23. I’ll Just Kill Him

Dom

I got us snacks as I payed for the petrol. Leonie had always been a chocolate girl but in the heat, they would melt all over her fingers. I would offer to suck the mess off, but I doubted that would be helpful.

I grabbed her a smoothie from the fridge in the shop and some chewy sweets she’d loved years ago.

Back in the car, she was curled up under a blanket, the aircon on high. She eagerly took the smoothie from my hands and lifted it to her clammy forehead. “Thank you.”

After a second of holding it there, she unscrewed the lid and guzzled half of it down.

I smiled as I pulled the car out onto the road. “I’ve never known someone to take their five a day so seriously.”

“Other than yourself,” she rasped. She had drank so much she had made herself breathless.

“We’re not far now,” I told her. We had gone past the muggy countryside and were now past the sand dunes, quickly making our way through the small towns towards the coastal city we’d grown up in.

The houses were further apart, protected by large trees and security gates.

Belov Security System signs warned every passerby.

“I didn’t realise just how successful it’s become,” she said, nodding her head at a four-story complex with my company logo on the gate.

“It makes me some money,” I said with a shrug. “It mostly runs by itself now.”

She cocked a brow as she burst open the bag of sweets and popped one in her mouth before lifting them an inch towards me.

To her offering, I just opened my mouth and she leaned over to feed me.

“Are blackberry-flavoured sweets still your favourite?”

I nodded, though it was a lie. Blackberry sweets were her least favourite, so I used to pretend I loved them just to share the bag with her.

I was chewing away as we turned down a road not too far from my family’s home. “We can visit my parents if you don’t want to go. If you’ve changed your mind.”

“I haven’t,” she said and pulled out her phone.

“Dad said you haven’t seen him for a while,” I admitted, with a cautious glance her way. She kept on scrolling. “Is it because of Firdman being released?”

“It’s because I’m about to spend a month going to and from their house like we do every summer.”

“Is that why you didn’t go to Issy’s birthday last year? Because you have some resentment?”

It had been the first season of social events where Mia had accompanied me and I’d itched for some normalcy, for an escape from her. For her to drag me over to Leonie. I didn’t see her at all that summer.

“Jared and I had some things to work through,” she whispered, “so we went away.”

But just months before, I’d overheard her talking about engagement rings. She’d shown Issy and Mia a house by the coast she wanted to put an offer on. A family home, where she would raise her children. Her future was set.

“Things like what?” I asked softly and placed my hand on her blanketed knee.

She dropped another blackberry sweet in my mouth. She didn’t speak for a few moments, rifling and sorting through the treat bag.

“I’ve cried enough for one day,” she said. “Only Jared knows.”

“And you want to keep it that way?” I asked, hoping the judgement didn’t fill my words. He didn’t deserve exclusive knowledge of her.

She looked out of the window and croaked, “Yes.”

She’d already been through so much. Yet, she let him keep a hold of her.

“You do realise if Firdman does get released, he’s dead, right?”

She turned to me with the driest look. I wanted to rip her clothes off in the back seat. Her anger turned me on like nothing else.

“I don’t want anyone else killed,” she sighed. “But if someone gets to kill him, it’s me.”

Correction: Murderous Leonie turned me on like nothing else.

“I’ll help,” I said with a determined nod. “I’ll hold the gun, you pull the trigger.”

“I don’t need help with my aim, thank you. If you remember, I was often better than you at the shooting range,” she reminded me with pride, shoving another sweet in her mouth and then chucking one into mine.

“When was the last time you shot a gun?” I asked with a laugh. She was meant to take over her father’s side of the business. The jewellery smuggling of our joint families. Luís, her father, had been creating a more legal side for her before he passed.

She would have taken on the world.

“I’ve gone at least once every week since the kidnap attempt,” she assured me. “The month Dad died, I went every afternoon after school. Anton took me.”

And I hadn’t known.

Because I kept my distance. Because I would hurt her worse than she could imagine if she ever knew the true extent of what I had done.

Luís Castillo was dead because of me.