Chapter 196

destroyed

-”

“I had to do it, Fay,” Daniel says, looking at me evenly, his voice serious and heavy with the weight of the life he just took. “He couldn’t live – you know that. You’ve read enough Machiavelli to know that if he lived he’d have come for vengeance. He had to be “Daniel,” I say, trying to interrupt and moving around the table now.

“I’m serious!” Daniel continues, stepping away from my father’s corpse and facing me as I come around, the bloody knife still clutched in his hand. “This is the only way we survive this, Fay – any of us. He had to die – and I – I know you’re too gentle to be able to do it I wanted to take the blood on my hands so you didn’t have to -”

“Daniel -” I say, stepping close to him now and looking up into his eyes – reaching out a hand to place against his heaving chest.

“I’m right about this, Fay!” he protests, insistent, needing me to see it. “Men ought to be indulged or utterly destroyed – if you -”