Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 47716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
Anton winced, but his wife didn’t seem to notice. “Baby...”
“Forget so quickly, did you? I’ve got that blood, too. Let’s get it done.”
“Okay,” Anton said, worried his wife was working herself into a fit. “How about I take my gun back, and Rory can go get you your—”
“Nope,” she repeated.
Lifting that hand off her stomach, Vine waved at Rory to signal for the skeets to be released. The bull on the side of the lake hesitated only long enough for the girl with the gun to wave at him once more. Then, the shooter went off, sending a clay disc spiraling high above the lake. Not a half a second later, the second one flew high, too. Finally, a third one went up.
Anton didn’t know what he was expecting. Maybe for his wife to raise the weapon, shoot, and miss.
Maybe he even expected her to raise it and hit at least one out of sheer luck alone. The sun was to their backs, after all. She didn’t have the glare of light. The handgun, so long as she could control the kickback from the fire, was pretty accurate with the aim. But, you had to know how to aim it, too. Once more, Anton was reminded that he didn’t know a thing about his wife and guns, except for the fact that she didn’t like them.
Anton didn’t watch the moving targets, no, he watched his wife. The hand with the gun came up lightning fast, her grip suddenly a whole lot stronger and surer. The other hand steadied her aim under her wrist while her eyes zoned and her body adjusted minutely.
There wasn’t a lick of hesitation.
It was one loud bang, the gun recoiling hard and fast like he expected it to, and then she lowered her arm.
Vine didn’t take the second or third shot.
She’d done what she was taught, he realized.
Made the first one count, and she didn’t blink about her choice.
Anton listened as two skeets splashed into the water and his wife turned to face him. The gun was handed over, her head cocked to the side in wait. “It wasn’t about hitting them all, it’s about hitting the one that mattered most to me. Which one did I hit, Joe?”
The bull didn’t say a thing, and Anton was stuck staring at the slight tremble in a small hand holding out a weapon she despised more than most.
“Joe?” Vine asked again, keeping her gaze on her husband.
“The first one,” the bull mumbled, sounding a little bit stunned.
“Yep. The first one. Put the guns away, Anton.”
Death
Foreword: Death takes place shortly before The Life ends. It was not originally cut from the story, but rather, written as an afterthought. I simply didn’t want to write a character like Anton in such broken form. Some readers wondered how Anton would have reacted to his father’s death, and this is exactly how.
The faintest creak of the only squeaky floorboard in the entire upstairs caused Anton to wake out of a dead sleep. It didn’t matter that the alarm clock blinked 3 AM, or that his newborn son had already been up a total of five times since he and Viviana first laid him down to bed earlier in the night. Anton might have been totally exhausted from lack of sleep, and he was, but someone wandering through his home put him on high alert instantly.
Hell, wandering through a mob boss’s house in the middle of the night was liable to get a person shot, frankly.
Anton didn’t have the chance to reach for the handgun he kept hidden from his wife in his bedside table before a soft knock landed to the bedroom door. It was followed by the quiet tenor of their live-in maid Clarissa, asking if one of the two were awake.
Soundlessly, Anton slipped out of the bed, keeping care that he didn’t wake Viviana or Demyan sleeping in the attached enclave. He didn’t bother to grab a T-shirt to pull on, or to bother with sleep pants, either. Instead, he snuck out of the bedroom in boxer-briefs knowing the extra time he spent rooting around in the bedroom for something to wear very well might wake up his son. God forbid that child wake up again before he woke up himself and was ready to feed. They’d quickly learned that was not a fun hell to be in the middle of. Especially at night.
“What?” Anton asked Clarissa, letting the door click shut softly.
“I didn’t mean to wake you, but you should call your mother. She’s ... Well, it took her a couple of tries before I heard the phone and picked up.”
Anton cursed silently. They’d removed the phone from their bedroom so any early morning or late night calls wouldn’t wake the baby. Even cell phones had been all but banned from the bedroom ever since his work one rang off the hook the first night they were home from the hospital.