This Is Love, Baby (War & Peace #2)(51)

I hold my hands up in the air a moment to stall him. My mind is fracturing quickly and I need all the answers I can get before I lose myself altogether. This breakdown has been a long time coming. I’m teetering on the very edge, about to plummet into my own mental hell. “How did you find us?”

Gabe takes my hand and squeezes it in an affectionate way. Hurt, f*cking hurt, flashes in his eyes when I jerk it away. I’m disgusted with him—with both of them. With a small sigh, he continues. “All it took was me doing a quick internet search to learn freak boy, who’d pickled your brain into thinking you loved him, was surprisingly alive. And I know you sweet girl, once you figured out he wasn’t dead, you were still hypnotized enough to go right back to him. But when I got there to retrieve you, lo and behold, he was kidnapping you. Doing all my dirty work for me.” He shakes his head and smirks at Brandon. “I have to say, * boy, you have some balls on you. Guess they finally dropped when you turned eighteen.”

I’m no longer listening to them. I slam my eyes closed and try to drown them out. But I can’t. The darkness swarms in and suffocates me with the truth. Truth that he’s really dead. This is too much. Brandon is not a murderer. He wouldn’t murder my father.

Please be a lie.

Please.

But it’s not a lie. It’s truth and he’s a murderer. The boy I loved as a teenage girl grew into something sick and f*cking twisted. He sought revenge when it wasn’t his to seek. Brandon Thompson stomped all over his own innocence when he stamped out my father’s life.

“Fuck you,” Brandon snaps, jerking me from my overwhelming grief. I pop my eyes open and swipe away the tears I hadn’t noticed were falling down my face.

Gabe’s glare becomes furious as he steps toward Brandon. “Shut up! I’ll put a bullet through your skull before you can take your next breath,” he roars. “I’m not done with story time. Tell Baylee how you lived in her house for months jacking off to pictures of her while you waited for me to find her, you sick f*ck. Tell her. When I called Tony after I sold Baylee to give him the money and to update him, you were there playing f*cking house in her house. And did Tony ever emerge from that house? No. Because you killed him. You were just waiting there so when the time came, you could swoop in and save the f*cking day. Ride off into the sunset with my girl knowing you murdered her goddamned father.”

I shudder and reach for my panties. There’s no way I can sit here and listen to another second of this. I have to get the hell out of here and back to War. If I can manage to slip off the bed and make a run for the doo—

“Leave them off,” Gabe barks, waving his gun at me and motioning to my panties in my fist. “I’m not done looking at you, sweetheart.” He winks at me and flashes me a heated grin.

Bile rises in my throat. I’m trapped in a sick parallel universe where there’s not one devil, but two. A nightmare of insanity. Not only a battle between two evils but an epic war. Two twisted murdering men. Two men who have used my body for their benefit, manipulated me, murdered one of the men I loved in this world, and nearly destroying the other. And as collateral damage, they had a hand in killing my mother too.

Anger surges through me, chasing away the betrayal and grief threatening to swallow me whole. These two men think they have a right to me and my body. But only one person truly owns me, and it’s my heart he owns. That man is honest and pure and wholesome. Deserving. He’s an angel—the father of my child who has earned his peace. Peace I vow to give him.

It’s time to end this war, for my War.

My mind stops considering ways to escape but instead how to outsmart them both.

I need a plan to get rid of them. And quick.

Time to show them I’m not a pawn. I’m the motherf*cking queen.

This is war, baby. And I will win.

With a deep breath, I inhale the strength of what needs to be done. Yesterday I was worried that murdering Gabe would somehow taint me as a mother. That it would make me unfit. But now, as I feel the hate and jealousy throbbing between these two men, I know it’s the only way. They’ll never stop.

Prison doesn’t stop people like Gabe or Brandon—not when they’re this far gone.

Death is the only probable sentence.

The battle lines are drawn, my strategy in this war is in place.

“Gabe.” I let out a sob. Brandon’s brows knit together in suspicion, as if he’s already figured out my plan. Gabe is clueless though as his dark eyes dart along my body, probing and assessing, before they land on my quivering bottom lip. “He killed my daddy. He killed your best friend. What if he kills me too? He was about to rape me if you hadn’t intervened when you did. I don’t think it would have ended there either.” My words are honest and I know he senses that—I need for him to sense that for this to work. Brandon is unstable. There’s no telling what he would have done once he’d had his way. Would the guilt have consumed him? Would he have ended both our lives?

Gabe’s smug stare is wiped off his face as he snaps his angry gaze to Brandon. My heart rate speeds up as I realize this could work.

“What the f*ck, Baylee?” Brandon bites out. “Like the motherf*cker would even care what the hell I did with you. He was chasing your half-naked ass down the street when I showed up! The man’s a goddamned monster! I’m the f*cking hero here, babe!”