallowed place for a silver framed picture I thought he displayed only to insult me.
His wedding picture with Mom.
The frame clutched in his swollen, gnarled hand, and the image of their first kiss as husband and wife defiled everything good and holy that existed in marriage.
Why had he come to save it?
In a burning mansion of extravagance and fortune, Darius saved a silver framed photograph. A memory.
A memento of an Atwood.
The gun rose. Trembled in my hand. Smoke coiled within the estate, blackening the grand hall and threatening to descend from the upper levels.
What was I doing here? Endangering myself? Endangering Bumper.
I chased a specter of blood. I hunted for vengeance.
I channeled my father.
This wasn’t the end I wanted.
“This isn’t about the feud anymore,” I said. “It’s not about Atwood and Bennett. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s not avenging an evil or forgiving your sins.”
I pointed the gun at him.
“This is about me.”
“Then perhaps your aim is off, my dear.”