90

Certain of his immortality, Falkirk stood to the right of the pantry and turned the knob and threw the door open. Bags of beans lined the threshold. Pistol in a two-handed grip, he stepped away from the jamb and saw the snarky girl alone, a can of pears at her feet.

This most perfect day of his life became even better.

"Come out of there," he commanded.

"No."

He trained the gun on her face. "No isn't an option."

The little bitch defied him and sat down on the floor of the pantry.

He was going to kill her. He had no compunctions about killing children. He'd done it before, if only a couple times. He wasn't concerned about what his crew would say, because they wouldn't care that he offed the little bitch. They wouldn't report him to anyone. Doing so would only get them executed by even more ruthless agents of the shadow state. They all knew what the stakes were here, knew what was required of them, and if Falkirk killed her, that was just one less task for them.

However, he didn't want to kill her in the pantry. He needed to get her out of there, secure her to a chair at the breakfast table, where she would wait for her mother and Pellafino to wake. He wanted the girl to watch while he killed Michelle and Duke, wanted her to understand that she had snarked the wrong man. He was a killer of demigods, a man with infinite worlds at his disposal, who could be shot but not stopped, who felt no pain anymore. He had lived a life of pain from an early age, emotional pain. He'd been shit on by everyone: his mother dying on him, his lust-crazed father selling him out for a sexpot second wife, leaving him with no inheritance. To claw his way up in the shadow state and the halls of the überwealthy, he had licked boots and kissed asses and humiliated himself in ten thousand ways, but now those days were done. He had the key now, the only remaining key in this timeline, and it made him free, made him the master of his fate and hers.

He holstered the gun and went into the pantry and shouted at her to get to her feet. She tried to curl up like a pill bug, so he cuffed her hard alongside the head, cuffed her again. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, out of the closet, into the kitchen. She flailed at him vigorously, without effect. He twisted the fistful of hair as though to tear it out by the roots, until her scream became as thin as an electronic squeal. She so infuriated him that he wanted to forget about securing her in a chair to witness her mother's murder, wanted to deal with her now, put a foot in her face, stomp that smart mouth so she'd never be able to smirk again.