Landon: Justice Series ― Erotica Paranormal Romance (12 page)

“It wasn’t much of a house. Two bedrooms, and a bath. Nothing like the one that they live in now. And when it comes time for them to be moved out and into a nice cell in prison, which I’m assuming you will want, all the things that are in the house stay. They can’t even take their clothing with them because they had knowledge of this will.” Landon had asked him how he knew that. “Your father and mother both signed it. On each page at the bottom, so that there would be no problems later, the will stated who got what. I looked it up. You were about twenty-four hours old when the will was updated with your name in the place of baby Logan.”

Someone touched his arm, and he sat up on the seat to talk to the man. Steele was his best friend. He was sure that he was to the others, too. But to Landon, he would forever be the one person that he would go to when he needed someone to talk to. Steele asked him if he was all right.

“Yes. I think so. They told me she’d be in surgery for about an hour or two. Then they’d move her to recovery where I can see her. She’s been beat up pretty badly.” Steele said he’d seen her too. “My father murdered Grandda.”

“I heard. I’m so sorry about that. You and I, we sure did win the lottery when it came to parents.” Landon told him he thought they all had. “No kidding. You think that was what made us what we are? I mean, not necromancers, but hard men?”

“Hard? We’re hardly what I would consider hard now, would you? I mean, I’ve seen you around Kari. And when Aster is in your arms, you look like day old ice cream. A puddle of mush.” Steele told him to wait until he had his own children. “We’re going to adopt. I mean, we’ll have our own children too, but we’re going to take in a couple of kids that have nowhere else to go for now. Billy is looking to see if he can find a child like us, one that might be alone too.”

“Kari and I are going to as well when Aster is a little older. I think Mitch and Vinnie are working to that end as well.” Nick had just announced that morning that Addie was going to have a baby, so he knew that they were going to wait to adopt. Each of them had a lot to offer a child, and more if the kid was anything like they were. “I have a favor to ask you. As soon as you can leave here knowing that Dillon is going to be all right. It’s about Vinnie’s father. I need help dealing with him.”

“You know that I will do whatever you need of me.” Steele said he appreciated that. “What is it we’re going to be doing? I’m assuming it’s to send him to hell.”

“Something like that. I’ve been trying to think how to do this without having a mess on my hands. As you know, Horatio hasn’t been able to go back to his place of death. So the last I heard he’s been taking over the bodies of the living and using them to kill. Last weekend he took the body of an elderly man in a nursing home and tried to get him to kill all the residents there. Kari and I think he’s trying to gather him an army again.” Landon asked him what had happened. “The man had no gun, of course, and the only weapon he had at his disposal was a small butter knife. He caused himself more harm than he did anyone else, but it was enough to have me called in. The poor man kept saying that he’d been possessed. Of course he had, but not by a demon.”

“What’s the plan then? You have one, right?” Steele said that he had, but he was going to need his help to pull it off. “Like I said, I’ll do whatever you need.”

The doctor came down the hall toward them and both he and Steele stood up. Kari was at home with the baby and the rest of the men were with them. With Allister out, no one was safe just yet. The doctor asked them if one of them was Dillon’s husband.

“I am, but he stays too please. I need him here.” The doctor sat down and smiled. Immediately he felt much better. “She’s going to be all right then.”

“Oh yes. She’s going to be just fine. I want to wait a few days before I send her home, much to her displeasure. She’s quite a woman, that wife of yours.” Landon asked him what she’d done. “Almost as soon as the IV keeping her under was shut off, she came awake cursing like a sailor and telling the nurses to get you. She said that she was going to bring a shit storm down on me so hard that I’d be feeling it for weeks. I came here when she threatened my manhood. Again.”

Landon laughed, as did Steele. He could not wait to get her home, where he could show her just how much he loved her.

It was another hour before he got to go back and see her. She was doing fine, but they didn’t want her to get an infection this late in the game. As he was told not to touch any of the bandages on her face or hands, he thought about the first thing he was going to say to her. Kissing her, he’d been told, was going to be next to impossible with all the bruising. But he was going to make it work if he had to hurt himself to do it. As soon as he entered the room, however, all he could do was sob and look at her.

“I could kill him.” Dillon told him it wasn’t that bad. He knew better…he could see what had been done to her. He’d seen her earlier, of course, but the swelling hadn’t started as yet, she had had blood and bandages on her face, and her hands had been covered by the blanket they had on her.

Her cheek was still bandaged with a large gauze, and he’d been told she had seventeen stitches in it. Her nose had been broken, and both her eyes were nearly swollen shut. There were stitches in her left brow as well as along her chin. He touched his fingers to hers and saw that her wrist was in a thick cast, and the other was wrapped up on a board to keep it still while the IV was running. Landon leaned in and kissed her gently on her lip, the one that was showing, and held her while they both fought more tears.

“She has four broken ribs as well as a sprained knee. All of which will heal nicely. The gunshot wound is clean and stitched up, and the loss of blood is a little concerning, but not so long as she keeps getting fluids like she is.” Landon nodded, unable to speak to the doctor as he rattled off what had happened to Dillon, as well as what he’d done to repair it. “Her lungs are clear, which is amazing since I fully expected them to be damaged as well. And her fingers, only one is broken. There doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage done to her. We’re going to keep her here for a few more days, just in the event that her lungs fill with fluid and we need to operate again. But in a few days, a week at the most, you can take her home.”

After the doctor left them, Landon watched Dillon drift in and out of sleep. She was all he had in the world right now, and he didn’t want anything else to happen to her. When the nurse came in a few minutes later and said that she needed to take Dillon’s blood pressure, Landon nearly laughed as it became evident she didn’t even know where to start.

He never left her. Not that he would have if they made him, but he slept in the chair while she rested. When morning came and he was asked to step out so they could change the bandages, he told them that when she came home he was going to need to know how to do it and wished to stay. Ten minutes later a nurse was not only showing him how to take the old dressing off, but how to put it back on so that there wouldn’t be any marks to her skin. He was shaking when she was finished, and wished that he could have had a little of the pain meds she was getting after they left them alone. Landon knew it was going to be a long time before he let her out of his sight again.

Chapter 11

Allister was just sitting down to dinner when his butler came into the room. His face might have been comical if he wasn’t so sure that he was afraid. Asking him what was wrong only got the man to babbling and finally, Allister got up to see what the problem was. He didn’t have any idea who the woman was that stood there on his doorstep.

“Invite me in.” He backed from her. But when she repeated herself, he felt as if he had no choice whatsoever but to do as she wanted. As soon as she was in the room with him, Allister knew that he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. She rushed him until she was standing there holding him above the floor with one hand.

He struggled for a few seconds until he remembered that he was armed. Reaching into his pocket for his gun, he nearly had it pointed at her when she smiled at him. Allister felt his bladder just let go. The women had long, sharp fangs.

“Shooting me will only piss me off. And I think we’ve had enough piss for one day, don’t you?” He nodded. “Now. I’m going to put you down and if you try to run, you’re going to ruin all my fun. And that will be terrible for me. It matters little to you, because either way, you’re a dead man.”

As soon as his feet touched the floor he felt his knees nearly buckle. But she picked him up again and sat him down on the couch. He never realized that they’d left the front hall and were now in his office. She sat down at his desk, and he didn’t have the energy to tell her to get away. Terror was making him weak. And weak minded. But he soon recovered when she began going through his drawers.

“What do you want? Whatever it is, you can just forget it. I’m not going to be playing whatever games you have in mind.” She grinned again. “What do you think you’re going to do? Kill me like you said? No, you won’t. I’m a very powerful man.”

“You’re a fool if you think I’m going to let you go. You are going to die. By my hand. But before you do, you’re going to do a few things for me.” He told her to fuck off. “Bad manners will not make your death a quick one, Allister. It will only make me have more fun while I kill you.”

“Who are you? And why do you think you have any rights to kill me?” She told him her name. “Means nothing to me. I don’t know a Vinnie Riley, and if you think those fake teeth are going to scare me, you’re stupider than I think you are. I have men all over this place that will come to me with just a shout.”

“They’re dead. All of them. Go ahead, call out to them. See if anyone comes. Oh, and the butler you have here, as well as the cook, they’re gone. I sent them on their way after you allowed me to come in.” She tisked at him. “Bad news on that. If you had not let me in, you might have lived a little while longer. Now I have you all to myself.”

He was beginning to think she wasn’t lying to him. But just to be sure, he called out to his body guards. All three of them. No one came, and when she got up to go to the door, he thought perhaps she was going to show him where they were. She did, but it wasn’t to see his men tied up.

They were indeed dead. Victor’s head was nowhere near his body, and the other two men had had their throats torn out. Not cut…no, they were simply torn out, like an animal had bitten down on them and just ripped. He looked at Vinnie when she said his name.

“You’re going to make a hasty will, leaving all your belongings to your lovely daughter. Also, I have a list of people here I want you to confess to killing.” He took the paper with at least three dozen names on it. “I know there are more, names I mean, but this will do for now. The rest will, I’m sure, come forward after you’re gone. You have a nice welcoming party just waiting for you to draw your last breath.”

“What do you mean?” He put the paper in his lap, not at all caring for the way it shook in his hand. “You must think I’m a sap if you believe I’m going to leave shit to my daughter. She’ll be dead soon enough anyway. And when she is, I’m going to go and piss on her grave.”

Vinnie looked at his lap and laughed. “You might want to clean up a bit if you really think that’s ever going to happen. And as for your welcoming party? Well, it’s the people on that list. The ones that you murdered. Oh, and the man you sent to kill Dillon and her husband is in police care. You should really do a better job of checking out your employees before you pay them two million dollars for a job that was never going to happen. He worked for the Feds and is telling them all about you right about now.”

“No.” She nodded and told him to go to the desk. It was as if he had no control over his body. He was standing up and moving to the desk before she sat down on the chair across from him…not the couch he’d been in. He noticed as it was stained wet with his urine. “What are you doing to me? You’re doing this, aren’t you?”

“I am. Now reach into your top left drawer and pull out the legal pad that’s there.” He did this, his hands not listening to him as he tried to tell himself not to do it. “I’m telling you right now, this is much easier than I thought it would be. I thought that you’d be harder to control. I guess it goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Allister wrote what she told him to. Each word was as hard as the next. He not only left his daughter his vast collection of paintings, but told her in the letter where each of his holdings were, and his homes, even the ones that were worth no more than the paper he was writing on.

By the time he was told he was finished, Allister was beyond exhausted. Fighting the woman had taken its toll on him. But every word she said, every command that she’d given him, he’d done it without being able to fight her off.

“Now what? You think that anyone will believe that I did this on my own? I have news for you, no one will take this seriously. They know me better that that.” She said she had that covered too. With a snap of her fingers, a man entered the room, stepping over the bodies as if they weren’t there.

“This is my attorney. He’s used to doing things that are slightly unconventional. And when I ask him to do something, not demand as I have you, then I know it will be done properly.” Before he could say a word, he was signing another form stating that he’d written the will he’d just made of his own free will.

“It’ll never stand up in court. No one will go against me when I tell them what you’ve done to me today.” She said nothing and just watched him. It was unnerving having her stare at him like she was, and he felt himself squirm in his seat. “Who sent you?”

“No one. I came here all on my own. You see, I really have come to love Dillon. She’s nothing like you, thankfully, and I want her to have this all behind her while she and Landon make a life together. I talked it over with Steele, and we decided that you need to be dead.” He thought her mad and said so. “No, at least not in the way you’re thinking. I am mad, but at you, not in the head. Now. Write out the confession.”

Again he had no way of not doing as she said. Each name he wrote, she told him that they were there to collect. Collect what, he asked her several times, but she only gave him the next name on the list until all of them were written down, with where the body was buried written right next to it. If anyone got a hold of this, he was going to prison for a very long time.

After he was finished with it, she had him put it in the envelope that she had on her and seal it with his own tongue. He never did this, never put his DNA out where it could be used against him, and marveled at how easily she’d made him do that as well. To do so now made him realize what sort of control she had over him. As the envelope was put on his desk and his pens put away, he asked her what the fuck she thought was going to happen now.

“You’re going to die.” She stood up then, moving toward him with a slow gait that made him think of beautiful women on a runway. But she was deadly too. This woman would kill without a second’s hesitation. He knew as surely as he was sitting there that he was going to die by her hand, just as she’d told him.

“I’ll give you all my money.” She laughed as she stood in front of him. “Everything is yours if you just leave here now.”

“No.” He watched in horror as she pulled out a gun and handed it to him. When she told him to put it to his chest, where his heart might have been, he could no more not do that than he could breathe. It occurred to him that there was going to be nothing he could give her to stop this madness just as she told him to pull the trigger. He did that as well, and felt the blast pierce his chest.

“Goodbye, Allister. I do hope you enjoy your afterlife. What little there will be in it for you.” She sat down again then, not caring at all that he was dying right in front of her. As if she did it every day. For all he knew, she did. Allister felt his life draining away as he tried to stem the flow of blood coming from his chest.

He saw them then. The men and women that he’d killed. They faded into the room even as the blood pooled in his lap. Holding his chest did no good; he was bleeding to death as they stood there watching him. Then as his body slipped away, Dave Marshall, the first man he’d ever killed, slammed his fist into his face. Then the next man and the next, until he felt like he was broken.

“And tomorrow, they will begin again. Every day they’ll come to you, Allister, forever and ever.” She laughed then as she stood up. And when she walked out of the door and closed it softly behind her as he was beaten, Allister started to scream as they hurt him. Beaten by ghosts that he had killed.

~~~

Landon stood in the middle of the hall and just stared. He wasn’t really sure what he was supposed to do or how to do anything. But his attorney had told him to meet him here and here he was. Earl handed him a thick chocolate chip cookie. Landon nearly sobbed when the thing seemed the only normal thing he’d seen for hours.

“You just walk around here and let me give you a tour. To have a man such as yourself here, no one knows what to think.” Landon nodded, taking a bite out of the cookie as he moved with him. “How is the missus? I heard that she is doing much better now. Be on the mend soon, I’m told.”

“Yes. She said to tell you that you’re coming to live with us. If you want to, that is. She told me how kind you were to her.” Earl stopped for just a second and Landon looked at him. “You don’t have to, Earl. I know that you might have your heart set on retiring, and my house is much bigger but less work. We’re not home much.”

“I’d be honored, sir. You know...I was going to ask. I surely was. You’ve made my day, you have.” They started toward the stairs again, to make their way to the bottom, Earl told him. “Are you taking any more of the staff? I should like to help you there. Not many would want to work for you. Not just you, but...well, sir, they rarely worked here when they didn’t have to.”

“You bring whomever you think. Like I said, it’s a huge house.” Earl said that he knew just the ones. “We have a cook, you know that, right? And her husband, Moses. He helps her there.”

“Yes. We have met with Miss Izzy before. Your cook, Alice, she is a good woman. Miss Ruth, I believe she is setting to retire now. I don’t think that your missus and Miss Ruth got along too well when she was here.” Landon thought that was an understatement. Ruth didn’t care for him overly much either. “It’s best for all that she is retiring. Things will run smoothly without her around.”

Landon agreed. As they moved from room to room, he thought about the items in the house. He had no attachments to any of it. There were some pictures of his grandparents that he took, a blanket that Grandda said he wanted, as well as a few things that had been his and Grandmas when they were owners of the house. A bedroom suite, as well as the silver picture frames with pictures of people that neither him nor Grandda knew. They were outside the room that he knew was his parents’ when he looked at Earl.

“I can’t.” Earl seemed to understand and told him he’d take care of it. But Landon felt he needed to explain. “They were never much to me. I know that they’re my parents and they really disliked me, but to go into their room and keep something from it? I can’t do it. There is nothing in there that will mean any more to me than this house does.”

The rest of the house was a blur. He kept the dining room table after it was approved by sending pictures of it to Dillon. He also kept the televisions. There were three in the lower levels alone that he thought would do well in the garage or basement of their house. Then there were the cars.

His grandda had collected them like some men did ties. He never drove them as far as anyone knew, and if he did, it was cleaned, waxed, and put back in the garage waiting for the next time he wanted to take one out for a bit of fun. As far as Landon knew, neither of his parents drove anywhere either that a limo couldn’t convey them to just as easily, so he knew that they’d never touched them. He turned to Earl and offered him any of the cars he wanted.

“Oh no, sir. I could never do that.” But he wanted it. The little red sports car that had been there since Landon had lived here as a child. “What will the others think?”

“I don’t care. I’m going to sign it over to you.” Earl looked at him, then at the car again. “Tomorrow. We’ll go down and have the title turned over to your name in the morning. As for the rest...I think Steele wants to have a look at them, as well as Hugh. After they have their pick, then we might as well sell them off too.”

The contents of the house that he didn’t want were go be sold off at auction. There was already interest, and several people had asked him if he was going to sell. But Landon had an idea what he really wanted to do with it and the house, he just had to talk to him. He thought that the house and all the surrounding land would be perfect for Drew.