He slams the door shut so there’s nothing between us, and I blink back into focus. As he takes a step toward me, a pounding catches our attention, booming down the hall, and Stokes emerges, bloody clothes and face, charging at him.
Byron’s brother ignores Stokes and turns back to me as I swing the mallet and connect it to the side of his cheek in addition to the force of his turn. It bounces off as he screams, and I grunt from the pain radiating from my palm, loosening my grip.
I can’t drop the mallet. It’s the only weapon.
I grip back on to it, wincing as Byron’s brother stumbles back and Stokes jumps on him, pulling him down to the floor by his neck.
Sirens wail louder, muffling Stokes as he groans, grabbing at him in every way possible to restrain him as Byron’s brother fights to get up.
If he gets up again, he’ll come after me.
No more.
I step to his side, lift the mallet above his head, just as he did to Stokes.
He reaches out at my ankle and squeezes it, using it to pull himself up off of Stokes.
With all the energy I have left, I swing the metal mallet down against the middle of his chest where his brother stabbed my father and release a guttural scream.
A strained whoof of air escapes his lips as I stumble out of his grip, back against the wall. Stokes works his way out from beneath his limp body as I pant, desperate for this to be over.
For everyone who thinks they’re entitled to me in any way to leave me alone.
I step forward, pulling Stokes to his feet. He wraps his arm around me, guiding me through the front door first where police cars screech to a stop on the road, all around his black car with tinted windows.
His.
I don’t even know his name.
Stokes bends, kneeling at Cline’s side, and grabs his hand as blood seeps from his shoulder.
Please be alive.
Cline moans, opening his eyes slowly, and I catch my breath, filling my lungs for the first time with the smokey autumn air.
“Drop the weapon,” the officer says as he exits his vehicle.
It takes a moment for me to realize he’s talking to me.
I drop the mallet on the porch with a clunk, leaving my aching hands empty. Stokes stands, and we raise our bloody hands as the police officers approach the porch with their weapons drawn.
“He’s inside,” I say, panting. “The man who tried to kill us is…”
Dead? Is he dead?
“My friend needs a paramedic,” Stokes tells a passing officer.
I’ve never been so thankful to have him by my side.
I grab Stokes’s arm with my left hand. “Your head. I thought you were…”
The officers sweep between us to the front door and we turn around, watching as they surround Byron’s brother on the foyer floor. One aims their gun at him, while another bends down and presses two fingers against his neck. The officers make eye contact and he shakes his head.
I killed a man.
My body shakes and my teeth chatter from the adrenaline.
They have to know, it was self-defence.
“He’s Byron Sommer’s brother. Byron killed my father,” I tell the officer stopped beside us, kneeling at Cline’s side. “He was trying to kill us.”
Stokes wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his chest. I close my eyes, the red and blue lights still flashing behind my lids, and the déjà vu of the same words I screamed to the paramedics as they arrived six years ago echo back to me.
He was trying to kill us.
But Byron was only trying to kill my father—and he succeeded.
His brother was trying to kill us—and failed.
All because a man was jealous of what he couldn’t have, and delusional enough to think he could have it if someone else were out of the way.
Is that what happened with Royal and Pascha?
Is Pascha dead?
Cline’s words at the door begin to sink in as he’s helped by a paramedic.
“Lyn,” Stokes mutters, and I pull away just enough to look up at him. “My head really hurts.”
Paramedics pull him from my arms and load him onto a stretcher. My heart aches as I watch his blood soak the white cushion behind his head as they roll him down the pathway.
“I have to go with him,” I call to them, and follow him to the ambulance beside Byron’s brother’s car.
He used that to track me, follow me, and terrorize me at my most vulnerable times; yet not the tinted windows of his car, his hidden identity, a key to our home or even his pre-meditated plan could protect him from the bitter end his path of revenge led him down.
Just like his brother.
I give it one last look before a stretcher carries Cline to an ambulance behind the car and I hop in behind my friend, grabbing his hand as a medic closes the doors behind us.
I barely feel the pain of my cuts any longer, or the black of my hand, but the warmth of his hand comforts me.
I hope it comforts him.
“Thank you for staying with me,” I tell him as he blinks up at me. “I’m so sorry.”
“Lyn.” He squeezes my hand and whispers, “You stayed with me, too. Thank you.”
A lump forms in my throat as we speed away from the house and away from the last of the Sommers.
Epilogue
Mom has barely let me out of her sight since she saw me in the hospital that night.
That night was something we used to refer to the night Dad was murdered, but so much has happened since then. That night describes what happened every night for this past week, leading up to, and including Halloween.
Nothing feels like the right thing to
