“What?” My vision was so blurred, my heart so suddenly empty, I could barely focus on him. I could barely keep my knees from buckling.
“I never knew how truly special you were. I mean, I knew you had a gift, but I never knew the depths of who you were. Of what you were. You’re amazing.”
“Dad, what happened?”
“You’re a god.”
“Dad, please. Who did this?”
He nodded as though coming to his senses. “There are people out there, honey, people who know what you are. I tried to stop them. I was trying to find out exactly who they are when they caught on.”
“Where did all of those pictures come from?” I asked him, referring to the pictures of me in his hotel room. “Is that who… Did the people who took those pictures do this?”
“No. But they know who did. They’ve been following you. Studying you. Recording every event in your life since the day you were born.” He bit out the last words as though disgusted with them. With himself for not realizing it. “They know more about you than I ever did. But you can’t trust them. They aren’t here for you. They’re here only to observe and report back.”
I knew it. “The Vatican. They report to the Vatican.”
He seemed surprised that I knew. “But there are others. They’re called the Twelve.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “We know about them.”
“They were sent,” he said, beginning to fade.
“Dad, where are you going?” I asked, rushing forward.
“I have to go. I’ll let you know when I learn more.”
I made it to him, but he put his cold hands on my shoulders to try to force me to pay attention.
“Charley, listen. They were sent. The Twelve. They were sent by something very, very bad.”
“I know,” I said, his essence fading from my sight.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They weren’t —” He glanced behind him, and just as he disappeared, he said, “They were sent.”
I stood staring into an empty space as the last word drifted toward me. The coolness on my shoulders faded slower than my father had. I closed my eyes, unable to bear the void in front of me. The void in my heart.
“Dutch,” Reyes said.
I turned and rushed into his arms, overwhelmed by the sobs bursting from my body. How would I tell Gemma that our father had died? That he died because of me? Because of what I was? The loss crushed me as nothing had before. I clung to Reyes and let the pain slip inside me, let it rattle my bones and score my flesh.
After an eternity of anguish, I peeled off his shoulder and went to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Then I came back out, my shoulders set in determination. “I can’t leave,” I said, prepared for an argument. I now sounded like I had a cold from all the crying, and I wondered how long I’d sobbed into Reyes’s wet T-shirt. “I have to find out who killed my father, and I can’t do that from a safe house in the mountains.”
Reyes lowered his head. “You have to trust your uncle to find that out.”
“My uncle doesn’t know what he’s facing. I do.”
He stepped closer, growing ever wary. “We’re leaving.”
I stepped closer, too, reached up, and wrapped a hand around his throat. “I can drop you right now and leave you quivering in my wake.”
He nodded and spoke softly, as though speaking to a wounded animal. “You can do a lot more than that to me, Dutch.”
Satisfaction welled in my chest.
“But before you do, think of our daughter.”
That one threw me. Reluctantly, I lowered my hand and retreated a step, not wanting to think about anything but the fact that my father had been shot and left to bleed out in a f**king storage unit.
“We have to get her to safety,” he continued. “You know that as well as I.” He lifted my chin. “The moment it’s safe, we’ll figure out who did this.”
“And when will that be, Reyes? When will it be safe? We have no idea how to stop them, much less kill them.”
“We’ll figure those things out,” he said. “But we can’t do that here. We’re too vulnerable, too available, but we will figure this out.”
In a fit of fury, I jerked my chin out of his grasp, grabbed my overnight bag, and stuffed a few random articles of clothing inside it.
“You keep telling yourself that,” I said before scooping up Mrs. Thibodeaux’s fishbowl and storming out the door. I would go with him. I would become a prisoner at some abandoned convent for the sake of our daughter, but the moment she was safe on earth, the moment I knew they couldn’t get to her, there would be hell to pay for those who had done this. Not to mention the fact that Reyes’s father would soon discover the folly of trying to position himself between an angry mother and her cub.
The earth rumbled with every step I took, with each idea that formed and solidified in my mind. If I had to, I would raise hell from the depths of the unseen myself and rip that bastard to shreds.
He wanted a war? He’d get one.
Excerpt: Reyes’s POV
I watched as Dutch stormed out of her apartment, fishbowl sloshing water over the sides, overstuffed bag dropping articles of clothing in her wake. The light that radiated from her core burned hot with anger, turning it to a gold as dark and shimmering as her eyes. That, combined with the pain of her father’s death, washed over my skin like an electric wind. She was so incredibly powerful and growing more powerful every day. Soon she’d be an uncontrollable force. An unstoppable creature. She would be the god that she was born to be, and she would no longer need me. No longer have use for me.