"Your father is... a bad man. A dangerous man." My mother sighs. "His name was--is--Martell. Charles Martell."

Martell. The name strikes a distant chord in me not just because it's my last name, but I'm scared to find out more.

I squeeze my mother's hands. The gesture feels empty, hollow. "I'm going to bed."

Yet I look into my father anyways. I search for hours online. I cling to every scrap of information. I do everything short of printing off his pictures and making a collage with red string on a corkboard. And it exhausts me. What I find out is that he's powerful. Wealthy. And definitely, certainly dangerous.

Vague hints of news articles suggests his involvement in shady business dealings. Nothing concrete ties him to anything nor anyone. But my father... He's not just a deadbeat dad. He's not just another guy who abandons his wife and child. He's a morally bankrupt criminal.

What does that make me?

I spend the rest of the week in a daze.

I barely find the energy to get out of bed. I open my Bible and feel nothing, comprehend nothing, begging for something to leap off the page at me but find that I have not even the energy to plead with God. I don't know who to turn to or what to do. I go through the motions of talking to my mother, stilted as our conversations are now. Because otherwise, she might see the despair in my eyes, and think that telling me the truth was wrong. She might say, I told you so.

The truth is a sword, cutting to the bone, but I played with it like a toy and got hurt.

GUNS HAVE BEEN DRAWN but I pull mine out of its holster first, levelling it at Charles' head.

"If you're not scared..." I say slowly, circling him. "Why are your hands shaking?"

"Stop!" It's Priscilla, pulling a blade from a sheath at her thigh, beneath her dress, and holding it in front of her. "I will not allow you to hurt my father."

Charles makes a dismissive, guttural sound. "Ma fille, assieds-toi."

"I will not sit down," she hisses before her sister yanks her back onto the chaise.

"Allons-y," Joanna suggests. Let's go. Marcella's eyes dart between her two daughters, between gold and silver, calm and fury. "Ici nous ne sommes pas en sécurité." We are not safe here.

I blink at the knife as it sails past my face, and step aside moments before it grazes me. Charles Martell takes advantage of this distraction and fires, hitting me in the shoulder. I clench my jaw and fire back a few rounds, footsteps pounding as I hear his guards run in. Finally. One of the bullets hits him in the arm, another in the chest, and he stumbles back, alone, onto the chaise. His wife and daughters are long gone.

"Thanks for joining us, boys," I say. "Took you long enough."

One of Charles' guards, and his closest friend, Tomas, pins him to the ground, a knee pressed to his back between his shoulder blades, where a red stain is beginning to soil his navy suit jacket. A pool of blood forms beneath him and I grin through gritted teeth. "Et tu, Brute?"

Charles spits blood and French at me. "Tu vas regretter ça." You will regret this.

"Non, je ne regrette rien," I quote back at him. No, I regret nothing. "It turns out, your most loyal followers would prefer to follow your bloodline and the true heir of Martell, not your so-called heiresses."

His face is white with shock. I continue. "Didn't you know your wife was cheating on you with your best friend?"

Tomas digs his knee so hard into Charles' spine, I half-expect him to go limp. I clap my hands, the ache in my shoulder burning more than I would like to admit with the movement.

"That's quite enough for today, Monsieur Cartier." I shudder with pain but hold myself upright. "I would hate to get my own blood on this carpet."

He nods, snaps his fingers, and the Martell's men follow me out of his own house. They're a motley group, but tight-knit, the four that I've been meeting for the past few months. There's the wolfish Tomas Cartier, the little ringleader of their pack, who speaks for the group. Then the dainty-looking blonde, Marie Allard, his sister, is the glue that keeps them all together. Her husband, Dominic Allard is shifty, the one who is constantly casting an eye over everything and everyone. Dominic's sister, Anne, seems to be the one to really look out for because she is tough as nails and still somehow appears syrup-sweet. Then, there's the silent and stoic type: Pierre, Anne's identical twin and her complete opposite.

"You need a lift back to your place?" Tomas asks me. "You're bleeding a lot."

I wave him off. "Just let me know when you want to meet next. I have my driver waiting outside."

He looks skeptical but gives me a time and place. I nod before hobbling out of the mansion, feeling like I should be more victorious than I actually am. I just accomplished a major settlement. Shouldn't I be happy? Shouldn't I feel fulfilled? Yet something is still missing; a part of me craves more.

More of what, however, I do not know.

I see the black stretch limousine and slide into the backseat. "Take me to the medical unit."

"Not until you tell me what you were doing, rejecting his offer like that." My father's voice. I am paralyzed, every muscle in my body seizing up. "That was an incredibly important deal that you just bungled--"

"Father, do you want me to bleed out in the back of a limousine?" I ask, trying to remain cool and composed while my white shirt becomes more red than white.

"I thought I had made my wants perfectly clear. Explain yourself."

I start, not bothering to put on my seatbelt as the car pulls into motion. "Christina Martell--"

"She is a stranger to these people. To these new friends that you have made. Do you think they will follow her, or these girls that they have known all their lives, no matter their bloodline?" His voice freezes me over, wraps me in a block of ice. "You should have simply chosen one of those girls to marry and been done with it."

I shift, trying to get into a more comfortable position for my arm. "Father, I know what I am doing."

"Still, you do not answer me. Why did I raise such an impudent, disrespectful son?" He snorts. I smell cigar smoke.

"Why do I have such a bullheaded, stubborn father?" I dare to ask.

"I'm going to act as if I didn't hear that." An interesting thing for him to say, when he once told me I was a grown man and grown men do not play pretend or be in denial. "But what makes you think this girl, this nice girl, this average girl from an average family, is going to want to be dragged into your world of trouble?"

That's what I've asked myself.

"Because she already has been drawn in." And I think, for reasons beyond me, she's going to keep coming back.