History was repeating itself. I knew Damian was back outside the gates of Casa Paloma, broken and battered, as Victor pummeled him. I knew the rage, the hurt, the sense of injustice that was flooding through his veins. But Damian wasn’t twelve years old anymore, and Victor was past his prime. Most of all, Damian had years and years of bottled-up wrath, clamoring to be set free.
Damian’s fingers closed around the hacksaw that was lying on the ground, and all of his fury exploded in a single move, a gash so deep that when it was done, the teeth of the saw remained lodged deep in Victor’s bone.
Victor staggered back, watching the blood spurt from his arm like he was in some kind of horrific trance. Damian had cleaved the flesh right under his elbow. The rest of his arm hung from the joint, dead and limp. Blood pooled at Victor’s feet, splattering on his rough, tan boots. Then Victor fell to his knees, swaying for a few beats, before his face hit the floor.
What happened next was over in a few seconds, but it unfolded before my eyes in excruciatingly slow, clear detail, like I was stuck in some parallel universe, unable to save the two men that I loved. They both lunged for the gun, but Damian got to it first.
“No!” I shielded my father from him.
“We can still get out of here, Skye.” Damian limped as he took a step towards me. “We walk out. I take you as hostage. No one will shoot.”
“You step out of this shack and you die,” said my father.
“Stop it.” I whirled around, from one to the other. “Both of you. Just stop it!”
“Skye.” Damian held his hand out, the other still pointing the gun at my dad.
“Don’t listen to him. Come to me, Skye.” My father held his hand out.
I stood between them and felt the whole shack tilting like a see-saw, with me at the pivot point, three kisses on one side, a paper giraffe on the other. Damian’s life was on the line; my father’s life was on the line. One of them was going down, and it was up to me to decide who.
“I love him, Dad,” I said.
“You think you love him, but he’s a monster. Take my hand, Skye, and let the men look after it.”
Damian’s whole face changed with those three words.
Look after it, and MaMaLu had been taken away from him.
Look after it, and they would take me away, too.
No. This time Warren Sedgewick was not going to have his way. This time Damian was going to look after it. I could see it in the way his whole body tensed, the way it had before he chopped my finger off, the way it had when he thought I was going to jump off the boat.
Damian was blind to everything except the raw pain in his heart. The wound I had tried to heal with love was ripped open. Vengeance oozed from it, infecting everything sweet and kind and soft, obliterating the tender shoots that were starting to bud through. There was no more Skye, just darkness and dust and a plague of bitter, black memories.
Damian squeezed the trigger.
I moved at the same time.
You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.
“Skye!” I heard both men calling as the bullet ripped through me.
The room stopped tilting. Everything went still. No more fighting. No more tug of war. I held my breath.
Sweet, sweet silence.
Then I exhaled and lurched forward, as the blood spread like a red blot across my t-shirt.
IT WAS A HIGH PROFILE case. People go missing every day, but a kidnapped heiress who beats the odds and gets shot during a rescue mission has everyone buzzing. Damian could have told his side of the story. Reporters were hungry for it, but he was tight lipped through the proceedings. He had done what he had done and nothing was going to change it. It was almost a relief when the judge handed down his sentence, and the media got their pound of flesh.
On his first day in prison, Damian knew that he could walk in like a lamb or he could take the bull by the horns. Whatever he chose would set the tone for the rest of his incarceration. He kept his head down for most of the day, watching and learning. Survival was the name of the game, and his time in Caboras had served him well.