Page 125 of Wicked Promises (Fallen Royals 3)

I nodded and went to the stairs. I should’ve gone to my room, but I didn’t.

My parents’ door was open, and a lamp was on.

A lamp in the middle of the day.

It drew my eye, and I went toward it like a moth drawn to a flame. Couldn’t help it.

“Dad?” I called.

Nothing.

Up here, I couldn’t even hear Mom moving around downstairs.

I steeled myself and pushed the door open.

It was stupid. He was going to be coming out of the bathroom or dozing in the chair they kept in the corner of the room for reading. A chair neither of them used for anything except not-clean-not-dirty clothes.

But my imagination told me that he’d be in that chair, and there he was.

Except his eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, and…

“Dad?”

Silence.

So much silence, it reverberated in my ears.

I stared and stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

He was covered in blood, but it wasn’t bright red like in the movies. It didn’t pump out of the hole in his neck or abdomen, between his fingers that were over his stomach.

It was dark. Still. Like it had flowed and then stopped when his heart finally gave up.

I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t move from the single step I had taken into the bedroom.

“Honey, did you find—” Mom grabbed me, pulling me backward. “Oh my god,” she shrieked. She covered my eyes, holding me to her chest.

My body was already wooden.

Dad was dead, or it was a trick. An awful trick.

I tried to get away from her, but I had lost my chance to check him. To shout, Joke’s on you, Dad! I’m not falling for it. She held me fast.

It was ketchup smeared across his face, that had run in rivers down the chair. It was soaked into the carpet, even, around his feet.

So much blood.

A whole body’s worth, spilled out of him.

“Don’t look,” Mom whispered into the top of my head.

My eyes were burning, but I couldn’t not.

“I’m sorry, Caleb.”

A groan worked its way out of my chest. The first noise, but certainly not the last.

She picked me up, grunting with the effort, and carried me downstairs. I was starting to come back alive then, the puppet cutting his strings and becoming a real boy.