by Moore, E. M.
That was the last time I’d ever think about vampires again. That would be my saving grace.
I went up to the gate. A guard peeked around the corner. His eyes rounded when he saw me. “Lilah?”
Nodding, I ran my hands through my hair and touched my face, knowing that I probably looked like shit. I never would’ve been caught dead going out of the house like this before.
He put the code into the computer and the gate opened. His hand still on the gun in his side pocket, he put his arm around me. “We thought you were dead.”
“Dead?” I asked, my body involuntarily shivering. I couldn’t tell if it was because of what he’d said or if it was because he was touching me, and it felt nothing like when Simon did.
“Yeah. With Ronnie dead in your room and your grandfather refusing to talk about it….well, we all just assumed.”
“Well, I’m alive,” I told him, itching to get his hands off me.
He looked at me from the corner of his eye, his gaze moving down me slowly. I could only imagine what he was thinking. That I only looked remotely alive.
How did he not know what had happened to me? The audio and video Simon sent… None of this made sense.
“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “I bet your grandfather will be so happy to see you.”
My stomach churned. I wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe he did think I was dead…but still, wouldn’t he have tried to find out? And there was still the issue of Simon sending the video of me clearly alive. Simon said my grandfather had gotten it, but maybe he hadn’t…
The guard pushed the main door open for me. Sights and smells assaulted me. It had only been a week since Simon stole me from my room, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Coming into the house before, I would’ve had a huge purse in one hand and sunglasses in the other that I would plop down on the counter. Right now, it was just ratty old me in borrowed clothes. “Where is he?”
“In the family room.”
Family room. Huh. Surely, someone told him of my presence here by now. There were cameras all over this place, and nothing went by without him being informed.
I walked slowly to the room I last saw my grandfather in. Sure enough, he sat in the same position, watching TV without a care in the world. Emotion swam toward the surface. My vision broke in front of me, fractured by the tears threatening. I didn’t know if I’d be able to hold any of this back. “G-grandpa?”
His head turned slightly, just enough to make sure it was me. “Yes, Dear?”
“It’s me,” I said, searching for words. “It’s Delilah. I’m back.”
He only nodded.
I hobbled into the room. It was like all the aches and pains, both physically and mentally, from the last few days were just now crippling me. I dropped to my knees right before I was in front of him and then crawled toward him. “Grandpa. I’m alive.” I didn’t know what I wanted from him, but whatever it was made my heart break in two.
He looked down at me, his gaze narrowing, though his face was as blank as it always was. “I can see that.”
I grabbed onto his knobby knees. “You didn’t come for me.”
He grabbed the remote from the side table and turned the TV off with a sigh. He brushed my hands from his lap and peered down at me. “Rightfully so, I see. You’re alive,” his gaze wandered to my body briefly and then back up to my face. “…and intact as far as I can tell. There was no need to come for you after all.”
My stomach dropped. Couldn’t he see how broken I was? Couldn’t he see the hell I’d been through? I looked and felt like death. I had scars all over my body. My hands started to shake. “This was because of you,” I said, my voice growing louder. “Because of you I was raped,” I spat. “And tortured.” I leaned closer to him, pointing out all the little cuts over my body that Simon had made with his freaky vampire claws. “What do you call these? Do you call these intact? I’m scarred…for life.” Tears dripped down my cheeks like a running faucet. I couldn’t even stop them if I tried.
Grandpa’s face turned hard. “Superficial wounds. I don’t know what you’re up to, Delilah, ransoming me, threatening me. I knew it all along.”
My mouth dropped open, and I started to shake so severely I could barely stand on my feet. What was he even saying? “I was kidnapped, Grandpa. Simon, he-he killed Ronnie. What is wrong with you? Didn’t you fear for me at all?”
“I heard and saw enough to know that you were in on the whole thing. You are no granddaughter of mine.”
A surge of anger rose up hard and fast. How dare he dismiss everything that happened to me? How dare he act as if everything didn’t matter when I loved him so? He was the only family I had, and he so easily dismissed me as someone who would do that to him. “You’re right. I’m not like you,” I breathed out, my nostrils flaring. “I don’t treat people the way you do, especially not my own family.”
“You’re no longer my family.”
I lunged at him. Fist closed, I hit him upside the head and kept going. I hit him and kept hitting him. His hand blindly reached out for the emergency button that went straight to the guards, but I clawed at his hand to stop him. “Why don’t you care about me? Why?”
Grandpa, for as old as he was, was still spry. He was able to push me off. I fell to the floor in front of him. When I looked up, he was standing over me, a gun pointed to my chest. A flurry of activity sounded just beyond the family room doors. He cocked the gun. “I can’t believe you would show back up here expecting me to believe your lies.”
I wept as fear rose inside me. I was sure I wanted to come back here, but for what? For this? For someone who so easily distrusted me? I scrambled backwards, staring at the barrel of the gun. “I loved you.”
Voices from the walkie talkies went off. “She has no weapons. I checked her when she returned.”
I blinked. “You were waiting for me to come back?” That guard, he wasn’t looking for injuries, he was looking for weapons. This was all a set up.
“Waiting for you to make your last desperate attempt to overthrow me. Who else would want me dead, Delilah? You’re the heir. You’re the one who is set up to gain everything when I die.” A sneaky smile made its way onto his cracked lips. “Little did you know it’s never been set up like that. Your attempt at blackmailing me for my life was doomed to fail from the beginning. It might interest you to know that you were never my heir, Delilah.”
His words were hardly computing. It was difficult to think about anything when a gun was pointed at you. I just shook my head. “There are more things to life than money, Grandpa. You can’t possibly see that someone would want to kill you for what you did to them, not what they can get from you? He left you a note. He told you why.”
“That story’s a ruse. Drop it. Which family are you working with Delilah? Is it the Irish? The Polish? Which one of them convinced you to do this, huh?”
“Neither,” I shouted.
He reached out and hit me with the butt of the gun. A splitting ache ran across my head. My vision blurred, and I blinked rapidly. I reached up, feeling something sticky on my forehead.
“Tell me now!” Grandpa growled. “You’re going to die either way, Delilah, but I want to know who you’re working with, so I can make them suffer too. No one tries to take out Jacob Greene and gets away with it. You know that. You’ve heard me say that a million times before. You’re no different. I don’t care if you’re blood or not.”
I brought my bloodied hands in front of my face. Tears of blood ran down the side of my face and fell from my chin to my clothes. “I’m not working with anyone,” I slurred. “I’m—I was kidnapped. I was taken. Beaten.”
Grandpa only laughed.
The door to the room finally burst open. Grandpa held a hand up and the flurry of activity ceased. “I’m dealing with it,” he said.
I looked that way. Guards sneered at me, silhouetted by the light of the hallway. I’d grown up with most of these guys. They’d known me
since I was little. Didn’t anyone believe me just a little bit? “Please,” I said, begging now. “I didn’t do anything.”
The guard who’d walked me in frowned. He shifted from foot-to-foot but said nothing.
“Tell me who you’re working with.”
“No one! I was taken for ransom. I had no part of it. He wanted you dead because you killed his mother with drugs. He—”
“Lies!”
The gun started to come down again, but this time, it halted. About a second later, I heard the crash of a window breaking. In a blink, I looked up, and saw Simon standing there, his hand on my grandfather’s stopping his forward momentum. The look on his face was pure fury. He ripped the gun from my grandfather’s hand and then threw him to the ground.
Shots rang out. I cowered down on the floor, my heart beating a mile a minute. Simon. What was he doing here?
Another shout rang out as more glass broke. “I told you to fucking wait.”
I cringed, recognizing the deep tenor as Galen’s. Galen and Simon? Was Kayleigh here too?
There were more shots. I crawled to the side and looked up. Guards kept running into the room shooting, but Simon and Galen were making quick work of them. I peered over at my grandfather. He crawled toward the bookcase, his hands shaking. My stomach bottomed out. There was another gun hidden there. I’d seen him retrieve it from there once.
I crawled after him, but I was too late. He’d already reached it. “Watch out!” I screamed. Grandfather turned and shot while I lunged for him. Fire ripped through my shoulder as I tackled my grandfather to the floor. I cried out in pain as he struggled underneath me. Through the blinding ache, I fought for the gun until hands came over and pulled me off. I recognized that feel, that touch.
“Give me the gun,” the voice whispered.
My whole body relaxed. Simon. He’d saved me. He’d been trying to save me this whole time. Maybe that was never his intention, but it’s what happened. First, he showed me I didn’t have to live with my grandfather. He showed me I was more than just a Greene. He showed me what a lie my life had been. He showed me that even though there were all different kinds of love, that didn’t mean that his was any less.
I shook my head, only just realizing that I’d gained control of the gun. “He shot me.” I peered down. Grandpa was on his back in front of me. I stood above him, leaning heavily on Simon.
“I know baby,” Simon said, his voice strong. He put his hands on my wound, and I cried out. “I know, I know. We’ll get you fixed, just give me the gun so I can end this.”
“He thought I did it.”
“Your grandfather’s a coward,” he seethed. “He has only one care in this world, and you never fit into that.”
I raised the gun, my hands shaking. Grandpa cowered into the bookcase. I felt a body at our side. I knew without looking that it was Galen. He would never leave Simon to do this for himself. Another one neared, too. Since all the gunfire had stopped, I imagined the guards were all dead, so the only other person in the room alive would have to be Kayleigh. “Don’t let her do this,” she said. “She’ll never forgive herself.”
“He never loved me,” I said, my insides breaking.
“Maybe she’s more like me,” Simon said. “Revenge heals the heart.”
“No one’s like you,” Kayleigh snapped, her tone harsh.
It made me flinch.
“Galen,” Kayleigh warned.
My finger tensed on the trigger. I could do it. I could pull this tiny little lever and then work out all my sorrow over his dead body. He never loved me. He tried to kill me. He didn’t care or come after me when I was kidnapped. He never thought of me as a family when I loved him. He was the only family I’d ever known, and he never cared.
A sob ripped through my chest.
Kayleigh tensed. “It’s not worth it.”
“So you say,” Simon said.
“W-who are you?” Grandpa asked, his eyes wide, fear finally striking him as we all stood before him like one unit.
“They’re not the Irish,” I said coldly. “They’re not the Polish either, Grandpa.” I gestured toward Simon. “Meet Simon. He’s the one who took me.”
Grandpa’s gaze narrowed. “But you were in on it.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Simon said, “But that’s not the case. Everything Delilah told you was the truth. I raped her. I beat her.”
I gritted my teeth. It just didn’t sound right coming from him. “He saved me,” I whispered. I totally believed that. I’d lived only a mirage of a real life, never knowing that my grandfather didn’t even care. It was just a shell, waiting to break. Simon had made the first crack, thankfully, awakening me to what was really going on. “I can live my life now.”
“Exactly,” Kayleigh said, “Which is why you need to put the gun down and let Simon handle this.”
My finger tensed over the trigger. Memories flicked by one-by-one while I saw them for what they really were. I never had good, quality time with my grandfather. He was standoffish. When I was younger, I excelled at trying to make him happy. None of it made a difference. By the time I was an older teenager, I must’ve realized that nothing I did mattered because I dropped all my extracurricular activities and filled my life with things that I thought made me happy. The shopping. The clothes. Showering myself with things that filled my life, but only on the exterior. My interior was still broken.
Simon pressed against my backside. His hand slid up my arm, past my elbow to the hand that held the gun. “Give me the gun, Delilah.”
“I could do it,” I said, tensing once more.
“I know,” he said. “And I don’t blame you for wanting to, but you know how much I wanted to kill him.”
I nodded. That was his intention through it all. He wanted justice for that little kid. What about justice for my little kid? The one who tried so hard to please someone who never cared? All the disappointment. All the feelings like I was never good enough rose to the surface. The gun wobbled in front of me and it took me a long time to realize that it was coming from me. Hard tremors shook my body.
Simon continued up my hand. He placed his finger over mine on the trigger. “This is for my mother, Greenie. Rot in hell.”
He pressed down, and the gun fired.
The crack of the bullet rang through my ears and I closed my eyes immediately, but not quickly enough to avoid the hole in my grandfather’s chest.
I turned away, wiggling my hand away from the gun. Simon let me, and I turned into Kayleigh who took me from the room. We passed through the familiar house and right out onto the lawn. “The boys will clean this up and then we can get out of here.”
“He didn’t love me.”
“I know,” Kayleigh said. “I’m so sorry, Delilah. Family should never be like that.”
“We killed him.”
Her jaw ticked, and a murderous look crossed over her face. “I know.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Maybe I should be pissed like Kayleigh, or maybe it was like Simon said. I was more like him. He wanted things his way. He had a set of rules all his own he expected people to comply with, but he wasn’t without heart. He wasn’t without feeling. And because of that, he was the exact opposite of my grandfather. One. a soulless creature, the other, a grandfather, and yet, they were the exact opposite of their logical descriptions.
I slid to the ground, and Kayleigh followed. I couldn’t help but feel that although I barely knew them, these vampires had been there for me more than my grandfather ever had.
That had to mean something.
Chapter Sixteen
Simon
I pulled out Jacob Greene’s will and snarled. Sure enough, the senile asshole hadn’t been joking. He hadn’t left Delilah a single cent. She wasn’t mentioned in the will at all.
“And they call us monsters,” Galen said from behind me.
Anger ripped through me. “We need to do something about this. It isn’t right.”
H
e set to work, calling in someone he used to know who was discreet. While we waited, Galen told me he was going to send Delilah and Kayleigh to a nearby hotel while we figured out what to do with the scene. When he came back a short while later, I looked up. “How is she?”
“Shook up,” Galen said. “When we figure all this out, we’ll bring her back over. We can make it seem like one of the other big drug runner families in the city raided them, hurting her and killing Greenie. Once my guy gets here, he’ll fix the will and then Delilah will be set to do whatever she wants.”
I nodded, trying to take it all in. “What about the bullet wound?”
“She’s in pain, but we probably can’t do anything about that right now. It has to still be open when the police get here.”
My jaw ticked. “We need to hurry then.” The emotional pain I couldn’t help, but the physical pain was a different story.
For the next twenty minutes, we went over the story until we were sure it would fly. As soon as Galen’s guy got there, I left for the hotel to tell Kayleigh and Delilah what the story was and bring her back. After texting Kayleigh to find out exactly where they were, I walked into a dumpy motel, scowling at the place. I never would’ve let Delilah set foot in a place like this. It was disgusting.
“It was the closest I could find,” Kayleigh muttered when she answered the door to my angry face.
I glared at her, and then turned toward Delilah on the couch. She tried to smile up at me, but then she hissed in a breath. I immediately dropped to my knees. “Don’t try to move. We’re almost done over there and then we need you to call 911 and tell the cops what happened.”
Her eyes widened.
I held a hand up. “Well, our version of events.”
She nodded.
I didn’t like the look of her. She was pale, and her breathing was labored. “Has she been like this a while?”
“She got shot, Simon. It’s not as if it’s going to be a walk in the park for her. She’s not one of us.”
