"It's Mr. D'Ath to you, Sam," Archer told him in a bored voice as he entered the private dining room and indicated to the solitary chair. "Please, take a seat. We would hate to be bad hosts and leave our guest of honor standing at his own execution."
Samuel's face turned ashen. "Wh-what? No. No, that's not... We had a contract!" He sputtered his defense like that would even remotely save him. But he’d sold my last fuck on the dark web eighteen months ago. What a shame.
"Sit down, Dad," I ordered, folding my arms over my chest. My dress was long sleeved and jet black—to hide the blood—and I felt like a pink-haired Morticia Adams. "I have a couple of questions for you."
Samuel's eyes darted from me to the guys and back again. "Why should I answer anything for you? You're going to kill me anyway, that much is painfully clear." He gestured to the fact that the whole room was covered in plastic sheeting.
He wasn't wrong.
"Of course we are," I murmured, cocking my head to the side. "Did you expect anything less after you sold your daughter on a human trafficking site?" Snapping my fingers, I gave him a tight smile. "Oh wait, you didn't do that, did you?" I stepped closer to him and felt a spark of satisfaction when he took a step backward. "No, you never sold your daughter. You don't have a daughter, do you?"
His eyes widened and his face grayed even more. All it took was a firm push to his shoulder and he stumbled into the chair we had set up and waiting for him.
"What my beautiful wife is trying to say, Sam," Archer added in a smooth voice, "is that whether or not you answer her questions will determine how painful your death is. We could make it so quick; just a pop between the eyes and you're done."
"Or we could make it hurt," Kody added with a malicious grin. "After all, we were trained extensively in the art of torture. You wanna guess how many bones I can break while keeping someone alive?"
"Or how many micro cuts a person's skin can handle?" Steele offered, shrugging like he was discussing the weather. "Ever heard the saying, like a death by a thousand cuts?" His lips pulled up in a macabre smile. "I can assure you you'd pass out before we even reached three hundred. Sayings are always so exaggerated."
Oh man, my guys were some scary-ass motherfuckers. I loved them so damn hard for it too. We were like four pieces of the most fucked up puzzle, clicking together in perfect harmony.
"What do you want?" Samuel asked Archer. Of course he asked Archer and not me. Heaven forbid a woman ever hold his fate in her hands. Even staring down his own mortality, Samuel Danvers wouldn't drop his misogynistic bullshit.
Archer knew it too. "Don't ask me," he murmured, placing his hands on my hips and pressing a tender kiss to my neck. "Ask your daughter. She's the one with a score to settle. I simply live to please her."
I leaned back into his touch without even thinking about it. Although I knew he was being dramatic, there was all too much sincerity in his words. Too much truth and devotion. It equally warmed my heart and scared the ever-loving shit out of me. More and more I was admitting that this relationship wasn't a question of me giving them my heart. It went both ways, and right now I held all three of their hearts in my hands.
It was a hell of a big responsibility. One I was determined not to fuck up.
"Okay, okay, you figured it out," Samuel said with a forced laugh. "You worked it out. I'm not your father. So what?"
Every word from his mouth stoked my temper and made what was coming all the easier to chew.
"When did you find out?" I asked, keeping my tone cool and calm. In reality, there had been no dire blow when I found out for sure. Was I shocked that James was my bio-dad? Hell yes. Was I upset or shocked that Samuel wasn't? Not even close. Somewhere, deep down, I'd always suspected there was something amiss.
Samuel scoffed. "I've always known. I had a vasectomy when I was nineteen to prevent any gold-digging whores from trapping me with an unexpected pregnancy. The only way I could ever father a child is through IVF, which Debbie and I never did. Imagine my surprise when she announces a month after our wedding that she's pregnant. Fucking miracle." He snorted a bitter laugh, slouching in his chair like it was a throne.
I pursed my lips, mulling over those details. "Then it wasn't your baby she was pregnant with when she died, either."
Samuel's face darkened, but it wasn't with shock. More like annoyance or disgust. "Doubtful. Debbie tried to pull that one over on me too when she realized she wasn't carrying her gangbanger boyfriend’s spawn. Well, that fucking backfired. Not only was it not mine, that meant there was only one other person’s it could have been." His smirk was pure poison. Fuck, I hated him.
"Spit it out, Sam," Steele drawled with a bored yawn. "If I get too annoyed, I'll start breaking your fingers."
A small shudder ran through me at the memory of how he’d snapped Hank’s fingers for interrupting us while we spoke. Archer must have noticed, because he dropped another gentle kiss to the bend of my neck.
Samuel wasn't watching us, though; his nervous gaze was on Steele.
"Debbie claimed she was attacked," he told us, licking his lips anxiously. "Came home one night all bloody and bruised up, her dress ripped and shit. Told me she’d been attacked and wanted to go to the police."
"And did you?" Archer rumbled, his voice threaded with violence.
Samuel shook his head. "Of course not. She’d probably just pissed off that fucking Reaper, and he taught her a lesson. I wasn't about to drag our family through the newspapers and risk exposing Debbie's infidelity. Any DNA test would have just proven she was a whore. That gangster probably kept her bra as a trophy or something, anyway."
I froze. "What did you just say?"
He looked at me in confusion and disgust. "That I wouldn't let her take it to the cops? Bunch of dirty fucks they are, anyway."
I shook my head. "No. What did you just say about her bra? Why'd you mention that?"
Samuel wrinkled his nose. "I don't know. She just kept going on about how he’d ripped her bra before she was knocked out. But she wasn't wearing one when she came home." He shrugged, like it was inconsequential.
But it wasn’t. Because I'd been gifted a ripped and bloody bra by my stalker as my something old for the wedding.
Fucking hell. My mom had been raped by her stalker. By my stalker. Her unborn baby had belonged to him.
Horror and revulsion washed over me as I processed all that information. My mom had been attacked and raped and Samuel had refused to report it to the police. What kind of lowlife piece of shit—
My murderous thoughts were interrupted when Archer pressed my butterfly knife into my hand. I'd had it tucked into the garter of my stockings and hadn't even noticed him pull it out; I was that deep in my fury toward Samuel fucking Danvers.
"Make him bleed, Kate," he murmured in a darkly seductive voice. "Make him pay."
I looked down at my beautiful holographic knife, then gritted my teeth and looked back to Samuel.
"Why pretend to be my father?" I asked him in a hollow voice. "If you knew from the moment my mom told you she was pregnant, why not leave her then?"