Page 102 of To the Grave

“Drop it.” The man’s gaze landed on Jace, pointing his gun at the man’s head. “All of you.”

And that was when I saw it: his nose like Jace’s, the same green eyes…

Jace froze and shook his head. “You’re… alive.”

“Didn’t plan on breaking the news to you quite this way,” Arlo shouted over the rain, “but here we are!”

“What the actual fuck is going on here?” Rafe asked, his gun pointed at Arlo. “And can we shoot these motherfuckers?”

My mind was spinning, trying to calculate the risk to Daisy if one of them tried to shoot Arlo.

“I would advise against that,” a voice said behind us.

We turned to see a man standing in a fancy raincoat, holding an umbrella like he was going to the fucking opera, and I knew immediately that this was Gray’s father: Piers Cantwell, aka Michael White.

And he wasn’t alone. A man in black stood next to him, a gun extended and aimed at Rafe as Rafe aimed his gun at Piers.

Fuck.

“Did I ask for your advice?” Rafe said.

“It was you all along,” Daisy said, staring at Piers. “And the VIPs are part of it.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but she clearly needed to know the rest of it.

“He used to be Michael White,” I said. “Before he became Piers Cantwell.”

Piers sneered. “Michael White. A nobody name for a nobody boy. I remade him, remade myself, no thanks to this backwards town.”

Daisy shook her head. “But… why? Why would you take all those girls? Why would you hurt them? Hurt us?”

“I spent my entire youth at the mercy of women,” Piers said. “Women who left, women who abused, women who rejected. What better place to exercise a little real-life therapy than theplace where it all started? And what better partner than the man who knows exactly how that feels?”

“Cool story, bro,” one of the guys with Rafe said, his gun pointed at Piers. “But yourpartnerhere is going to want to drop that gun if you don’t want a hole between your eyes.”

“I don’t think you’ll be so foolish,” Piers said. “It will be mutually assured destruction.”

“Spoken by someone who doesn’t know shit about us,” Rafe’s other friend said.

Something was happening. I could feel it in the way I felt Jace and Otis move into position when we moved around Daisy, when we didn’t need words, except this time it wasn’t just us.

It was Rafe and his men too.

I saw the pieces of the puzzle: Ruth still on the ground with Gray, Arlo using Daisy as a human shield, Piers to one side, his bodyguard pointing his gun at Rafe while Rafe aimed at Piers.

I slipped my knife out of my pocket.

“Let the girls go and maybe we’ll let you live,” Rafe said.

“Call me crazy,” Arlo said, looking at Jace, “but I don’t think my kid here wants you killing his dad when we’ve finally been reunited.”

I was surprised to see Jace was still aiming his gun at Arlo’s head.

“You think wrong,” Jace said. “You made your choice. I’ve made mine.”

And then everything went quiet, the clanging in my mind disappearing as I threw the knife at Gray’s chest.

Gunfire split the night as Daisy dove for the ground and Ruth scrambled away from Gray, kneeling in the mud, shocked as he looked down at the knife embedded in his chest. Piers was on the ground next to his bodyguard, shot by one of Rafe’s guys.

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