Wilhelm yelled and shot wildly towards me with his shaking hand, missing with all but one bullet, which struck me in the left arm.
I cried out and raised my gun towards him. “It’s over Wilhelm.”
Wilhelm looked at his son, the defeated mercenaries, and the dead King at his feet, his rage replaced by shock. He had killed the King, but he had also lost everything. Kill him. My arm shook as I aimed at his head. Just one shot…
Taking a deep breath and lowering my gun, I whispered to myself, “No.” He deserved to die for what he had done but suffering through the rest of his life in prison, knowing that he was the reason his son was dead, that was a far greater punishment.
As Jonah and the servants finished freeing the trapped Whites and closed in around Wilhelm, the snake dropped his gun in defeat. The rest of the royal family joined the Queen at the fallen King’s side, and I just stood, lost, as Julia’s face filled with agony and tears streamed down her cheeks, her eyes fixed upon her dad’s body. I couldn’t save him, but I could save her.
Jonah hobbled towards me as one of the kitchen chefs shoved Wilhelm to his knees. He looked at me in silence and gave me a brotherly hug. I returned it but couldn’t figure out what to say. Words could not express what we had just done, and all I could muster out was a “thank you.”
He released me from the hug, smiled, and patted my shoulders. “You did this, Coyote. We were just the back-up.”
I looked at my bandana, sitting in the midst of death and carnage, before returning my gaze to Jonah’s face and shaking my head. “Coyote is dead.” I turned my head towards Julia. “I’m only Ivan now.”
Jonah followed my gaze. “Is she…”
I knew what he was about to say. “Yes.”
He nodded understandingly. “Go. She needs you.”
As he headed towards Wilhelm, I stumbled over to Julia and knelt over her father’s body. Her eyes flowed like a river as I wrapped her in my arms. My own tears began as I started to grasp what just happened. We just sat in silence, mourning the death of the King and so many others as the shocked royals gathered around us. She looked up at me for a second and our tear-filled eyes met before breaking back towards her fallen father.
Is this my fault? Isaac had become unhinged after he found out what I did, but his family obviously had larger plans of revenge. Everything had fallen apart so quickly. Operation Blackout didn’t matter when I was watching a maniac put a gun to the head of the woman I loved. That was the first kill that I didn’t feel bad about, and with Coyote gone, I hoped it to be my last. Coyote’s death meant nothing if Julia could live. I couldn’t save the King, but I could save his family and as many royals as possible. So many of them had spat at me and mocked me for the last few months, but none of it mattered in that moment. When it came to it, they were helpless as yet another tyrant decided he wanted to take something that wasn’t his. It didn’t matter who Wilhelm was, he would pay for what he did.
Everything was about to change. The UPF had lost almost all of its cameras and electronic surveillance systems, but that would just make them more ruthless; the real fight was still to come. We had so far avoided a war, but with the King dead and the monarchy on shaky footing, things looked bleak. There would be repercussions, and my name was public now. I would be a target, even more than before. Coyote may have been dead, but Ivan inherited his sins.
As I looked down at the King, I thought about what he had accidentally done for me. His last words were raging about my secret identity and relationship with Julia, but he had opened the door for me to be where I was, saving the rest of his family. With his death, there would need to be a new monarch, and after that night, nobody had a clue who it would be. The third most powerful royal family had almost conducted a successful coup through cooperation with the UPF, the Militia had lost its potential ally on the throne, and most, if not all, of the Hughs’ guards were dead. Though the royal army was larger than that, it showed the Hughes family’s weakness. Vultures would be circling, and Duke Bilgram’s coalition remained a known threat. Unfortunately, the Preus family had remained an unknown one until the last second. Would there be others?
Miles away, another leader had fallen. We had lost El Capitan and so many others because of what Razor had done. We would make sure he paid for it. We were without a captain after our greatest mission yet. The Militia had lost so many in the UPF raids that night, and I didn’t know how many of us were left. On top of that, we were now connected with the monarchy, further complicating the entangling alliances in Northern Mississippi. The few lieutenants still alive would want to stake their claim on the captaincy while our remaining forces scattered, fleeing from the safehouse raids.
As tonight had shown, everything was intertwined. The Prism was fractured but so was the world of glass in which we knelt, and I wondered how long we had until those fractures shattered everything around us.
Us. Julia laid her head on my shoulder, her tears running onto my jacket as we knelt. In one night, she had a gun put to her head, saw her boyfriend kill multiple people, and saw her father die. We had both lost our fathers, and a part of ourselves died with them. There was nothing I could say to change what happened, nothing to fix it. It felt like forever as I held her there, the cracks stretching beneath our feet.
END OF BOOK ONE
Afterword
Thank you for taking the time to read my first book! I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. If you did, please consider giving it an honest review on Amazon. To stay updated on my writing for the series, as well as updates and promotional opportunities, sign up to receive email updates at: www.eepurl.com/gd0rZ1
The Fractured Prism (The Prism Files Book 1) Page 24