Page 27 of Riot

I thought—“let it happen”.

Let him die.

Let his breath cease and never come back.

But then reality cut through the fantasy like a blade.

If he lived, and found out I stood there and did nothing? He’d kill me. Slowly. Cruelly. He’d make it hurt.

I stumbled back from the threshold and bolted down the hallway.

“Avi!” I screamed. “AVI!”

I found him in the kitchen a second later, dressed in all black—black joggers, black fitted tee, black socks like he was mourning something preemptively. He had a half-eaten peach in one hand, a knife in the other.

Avi raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“It’s your father—he’s having a seizure or something. He’s on the floor—he’s not breathing right!”

His eyes sharpened. The fruit hit the counter with a thud, the knife clattered beside it, and he took off sprinting toward the master wing, phone already out, barking into it in Hebrew.

I didn’t follow.

I just stood there in the hallway, hands shaking.

And for a moment, as I listened to Avi shout and the distant gurgling of his father choking on his own lungs, I closed my eyes…

And prayed. Not for a miracle. But for silence. For the long beep of a flatline monitor.

For the death of a man who’d stolen a decade of my life and turned it into ritual and ruin.

If God was listening?

I hoped He was in the mood to collect.

But deep down?

I knew I didn’t want karma—or sickness—or fate—to take him.

I wantedme.

I wanted my hands to be the last thing he ever felt.

Boaz was raced to the hospital in the middle of the night.

I watched from behind the curtain, just barely lifting the edge of the gauzy white drape as Avi and two of his security goons carried him down the front steps like a broken statue. His face was pale and slack, his mouth twisted in pain even in unconsciousness. One of the guards held an oxygen tank. The other had a rifle strapped across his chest like someone might try to intercept a dying man.

They laid him in the back of the SUV, slammed the door, and peeled off into the dark.

That night I didn’t sleep.

I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling fan spinning above me, waiting to hear the news. Part of me prayed they’d come back with a body bag. Another part—a smaller, angrier part—hoped he lived just long enough tofeelwhat it was like to be powerless. Just long enough to know what it was to beg.

But Boaz wasn’t built to go out easy.

By morning, the black SUV returned.

Avi stepped out, still dressed in black. His expression was hard to read—part tight-lipped concern, part simmering calculation. He walked with the same swagger he always had, even though the king he guarded was crumbling from the inside out.

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