33. Theo Glass
Chapter 33
Theo Glass
Marielle’s was a small brick-faced and narrow spot crammed between two tall buildings in Brooklyn. My sister’s name was scrawled in white across a blackboard above the red door. I could hardly believe this was real.
A Closed sign hung on one of the windows. I looked inside. The bar was dark, but I spotted a shadow moving in a far corner by one of the booths.
I slammed a fist against the locked door. They were inside. Jace was inside.
My father was inside.
If I had to break through the window, I would. I wasn’t going to let a locked door stop me from rescuing Jace and from getting even with the man who’d made my life a living hell.
The day of reckoning had come.
I could have chosen a different path. Jace had given me a solid head start. I had a passport; I could have been on a plane to a different country by now. If I was really heartless, I would have left Jace to his fate. I knew my father’s intentions for Jace weren’t to keep him happy and healthy—they were to torture and kill him. That could be the only reason why he’d abducted him.
Then again… what if Jace wasn’t even abducted? I was making a few leaps in logic here. It made sense that my father would want to hurt me now that he knew I was the one dismantling his lucrative blackmail operation, but I was beginning to learn that life rarely ever made sense.
“Open up!” My voice came out raw, hoarse with rage. No response.
Inside, the shadow moved again, and I knew I couldn’t wait. One way or another, I was getting through this door. I palmed the crowbar I’d found in the alleyway. No one else was on the street but me. I had to take this chance.
I lifted the crowbar and drove it hard against the windowpane next to the door. The glass shattered with a sharp crack, shards falling like lethal raindrops. I reached through the jagged hole and unlocked the door.
It creaked open, revealing a dimly lit room filled with stale air and the faint scent of liquor. The bar’s interior was even grittier than I’d imagined: mismatched red and blue leather chairs, peeling green wallpaper, and a long counter lined with empty bottles.
I can’t believe he named this piece of shit after you, Em.
But none of that mattered.
One man stood near the far end of the bar, looking up in alarm. Before he could react, another man appeared through a back door.
It was Gio, my father’s right-hand thug. He’d been friends with my father since they were in the navy together. He was a piece of shit, and he was the first to react, drawing a gun from his waistband. The second man—a hulking brute with a shaved head—grabbed a bottle from the counter, his muscles tensing like a coiled spring.
“Look who finally showed up,” Gio sneered, aiming the gun directly at me. “Daddy’s little disappointment.”
“Where is he?” I barked, my voice slicing through the tension like a knife. “Where’s Jace?”
“Downstairs,” Gio said, his smirk widening. “But you’ll have to get through us first.”
Before he could fire, I moved. I launched the crowbar at Gio’s wrist, the heavy metal connecting with a sickening crack. The gun clattered to the ground, and he howled in pain, clutching his arm. The second man came at me, swinging the bottle like a club. I ducked, the glass narrowly missing my head, and countered with a punch to his ribs.
He grunted but didn’t go down. Instead, he swung again, catching me in the shoulder. The bottle shattered. Shards of thick glass stabbed through my shirt, digging into flesh. Pain exploded down my arm, but I gritted my teeth and grabbed the nearest stool, slamming it against his side. He stumbled, crashing into the counter.
Gio recovered enough to pull a knife from his boot. “You fucked up by coming here, Theo.”
“You’ve got it backward,” I snarled.
He lunged, the blade glinting in the dim light. I sidestepped, grabbing his wrist and twisting until the knife clattered to the ground. A sharp jab to his jaw sent him sprawling onto the floor. The bigger guy was on me again, his massive hands wrapping around my throat. He slammed me against the wall, and for a moment, stars burst across my vision. A searing hot pain flooded down my arm, stealing my breath.
But I wasn’t done. I brought my knee up hard, catching him between the legs. He roared, releasing me just long enough for me to grab the crowbar. With all the strength I had left, I swung it into his temple.
He sputtered out blood and fell to the floor like a spineless jellyfish.
Breathing hard, I turned to Gio. He was still conscious, dragging himself toward the fallen gun. I kicked it away and pressed the crowbar against his throat. “Stay down,” I growled. He froze, his eyes wide with fear.
Oh, how the tables had turned.
There were many times Gio would be over the house when I’d have bruises from my father’s beatings, or I’d be silent after spending days locked in the bathroom. He was well aware of the horrors I was being put through, and he’d done nothing to stop it. For all I knew, he encouraged my father’s actions. He was also likely one of the masterminds behind Pressure Point. It explained how he was able to stick around so long as my father’s right-hand man.
I pushed the end of the crowbar harder into his throat. The skin turned pink around the gray steel. His eyes bulged.
The monster inside me uncoiled, swallowing my emotions whole, leaving nothing behind but a cold and cruel anger.
“Please,” he whimpered, coughing the word out against the crowbar crushing his windpipe.
How many times had I pleaded as a child? Just wanting to be left alone? Long forgotten were the pleas for love, for compassion. Those died out after the years of abuse. I just pleaded to be left the fuck alone.
No one ever listened.
I raised the crowbar and slammed it back down on Gio’s head. His skull gave a sickening crack, and his eyes rolled to the back of the room. Blood poured out onto the scratched-up hardwood floor.
Please.
Finally.
Someone listened.
With the two men taken care of, I grabbed the gun off the floor and bolted toward the stairwell at the back of the bar where Gio had appeared from, taking the steps two at a time. The basement door loomed ahead, slightly ajar, light spilling through the crack. I could hear voices—my father’s low, venomous tone and Jace’s strained, defiant replies.
Pushing the door open, I stepped into a scene straight from my nightmares.
Jace was tied to a chair, bloodied and bruised, his face pale but his eyes blazing with fury. My father stood in front of him, a silenced pistol pressed to his lips. He turned when he saw me, his cold blue eyes—eyes we shared—narrowing in disdain .
“Put the gun down, Dad.” I raised my own gun, aiming it directly at my father.
“This is a surprise.” He didn’t listen. The muzzle was still sitting between Jace’s jaws. His eyes were wide, pupils blown open with fear. It made my heart drop. I’d come to love this man with everything I had inside me. He’d fixed me. Made me heal old wounds I thought would never close. He gave me hope that there was some kind of better future ahead for me.
And now, he was a trigger pull away from having his brains sprayed all across the wall.
That would be something I could never recover from. That would be my father’s ultimate act of cruelty.
“Let him go.”
I could shoot him, but I risked missing the shot. If I did, it would take my father seconds to end Jace’s life.
That simply wasn’t an option.
“You were always a bossy one,” my father said. His expression was sinister. I flashed back to being a child. Having absolutely zero power over the situation. I’d been a cockroach under the heel of his boot. He was a twisted man, and all of that abuse and darkness came bubbling back up to the surface of my psyche. I could feel the panic rising.
Have to control it. Have to control it for Jace.
“I didn’t think this would be how you’d find us. I wanted to leave Jace with the same pair of wings you’ve been leaving all of my employees. You caused a pretty big mess, you know that, Theo? Just like when you were a kid. Always fucking things up for me. ”
“You were the one that fucked things up. You ruined us. You stole our childhood. And now you have the fucking balls to name a bar after my sister. This place needs to burn to the ground. With you trapped inside it.”
My father moved so that he stood behind Jace. I looked into Jace’s eyes. They pleaded with me for something. To run? To fight? He didn’t speak, but was his body language trying to tell me something? His eyes darted down to the right, toward his arm. My father lifted Jace’s head with the pistol pressed up against his chin. He pushed the muzzle against the side of Jace’s skull. “You can still leave, Theo. I can give you that one mercy. Maybe I haven’t been a good father to you. This could be my way of making things right. Leave. Let me kill this man. No one besides me will know you were Nevermore. As long as you don’t mess with my business again, then I won’t mess with you.”
“You consider that a mercy?” I spit on the floor between us. “Fuck you and your mercy. Too little, too late.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You’re such a fucking piece of shit.”
“Relax there, Theo. Don’t get me angry. You know what happens when I get angry.” His finger rubbed over the trigger. A slight twitch would end things. My heart pounded with fear, but I couldn’t show him that. My father fed off fear. It made him stronger.
Jace’s eyes flicked downward again. What was he trying to tell me?
“Just let him go. Then you can take out whatever anger you have on me. Same as you did when I was a kid. Just like old times. ”
My father let out a dark laugh. “You know, I did try to make things right. I even tried to apologize to Marielle. But I think I got too close. She figured it all out. It was my mistake.”
“Keep my sister’s name out of your mouth,” I said, venom in my voice. I gripped the gun in my hand even tighter.
“Marielle would be so pleased to see how much you care about her. It’s truly a shame what had to happen to her.”
“Had to… but she… you.”
No… there was always a question in the back of my mind. I always wanted to believe she didn’t kill herself. But… “You killed her.”
“Not exactly.”
I’d been wrong earlier. Killing Jace would have certainly been an act of cruelty, but my father had already committed the ultimate sin. He had my sister murdered. He took away one of the only people I could trust in this world. His own daughter.
Red flooded my vision. I had to take the shot. I had to kill him. I had to end this.
“I had her killed, yes. She knew the truth. Was going to put it all together. I couldn’t have that. Neither could my boss. I’m not doing this all alone, and I do have to report to someone. They weren’t happy when they found out Marielle was smarter than she looked.”
Blood pounded in my skull. It drowned out his voice. All I could hear was my skull cracking in half from the pressure .
How could he?
How could he?
How?
“How?” I took a step forward, gun aimed at my father. Jace’s eyes were wide. “How can you be such a fucking monster?”
“Guess it runs in the family, huh?”
I had to take the shot. End it all. But Jace… the gun was still pressed against his head. My father would shoot it. And my aim was never good. I worked better with a knife, not with a gun.
“You know what?” my father said with a twisted smile slashing across his face. “I’ve had enough of this.”
He was going to do it. I had to do it first. I squeezed the trigger.
BANG.
The bullet whizzed past my father’s head. Instead of blowing Jace’s brains out, he raised the gun, aimed it at me.
A muffled bang sounded from the silencer.
The bullet hit the ceiling. How?
Jace. He’d gotten free from whatever was tying his arms down. He’d grabbed my father’s arm and twisted it upward. My father was caught by surprise. He let go of another shot, and another. Plaster from the ceiling rained down on the floor. One of the lights shattered.
Jace lobbed a punch into my father’s gut. He grabbed his arm and yanked it upward, into my dad’s own chest.
Jace pulled the trigger.
My father’s eyes opened wide. Blood trickled out of his mouth. He blinked once before he slumped forward, falling onto Jace as if he needed the support. The life fled him. Jace had done it. He’d killed my father.
He’d saved us.
I ran to him, a hand on his lower back. He pushed my father off him. My father fell to the floor, the gun falling out of his hand. Blood oozed from the bullet wound in his chest.
“Are you okay?” I asked Jace, scanning him for any lethal wounds. He was battered and bruised but appeared to be okay.
“I am. You?” His eyes raked over my body.
I felt like I was able to finally breathe, as if an invisible weight had been lifted off my chest, my lungs no longer compressed to the size of tiny tin cans. I looked down at the corpse of the man who’d been a part in giving me life and simultaneously making that life a living hell. I restrained myself from letting go of another sequence of gunshots into his back.
“I am,” I said. “I can’t believe this…”
“Neither can I.” Jace surprised me by reaching for my hand. His fingers locked between mine. He blinked, his head shaking as if in disbelief. Could it have been the adrenaline? Did he forgive me for everything I’d done?
“Theo… you need to go. People probably heard those gunshots. The police will be here, and if they aren’t on their way, then I’m calling them myself.”
He was letting me run again. Permanently, this time?
Jace continued, his hand still in mine. “I’ll… I’ll tell them Leo confessed to being Nevermore. I’ll tell them I was close to figuring it out and that he abducted me to keep me qu iet. But Theo… you have to promise me. Nevermore dies today. Right here. It’s over.”
“I promise, Jace. Never again. I won’t ever take justice into my own hands. I’ll never take another life. I swear it.”
He scanned my face, looked into my eyes. I could do nothing but promise him. I gave him not only my word but my heart. I’d give him my life. I’d give him everything.
“Fucking hell,” Jace said. He let go of my hand. “Okay, go. I’ll handle this.”
Before I left, I kissed him. This was the least romantic setting imaginable, but I had to have his lips against mine. Had to seal my promise with a sign of my love for him.
He didn’t pull away. He kissed me back. I could taste the blood from his busted lip. I wanted to heal it, fix him, make everything better.
And I felt like I finally had the chance to do that.
First, I had to leave, though.
“Come to my apartment when it’s done,” I said to him. I didn’t even look at my father. To me, he had died a long, long time ago.
“Okay,” Jace said, already pulling out his phone.
I went to the stairs, every step pulling me further and further out of the nightmare I’d been living in for the past few years.
As I exited Marielle’s and hurried down the street, the final line of the Raven poem struck me.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door ;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Nevermore was dead, but I felt so fucking alive.