All Dominic could do was lay there as he watched Katarina crawl underneath her bed.
He hoped for death to come, to take him away, knowing his heart wouldn’t be able to watch what Lucifer would do to his precious sister, but he should have known better when his father stopped kicking him before darkness could take him away.
Internally, Dominic screamed from the top of his lungs for help as Lucifer turned to go for his target. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, knowing what it would do to him if he watched, but he forced himself to, not wanting his sister to go through what she was about to experience alone.
What hurt the most was that she wasn’t looking at Lucifer, who was stepping closer; she was looking into his eyes, pleading for help, and there was nothing he could do about it.
When Kat’s scream entered his ears as Lucifer dragged her out from under the bed, the two broken pieces of his remaining heart shattered.
Lucifer lived for one reason—to break souls. He marked the living. It was his signature he left on a soul that you could only see through someone’s eyes who had been touched by Lucifer. That was why, over time, when he let Dominic out of the closet, he would stare into his eyes, looking for the mark that told him he had finally broken him.
Dominic knew it killed his father that he had yet to break him, but it was kind of ironic that the reason he hadn’t yet was because the hell he’d put him through was the exact thing that made him resilient to it … until now.
For twenty years, he had lived on this earth, never letting his father get the best of him, no matter what sick torture or games he played on him. He was feeling his resolve slip now, though.
He held onto his soul for as long as he could while watching Lucifer mercilessly beat his own ten-year-old daughter. The only thing that saved her was her body protecting itself from the pain when she passed out.
Dominic didn’t even watch Lucifer walk past him when he tossed Kat’s body to the ground like it was a piece of trash. He only kept his eyes on her.
Time seemed to pass slowly. He didn’t know how long he lay there on that concrete floor. The pain he felt in his body was unmatched to the pain that was in his heart.
It took everything he had in him to crawl over to her when he finally could. Every inch he scooted closer to her, the more his soul slipped, until he finally got to her unconscious body and rocked her in his arms like he had the first night he’d met her.
Then that was it.
For the final time, Lucifer had finally … won.
Dom sat in the chair at the tattoo parlor, taking in the pain with stride. What he felt as the tiny inked needles sunk deep into his skin was nothing compared to the day Dominic broke.
Lucifer might have won the battle, but Dom wasn’t going to let him win the war. His father had made the biggest mistake of his life that day by forcing him to watch as he hit his little sister. He had finally marked him and broken a piece of his soul, but just like he had broken his wrist … it healed back stronger.
Looking down, he watched the black ink stab into his fists as the eight letter word slowly formed over his fingers.
He had promised himself two things that day …
First, Lucifer would never lay a hand on Katarina again. He had to tell the devil their little secret, and when she healed, he had brought her upstairs to the kitchen and out of the basement for the first time as Lucifer had sat, counting his money.
The mathematical prodigy had showed Lucifer how far from stupid she really was when she had counted the cash on the table without touching a bill.
“She’s special …” The devil leaned forward, staring at the little girl, who he had never wanted to call his daughter, right in her eyes. “Like him.”
“She is,” Dominic confirmed. “Do not make the same mistake again by leading her right to our enemies.”
Lucifer snapped his dead, black eyes back to his son’s at the insult. “Is there anything else you want to fucking say?”
“She is too valuable to us.” Dominic placed his hands on the table before he stood. Staring the devil down, he showed him the monster he had created. “And you will not touch her again.”
And the second thing he promised himself was …
Lucifer would only die by the hands that now had the word O-V-E-R-C-O-M-E splayed across them.
With the door opening and the lightswitch being flipped, the man that had come in suddenly stood frozen in place.