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the best role model for his little brother, but he was the only role model he had. He had done the best he could when he had only been a boy himself.
    “Yeah, I remember.” Dominic smiled, caught up in the fond memory.
    “So, anyway,” Colton continued, “we were tossing the ball back and forth and then, all of a sudden, you weren’t there anymore. In your place was this guy that kept telling me he was my father. Said he was real proud of the man I’d become, and he wanted to be part of my life, that he felt like shit for not being there for me and you when we needed him the most.”
    “That’s bullshit. He’s playing with your head, Colt.”
    “Yeah, I know.” Dominic wasn’t convinced his brother really believed his own words. He could tell by the look in his eye. Colton wanted everything Drake had said to be true.
    For the duration of their young lives, Colton had been the one who had always yearned for a father. He had even drawn pictures of his family, except there had been this extra person standing next to their mother, holding her hand, and they all had huge smiles on their faces. When Dominic asked who it was, he had just shrugged and said it was their dad. The kid was naïve. He really believed one day he would come home and they would be a perfectly happy, little family. Dominic had felt sorry for Colton, and it just made him work that much harder to give him some semblance of a normal life.
    Dominic hated their father even more because of the heartbreak he had seen his brother endure—his hopes crushed, his dreams demolished. It was just cruel. But given what he learned of Drake D’Mon, cruelty was what he did best. Case in point: the fact that he visited Colton in his dreams and preyed on what he wanted most.
    “What did you tell him?”
    Colton fidgeted with a loose string on the hem of his shirt and shrugged a shoulder. “I told him you were the only father figure I ever had or needed in my life.”
    Dominic’s heart swelled with pride.
    “And then he told me if I ever changed my mind, I could find him at the graveyard. He said he had a legacy he wanted to pass on to me and not to let you stand in my way.”
    Dominic’s heart stopped cold. “That son of bitch!”
    “Don’t worry about it, Dom. I told him he could shove his legacy up his ass for all I cared, but he wanted me to give you a message. He said he’d be seeing you soon. That’s when I woke up.”

When Colton had told Dominic that their father would be seeing him soon, he had no idea that it meant within the day.
    After a relatively successful disclosure of the facts Colton needed to know about him, he had taken Kerrigan’s advice and gone up to their room for a much-needed nap. It wasn’t long after he closed his eyes that REM sleep set in, and he was forced to relive the nightmare that had haunted his dreams and reminded him that he was not as heroic as the people he loved would’ve liked to believe.
    It was the eve of his twenty-fourth birthday—the night evil had stalked and murdered the woman who had saved his life.
    Availia had been behaving strangely all day. Usually during the week, her chores would consist of light cleaning and some straightening up here and there, reserving the heavy duty stuff for the weekends. But not that day. She had been scouring every inch of the house as if preparing for guests. Even more strange had been her insistence to go grocery shopping. That was something else she usually reserved for the weekends. When she had arrived home, the trunk of her car was loaded down with enough food to feed an army for a week.
    She called her son, Hudson, that afternoon. Dominic hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but when he had seen her tracing the outline of her families’ faces in the photos on the mantel as she spoke, he became concerned. It sounded an awful lot like she was saying goodbye. He dared not alert her to his presence, but odds were she already knew he was there.
    By the time dinner had rolled