“Hunter. Hunter boy. You don’t have to do this, son. We’re fucking family.”
He was pleading for his life. I drank it in for all it was worth.
“We’re fucking family. We’re fucking family,” he kept screaming. It was no use.
This is it, you fuck. Shut up and look at me.
The old man fell silent except for the labored breath sputtering out of his mouth. I stared down at him and said the words we both knew to be true.
“You’re not my fucking blood.”
I knelt there over him for what felt like an eternity and then watched his eyes go wide in pure fucking terror as I brought my fists down on his skull. Again. And again. And again.
With every crunch of his skull against my knuckles I was more and more free. I couldn’t stop. This was a beating that had been welling up inside me for decades and it wasn’t going to end until I goddamn said so. It didn’t matter if he was already dead. He was getting off easy as far as I was concerned.
As the old man’s blood covered my body with every crash of my fist, I heard nothing else, I saw nothing else. The animal was uncaged and there was no one to hold him back.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice calling me calmly back from hell.
“Hunter. Hunter, that’s enough. It’s done.”
I pulled myself back and knelt over the mangled body that used to be my piece of shit father. All the hate and violence in my bones had just been unleashed on him and there was barely anything left recognizable.
“Hunter, baby. Come here.”
I looked up to see Kelly standing beside me.
She wasn’t scared and there were no more tears in her eyes. She stared down at me and placed her hand on my head.
She was just as fucking beautiful as the moment I set eyes on her.
I let my body fall backwards, sat on the ground, and pulled out a cigarette. Kelly sat next to me and I put my arm around her as she let her head fall on my chest. I lit my cigarette and exhaled toward the sun. Lucas sat down on my other side and just stared at the body of the old man who lay destroyed in front of him.
I wish there would have been someone alive to take our fucking picture.
It was a goddamn beautiful moment.
A new family had been created, had been fused together, in the blood of the old.
Chapter 53
Kelly
I LOOKED OUT TOWARD THE mountains as I sat with my head buried in Hunter’s chest. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I wanted to just curl up in his arms and sleep. I could feel his heart beating and I could smell the mixture of sweat and blood on his skin. Part of me didn’t believe any of it was real. Like I was going to wake up in my home covered in sweat and gasping for air as I came out of a feverish dream. But as I heard the crackling of his cigarette and felt his arm go around me, I knew I wasn’t dreaming. His massive hand gripped my shoulder and pulled me closer to him and I opened my eyes to look up at him.
His sweat and blood soaked face glistened as the sun crept out from behind a cloud and shined down on the destruction that had just fallen at his hands. I looked over at Lucas, sitting on his other side.
How would we come back from this? How would things ever go back to normal?
As I turned my head and let my eyes run over the limp, dead body of the Boston gangster that lay in front of me, I knew that they wouldn’t. Things would not go back to the way they had been. A person couldn’t unsee something like this. My life as I knew it was over. Lucas’s childhood was over too. We had both been dragged into Hunter’s world and there was no going back. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, but I wasn’t sad. I was just overcome by it all.
I thought back to earlier in the day. Up in the bedroom, Hunter standing up from our bed, me lying there beneath him. He’d been going to tend to Lucas. In that moment, I had felt nothing but pure happiness, like my life was just how it should be. Now, sitting here with the two of them and all the carnage around us, I felt the exact same.
When I had put on my housecoat and walked to the bedroom window, only to see a knife at Lucas’s throat, I felt terror. When two men came crashing into the room moments later and dragged me downstairs, I felt terror. As they dug a knife into Hunter’s back while I stood by helplessly, I felt terror. It was a terror that this life, my new life, was over. Not for one second had I wished I could go back to before I’d met Hunter.