Lies & Lullabies (28 page)

“You planned it.” My voice began to fade. “You wanted to scope out all the women and find out who was important—who to take. Is that how you figured out I would be the one to hurt Michael the way you wanted? Is that…” I gestured to the wall “…how you figured out how to dismantle the syndicate? Was being on the commission not enough for you?”

The mask was cracking, revealing underneath his once effortless fight to show me he felt nothing, he felt everything. “I would never set my sights so low and do all that I’ve done for a demotion. What I’ve done is deeper than revenge. It’s about the future.”

Reaching out for me, he placed his palm against my neck and pushed me against the glass, pinning me there. “This is the last fucking time I’m going to repeat what I asked you earlier.” The pain taking hold of his voice threw me.
 

I blurted out my confession. “It came from Jory’s book.”

He slid his hand from my neck. His lush, dark lashes fluttered over his eyes. “What?”

“The book you took…what did you do to the women in that book? Use them like you used me? Brenley’s picture was—”

He shoved his hand over my mouth and told me to stop talking with a shout that resounded off the walls and made me cringe. “Jory’s been talking to you, has she?” His voice turned gruff from his earlier and rare exertion of it.
 

“There are things between us that…”

“That what?” An eyebrow arched over his bright eyes. “She told you that you weren’t the only one and now you feel less than special about what we’ve shared?” His trademark slow-to-appear and crooked smile tightened his lips. “She was right; you weren’t the only one. But those women had no affiliation with the syndicate. The women you saw? You might want to ask her about her mother, the one she murdered, and a bad little habit she picked up when her brother was still living.”

Pausing, he regarded the invisible space between us. “I’m trying to be understanding—I put you through a lot over the time we’ve shared together—but have you lost complete use of your common sense? Connect the dots, Simone.”
 

Shown more emotion from Catch than I had encountered since I met him, I dropped deeper into the middle of an emotional no man’s land. “
Jory
killed those women? Why?”

“You claim to remember the night we met, but you don’t remember enough.”

I drew my own conclusions. Jory had killed those women. Jory was doing many things for my sister for one reason alone: Deana wanted to be Michael. Had Deana gone so far to get what she wanted, she placed Catch in the mix to help her?
Did she think I was in the way and want to get rid of me?

“Oh my, God. My head hurts.” I crouched down, bending my knees and ran my hands down my face.

Catch strode toward the wall and tore the picture down, bundling it in his hands. “She was my daughter.”

Shaken to the core, I attempted to sort through everything to stand on level ground. “I’m so—”

He held out his hand, shaking his head. “Your sympathy is misplaced when you aren’t the one who should apologize to me.”

"What happened to her, Catch?" My question was careful, treading softly in a place I might not have belonged.

The strain my question elicited was easily seen in his body. “I thought…” Sighing, he mussed with his hair, leaving it falling toward the sides of his face. “Michael had my daughter stolen out of her home and used her as ransom to get me to kill for him. My then wife was the one who allowed it to happen. She was too fucked up to stop it from happening, or it’s possible she didn’t care. I’ll never know the truth; she's dead.
 

“I found my daughter…two months later in the middle of New Mexico. Denice, Marcin’s other sister, was expecting me. She handed Brenley to me, and…” His fists clenched, shaking, fighting against impacting something or someone. “She was given a lethal cocktail to stop her heart before I arrived. I drove for miles to the hospital but she was already gone. I paid my debts and agreed to work with Jory because she told me where my daughter was. I wanted to take Michael down for several reasons. My daughter was one of the reasons.”

I hugged myself, keeping my distance.

Taking note of the tremble in my shoulders, his face sank. “Do you really believe I would've physically hurt you? Is this where your head is? Are you terrified of me, Simone?”

"I have every damn reason to be. I don't know anything about you anymore."

He made strides toward me, stopping only a few feet from my position. “You’re the only one who has ever had the real me…” He glanced down at the floor for a moment. “You’re still holding on to
him
,” he muttered to himself. “Tell me, Simone, did you ever formulate a reason for your father's behavior toward you?"

"He's dead.” I pushed myself up on the wall to stand upright. “It doesn't matter."

"It matters more than it has before." In one step his face was within kissing distance.
 
"Close your eyes." His words were whispered across my face.

I shot a cutting glance in his direction. “We’re past the games, Catch.”

The distance and detachment in his blue eyes had completely disappeared. His impassiveness was torn down to reveal his tender places. "Close your eyes, sweetheart."

I took a step back from him and shuttered my eyes.

“Imagine a daughter who does all the wrong things”—he slipped his arms around my waist, his soft lips grazed across my forehead—“is constantly in trouble with the law, flunking out of school, failing at every opportunity she is given—an all around waste of space who has dreams of being her father’s clone.
 

“Now…imagine a daughter who does all the right things, an honor roll star, a pianist, a dancer, an overachiever who hates the sound of the word failure. She was born with the drive to make sure she excelled at everything she set her smart little mind to.

“Imagine you’re a man who never had anything good in his life, was told you were a shit, and believed it, played the part, only to find out you actually might’ve done one good thing in the world. The woman you’d played with, made her love you when you couldn’t love her, had a child she’d left to raise to someone else for sixteen years. The only reason she called you and told you, is to hurt you and make you think it was too late for you to get to know her.
 

“You follow your daughter, research her, and discover she’s the one good and decent thing you’ve done in your life. She excels despite the cards she’s been handed. She has a bright and contagious way about her—she’s pure light and innocence like you’ve never seen before. She’s the one thing alive to prove to yourself that you’re human.”

His fingertips touched my temples as I fought to suppress what his story evoked from me.

“Every villain wants something different,” he continued methodically. “Villains from birth, they want the tangible. But the villains who are made? They want the intangible—love, acceptance, a legacy, or power. Whatever it may be that they can’t see, touch, or obtain, that’s what they want. A few want a shred of evidence proving they could’ve been good.
 

“You were that for your father, and that’s why he protected you. His nature pushed you down and threatened to murder the aspects that made you who you were, to remove you from unique to the same as everyone else; hiding what they feel, pretending they don’t feel their pain, faking their lives, and becoming walking corpses. He all but ruined who you were.

“I had the party for you. I made you mine, because I wanted you. I wanted Michael to know another man did what he couldn’t do. I wanted him to experience his bitter failure. I didn’t want him to die easily. I wanted him to burn slowly and watch his own ashes disappear in the wind. He couldn’t make you better, I could. I took you because it would destroy him. I persuaded you to stay with anything at my disposal because there was no future to look forward to unless we were together. I planned to keep you because of one thing, and one thing turned into many more things as I’ve gotten to know you.”

He held my face as my eyes opened and the emotion swelled from my eyes and trickled down my cheeks.
 

“How long have you known I was pregnant?”

He swept my cheeks with his thumbs. “Deana shared her thoughts and assumptions with me a few weeks before you met me on the street. I received a confirmation from the doctor the night you made me chase you. And your father found out he had an unborn grandchild he’d never get the chance to meet the day you killed him.”

I removed myself from his arms, shaking my head. Denying what connected us beyond the surface.
 
“Please, just let me go, Catch. I can’t take this anymore. I feel like you’re…I don’t know what’s going on inside me, but I don’t like it.” I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay even if it meant very little sense to my own mind. My needs and my wants had blended together and I no longer made sense of my need for Catch.

“You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said. I can’t let you go.”

“I-I want to find Deana.”

Tension held his muscles captive. A slow-moving dark cloud shaded his face. “I know you’re there, Jory.” He turned around, greeting her as she stood in the doorway. “Congratulations are in order. It’s not often anyone is able to fuck me, but I’m not above admitting where I fell short. It doesn’t matter in the end; you can never hope to gain whatever you wanted by deceiving me into working with you…or should I say Deana.”

Lost as to what had occurred, I closed the circle, standing beside Catch as he spoke to Jory.

“I blamed Michael as the one who took my daughter.” The gentle and tender side of Catch shown to me only moments earlier melted away to mold him into a terrifying man. “But given your book of secrets containing a picture of my daughter after she was taken, I know it was you. You were the one who took her. There’s only one reason for it, and it’s because of Deana and her lust for ruling the syndicate.”

Jory’s posture turned rigid, her eyes were full of tears. “And we fucking won. Michael and anyone who kissed his ass is gone. You saved me the trouble and killed them. We only used you because you could get to them and I couldn’t. You did everything just like Deana wanted, and you—” Jory looked at me.

“
We
won?” Catch’s voice slipped in deviance and cut Jory short. “You took something from me, and I took something from you. I’m not done. When I am, you two won’t be able to claim the victory over anything.”

“You…you killed Denice?” Jory’s entire body vibrated with anger.
 

A humorless smile spread across Catch’s lips. “Deana knew the whole time she was using you, and never once bothered to tell you.”

Jory chanted her disbelief, her intoning screams rang inside my ears. She yanked the scarf off her head, where it held her hair back from her face, and wound it tightly around her hands. Tension lines appeared in her hands, and the pigment began to drain from her complexion.

“We’re both very bad people, Jory. If you’re expecting an apology, you’ll never receive one.” Catch opened up his balled fists and revealed the crumbled up picture of Brenley, allowing it to fall to the floor. He stepped toward her, a dark grin staining his face. “I shot Denice point blank, and I’d do it again if given a chance.”

With a shrill cry, Jory jumped on top of Catch and wrapped her scarf around his neck. They both tumbled to the floor. Catch remained beneath her, his face reddening as Jory cut off his air supply with her scarf wrapped around his neck.
 

He had every means to fight and didn’t.
Why?

As I stood there, watching his life leave his body, dismay seized my muscles and threw me into fight mode. “Jory? Let him go!” She was immobile. “Catch, do something.” Neither would respond to my pleas.
 

I shook Jory’s shoulders, intending to pry her hands away from Catch. When I attempted to attack her, a strong hand grabbed ahold of my wrist, keeping me from hurting her. I wrangled my hand from Catch’s vice grip as he struggled to hold onto his life while teaching me an unspoken lesson.
 

I clasped my hand to my racing heart, staring in awe at a woman who had completely checked out of her body. She was out for blood, and she wouldn’t exist in the room until she gained her fill. With every strained breath, I felt my life leaving me faster than Catch’s ability to breathe.

My gaze darted around the room, searching for a weapon to stop her. The door to the weapons closet, I thought Catch kept locked, creaked open. I stared at Catch as his swelling eyes were set on me.

Scrambling to the closet, I grabbed a scythe. I held it in my hands, my attention split between the two of them. I tossed the scythe across the mat; it landed within inches of Catch’s grasp.
 

He wouldn’t budge.
 

I closed my eyes, lacking the courage to watch the action unfold after I conceded the game. “I yield,” I shouted out. “Catch…I yield.”

The wind shifted. The air became stale and still. My eyelids fluttered open. Catch took the scythe and made it disappear into Jory’s body. She jerked, a gurgling sound erupted from her chest. She loosed the hold on the scarf, setting Catch free. Holding the back of her head to keep her steady as she straddled his lap, he withdrew the scythe, burying it inside her again. The putrid sound of her organs being attacked added to the tense air.
 
Blood bubbled from her mouth as she struggled for life.