Paradise Found: Cain (Paradise #2)(82)

“What the hell are you doing?” Kursch questioned somewhere outside the circle of Abel and me. “Are you trying to kill him? Are you trying to prove your father right?” My head spun to look at Kursch, a man who had been a faithful servant and father mentor. I loved this man, like Sofie said. Not wishing to prove anything to my father, I still didn’t feel I had any choices. Too much was happening too fast.

“Stop this,” Sofie demanded. “This proves nothing.”

“I need to prove he doesn’t own me,” I muttered to myself, but Abel heard the garbled words and nodded in agreement. I still hadn’t made a move to strike my brother.

“You *,” Abel hissed. “Are you trying to prove I’m a loser? Are you letting me fight you, while you stand and take it, because it’s the only way I’d win? Then what?” he grunted. “Then we have to do this again. It will never be enough for him until one of us wins. Don’t make me look weak. For everything you’ve ever done for me, making me look weak in front of them would be the lowest.”

Abel was right. I had belittled him just like our father, though not half as bad as him. When Abel was young, I attributed his crying to his youth. As he grew older, and I grew more like Atom, I became easily frustrated with Abel. Instead of supporting him or training him, I kept him down, like our father wanted me to. I added to the torture. Letting him beat me would only confirm that I thought Abel was weak, which I no longer believed. In fact, Abel seemed stronger than me. He stood up to our father first. He took the challenge to fight me. For love. For Elma.

I lowered to my fighting stance and tried to get my head into this challenge. A knowing smirk crossed Abel’s battered face. While he was beaten, he wasn’t beat. His strength was he was fast; mine was I was strong. He could outmaneuver me in many ways, but my right hook countered to his left uppercut. My powerhouse kick caught him by his right leg and we flipped to the ground. Like a fish out of water, Abel flopped onto his back with an exaggerated exhale of air, and I coiled around him like my signature snake name. We struggled in a deadlock. The earth beneath my feet gave no traction in the dry grassy mess below us. Finally, Abel went limp beneath me.

“Enough,” he muttered. “All he wants is you to win,” Abel admitted with defeat. He conceded this knowledge, his body too weak to fight back, but his mind clear as to our father’s goal. I pushed off his back, making a display of forcing him down. Abel rolled to his side, and it was only then that I offered him a friendly hand. Pulling him upward, I wrapped an arm around him like I’d often done as a child. The ink of my left forearm spoke, and I held my arm tightly over Abel, supporting him, displaying for my father that this ended here.

“Kill him.” My father glared at me, forcing the knife upward and drawing blood from Sofie’s delicate neck. A thin trickle of red snaked down her white throat. Her head didn’t dare shake, but her eyes pleaded with me. Not for her life, but for my brother’s. Faced with death, she was still an angel.

Suddenly, my father was projected forward. Sofie fell in the struggle, her outstretched hands catching her as two men tumbled to the side of her.

“Roll,” I yelled, approaching the sudden mayhem of my father and Kursch, scrapping like two schoolboys on the hard ground. Larger in stature, Kursch toppled their two bodies so he was over my father. With his baldhead and extra thick arms, he typically appeared more like a gentle giant than an enforcer. However, the expression on his face showed the severity of his demeanor. Atom might have been the one who handled the dirty work, or so we thought, but the strength of Kursch and the threat of his stature were evident.

“I won’t take this any longer. You took enough. You’ve punished them enough,” Kursch hissed to our father’s face. “I watched you destroy Eve. Destroy your sons and punish your daughters for being female. You took your love and threw them all away. You took mine and destroyed it, but I won’t let you do it to them. I won’t let you destroy their chance at happiness, just because you are a miserable, thwarted man. Bitterness has consumed you, but I won’t let it take them.”

I’d never heard Kursch speak in such a manner, let alone speak this way to our father.

“You’ve always been jealous,” Atom spit at his oldest friend. “She loved me.”

Kursch blinked in disbelief.

“I wasn’t in love with your wife,” he emphasized.

“When you couldn’t have her, you wanted the next best thing,” Atom snapped, still under the weight of Kursch, who held him pinned with one of his large arms. Sofie had scrambled away from the two men who held all our attention, but she was still separated from me. I didn’t dare move to her, too captivated by the fight before me.

“You’re a sick man, Atom Callahan,” Kursch said, shaking his head slowly, disappointment evident in his tone.

“You’ll always be second best,” Atom slurred, “How does that feel?” His voice struggled under the pressure of Kursch’s hold. “You’ll never be good enough, not even for her.” His head attempted to shift left, and it was then that I noticed Ava Shepherd staring down at my father. Her eyes cold shards of dark; her fists clenched at her sides like she wanted one shot at him herself.

“You’re a bastard, Atom,” Kursch hissed, forcing him down one more time, before moving back as if to stand. Atom spit at his friend like he was a child. Kursch didn’t bat an eye as he wiped his cheek and slowly sat back.