Mockingbird (A Stepbrother Romance #2)(54)

He stabbed me.

We roll. He tries to get on top of me. I catch his wrist, keep him from driving the point into my temple.

He grabs something on the table and I narrowly avoid the edge of a sword taking off half my face. He's got a sword.

Of course. We're in a museum.

He knows all my moves. He's always been able to beat me at everything. I look past him, over his shoulder, see Diana holding her mother, desperately clutching the wound in her side.

There's one move I never used on him.

I knee him in the groin.

He howls in agony. It's enough. I shove him off me, roll, and as I put my hands down to get up, my fingers close around supple, well-worn leather.

We would end up doing this in a place with swords lying everywhere.

I yank the museum piece free of the scabbard. It's not the type I'm used to sparring with or training for, but the commonly held believe that European swords are clumsier or heavier than Japanese weapons is a myth. This is actually lighter than my practice blade, with a wicked, nearly four foot blade that tapers to a wicked point. The blade ripples a little when it catches the light, from the smith's hammering. It's the real deal.

My father goes after his gun.

"En garde, motherf*cker!" I bellow, and I almost have him.

His defensive swipe, barely deserving to be called a parry, is weak. He strikes my blade aside and rolls to his feet, tosses the punch blade and lunges at me.

This isn't a game. We've never practiced with even blunted metal swords, much less live steel. This is it. This is the real deal. I have to keep him off the sword. I have to beat him. That might mean I have to kill him. Diana's mom is going to bleed out.

He's been training me for this the whole time and never even knew it.

Blades clash, flat on flat, as I try to hack an opening into his defense. If I tire I lose my advantage, but I feel worse every second, like every beat is draining blood from my head. I'm bleeding bad from my side, where that blade sawed into my flesh, just above my bottom rib. My father presses his advantage, striking at the side he knows is weakest. He's not holding back, he's not teaching me, he's trying to kill me. Every swing almost makes it. He goes high when I think he's going to go low, he feints, he defies my attempts to read his muscle movements and looks to predict where he will strike. All at once the advantage is gone.

Then I hear Diana wailing, as she clutches her mother. Carol is ashen, her face slack.

I throw myself at my father as I never have before, molten fury exploding in my chest, surging down my limbs as renewed energy. Swing strike, parry. He's moving back. He hurt his leg on the table, it's making some of his strokes and parries slow, off of the forms. I let him swing at me and my parry turns into a riposte, melding defense with attack.

It was a feint. The point of his sword goes into my thigh and through and out the other side. My arms fall slack to my sides in shock. It f*cking hurts. He draws it out and I fall to my knees, then onto my side, clutching the wound. Holy shit.

I'm going to die. He raises the sword over his head, about to crudely bury it in my skull, like he would if he was chopping wood.

Bang.

In a movie, a red dot would appear on his chest and he'd look down in confusion. In real life, there's a puckered dark red flower on his chest and the sword goes flying out of his hands as blood paints the wall behind him in a splat, audibly distinct from the gunshot and even his groan.

Diana pulls the trigger again and again and again and empties the gun almost before it hits the ground. When my father hits the wall, he's already dead. His chest looks like a piece of meat that someone took a tenderizing mallet to. He doesn't say anything. He just falls down all in an awkward boneless heap and Diana drops the gun and starts shrieking.

I'm looking at my leg. I'm bleeding.

A lot.

That doesn't seem important, though.

I'm sleepy. Really sleepy.

Diana is screaming at me.

She won't let me go to sleep.





Chapter 14: Diana





The time is just gone.

It comes to me in flashes, like I'm reliving it while I live it. I can feel the kick of the gun in my hand, the checkered grips digging into my skin as I pull the trigger over and over and over until the top locks back and it's empty. I can see Apollo's father slumped against the wall. He doesn't look peaceful or have a frozen sneer or a faraway look. He looks confused, if anything. His face is just slack. I can feel the same hand pressed to my mother's side, holding in her blood with a handkerchief I found somewhere. She looks so pale, like all the color is leaking out of her through her wound.

Apollo is lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. I'm screaming at him to move, to get up, until my throat is raw. Bob Anderson runs into the room.

Then I'm in an ambulance between two gurneys. There's plastic tubes and wires everywhere. I hear my mother's ribs crack as the EMT gives her CPR. Apollo isn't moving.

It's like five minutes has passed, but hours have gone missing. I'm sitting on a bench outside an operating room. It's built into the wall, in front of a window, facing the door. It's not like a TV operating room door, the swingy kind with the round porthole windows. It's unusually wide but it's just a door. Charity has her arms around my shoulders, and I can't stop crying into her. At least not for the first few hours. Then I just sit there, shell-shocked, staring at nothing.