Page 63 of Cruel Revenge
When he hit play again, I really listened—Carey’s speech to her biological mother, about me, about our relationship.
“Jackyis my mom, and when Dad marries her, it’ll finally be official.”
Words that hit too hard, as I choked on things I never got to say to Carey now that she was gone. Things I had hoped she would know by this time. That she meant everything to me. She was my whole world, the whole reason I fought for peace that sometimes seemed impossible. The beginning and end of everything for me. She wasn’t the daughter of my blood, not the one I brought into the world, but she was my daughter in every way that really mattered. She owned my heart and soul in a way that would put me against Heath if I had to be.
Hearing those words from her again, I didn’t regret biting her. Not a single bit. The tears that welled in my eyes had nothing to do with regret or feeling bad for Heath about making the choice. They were from the fact that I wasn’t with her to know if she survived or not. I wasn’t there to welcome her to immortality.
It was Subira who reached out to hit the space bar and pause the playback.
“From this day forth, she is not only Carey Everson. She is also Carey, daughter of Jacky, daughter of Subira,” Subira declared softly. “From this day forth, she is as much a member of my family as she is the one she was born to.”
“She would like that,” Landon said softly, turning to his father, clearly directing that at him. “Right, Pa?”
I looked at Heath, his blank face not revealing anything, but he blinked at Landon’s comment, his eyes turning the ice blue of his werewolf form.
“She would,” he finally said, everyone waiting on him. “Let’s finish this. We need to stop dragging this out.”
“It gets worse from here,” Dirk warned.
I knew that all too well.
Now was the moment when I had been certain there was something wrong.
“I should have… smelled her lying better,” I mumbled. “Because she didn’t mean anything she said to Carey about needing a mother or anything.”
“There’s a chance magic was clouding your mind,” Subira said as we watched the video play. “But in the end, this was over before you ever had a chance.”
Once I was grabbed, everyone in the room tensed. Everyone saw me yanked away from Carey as the SUVs pulled up to the front too quickly.
“She fought so hard,” I whispered, unable to fight the emotions that went through me.
“She did,” Hasan said solemnly. “I trust she was trained?”
“Yeah…” Landon confirmed. “We taught her.”
“Good job. She dodges the powder by kicking it out of that witch’s hand before it can be used,” Subira pointed out. “The blowing of it is clearly part of its activation, so it rendered it useless. The ingredients probably still cause some drowsiness, but they would be amplifying it with magic to make it aspowerful as it seems. Relatively easy thing to do and a staple of potion making.”
“Oh, here are the spikes,” Davor said, the words shaky. Everyone could now see what I had fought to live through. They had only seen the aftermath.
I was about to relive it in third person.
I was being strangled, clawing at my own throat to remove what invisible thing was holding me there. The witch Davor and I had seen was there with his hand out. When he spoke and that undercurrent of feminine voice came out, Hasan snarled.
“There she is,” he snapped.
I was spiked twice. Everyone in the room flinched.
“Jacky…” Zuri gasped after I was left sagging on them. “How did you even get down?”
“Watch,” I said, breathless as the memory of the pain made me freeze, the way seeing the spikes again had at the restaurant.
They did. Heath growled as I pushed off the wall and pulled myself on the metal spikes, letting them go all the way through me. Multiple people cussed, growled, gasped, or just let their jaw drop as I dropped to the ground and my clothing ripped as I immediately Changed.
“Thank you for the charm,” I said to my mother, looking at her to stop watching the video for just a moment.
“I’ll make another before the end of this for you to wear,” she said, her lips thin with the stress of what she had just witnessed. “That is much more of a wound than I intended someone to need to survive through.”
“There are a lot of medical things I could explain about how that didn’t kill me before I fell to the ground,” I said, sighing. “Things like how it pierced instead of crushed things, which was to my benefit. No one here needs to hear that.”
