“Then tell me,” he said with audible frustration. “Tell me what it is that you think is going on.”

She hissed her next words. “I’m getting the money that should have been mine,” she said. “Because I will put it to better use than either you or Lisette would. She’ll let the men who follow her like puppies influence her judgement. She might even let you influence her judgement. I won’t make the same mistake, though. I’m here for the money, Mark. That’s what’s going on.”

The next sound that I heard was the sickening sound of me being mistaken about everything; mistaken about having come here, about letting my uncle try to help me, and about what Naomi was truly capable of. The sound of the gunshot was so fast that I didn’t even have time to react, but the sound of Mark’s groan lasted much longer.

Michael, Adam, and Rob immediately ran into my uncle’s bedroom, leaving me standing in the hallway alone trying to decide whether I should run after them or stay here so that I didn’t do anything else stupid to put them in harm’s way.

After a split-second decision, I ran into the room behind them.

The scene that played out before me was nothing short of everything that I had tried to avoid with my attempt to come here alone. But I couldn’t have been more grateful that the guys were all here with me. My uncle’s body was draped over the floor as a pool of blood crawled along the ground around him as if it were a red shadow. Michael, Adam, and Rob were all wrestling with Naomi until they were able to wrangle the gun from her hand and restrain her. She didn’t know we were here. She wasn’t expecting the three of them to rush her. She looked frantic and confused as her head whipped around to look at each of them. Michael stuck the handgun in his back pocket while Adam and Rob held onto Naomi, who was trying to scream, and bite, and kick her way out of their grasp.

Unfortunately for her, they were a lot stronger than she was and there was no way that she was getting free from their hold or hurting anyone else.

I ran to kneel down beside my uncle and lifted his head into my lap as Michael put pressure on his wound. But the bullet had hit the left side of his chest, and by the amount of blood that was seeping from his body, it was obvious that Naomi had struck his heart.

Her aim couldn’t have been more perfect for a fatal shot.

“Mark,” I said as tears welled in my eyes for someone that I barely knew. “You gotta hang on for me, okay?”

I cried because I was so tired of losing people, even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to know my uncle yet. I still wanted to, and those decisions were being ripped away from me by selfish people who had nothing better to do than profit off the backs of others. I was so sick of people taking the things that were mine and hurting the people that I cared about.

I looked at his pained face and heard him struggling to breathe as his eyes became wider and more full of fear. I glanced at Michael and I could tell by his expression that there was nothing we could do. Within the next minute or two, my uncle would be dead.

But Mark still reached up and grabbed my hand. “Lisette,” he strained, “Follow Paula’s wishes. Do what your mother wanted to see done. She gave her life in order to protect you and everyone that needed protection. Honor her.”

The last two words he spewed out were laced with blood that dripped down his chin. As soon as he had pushed himself to relay his last thought in this world, Mark died. Right there in my lap as I held his head against my thigh, he died.

And it was all Naomi’s fault.

“We should just kill her,” Rob said. “We should kill her right now and be done with this. She deserves to be killed, and then we would be free of her.”

For a minute, I agreed with Rob. I hated Naomi. She killed my uncle, she nearly killed the man I love more than anyone in the world, and she tormented the other men that I care about. She wants to steal my mother’s dying wish so that I cannot fulfill it, and I hate her for all of it. But Mark’s words rang in my head so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything aside from what he said.

Honor her.

He gave his life for this too. He protected my mother’s inheritance, and her journal, all this time just to make sure that I received the chance to choose what to do with my mother’s wish. As much as I agreed with Rob and wanted to pull that gun out of Michael’s back pocket and shoot her squarely between the eyes, I couldn’t.

The only thing that was going to make this right was if I could make sure that all of this loss was not in vain.

“No,” I said to Rob in a voice that sounded much stronger than I felt. “We can’t kill her. We’re going to help her.”

I had to grit my teeth in order to make the words come out without choking on them as I set my uncle’s lifeless body down onto the ground and stood up.

“Help?” Adam asked. “Lisette, come on. I know you want to do the right thing, but you can’t be serious about this. She’s killed people.”

“We were able to help David,” I reminded him. “David killed people too. Hell, we’ve killed people ourselves.”

“Yeah, but we’re not psychotic,” Adam said, half sarcastically and half completely serious. “Not yet anyway.”

“What are we going to do with her, Lisette?” Michael asked as he closed Mark’s eyelids with a gentle stroke of his hand. He knew better than to argue with me right now. “It’s not like we can just throw her in the backseat of the car and take her back to Charlotte. She’s dangerous.”

“Why not?” I asked. “There’s four of us and only one of her. She has no weapons, no one here to help her, no traps that she’s been able to set. I don’t see any reason why we can’t put her in the back of the car and take her home.”

“Home?” Rob asked.

I nodded. “I’m going to create a sanctuary for anyone who is troubled, like my aunt. I’m going to build it in Charlotte.”

“You mean we’ll build it together,” Michael reminded me.

I nodded once more before I continued. “We’ll build it, get it off the ground, hire people to run it, and then once it is self-sufficient enough to take care of the residents there, then we can leave and go back to Asheville or wherever else it is that we all want to go. My mother’s wish is to have it built and help people inside of it, including Naomi. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Michael teased me a bit. “If I have to keep correcting you to say ‘we’, I’m going to start feeling offended.”

“Sorry,” I said with a soft smile. “That is what we’re going to do.”

“Alright,” Adam sighed as he shrugged his shoulders, knowing he wasn’t going to get any further toward dissuading me in this argument. “Let’s bind her up at least. She’s a crazy bat.”

Naomi spit on his shirt, and Adam looked at me with his hands lifted in the air as if to say “See, told you so”.

Michael took care of my uncle’s body while I gathered up all of the inheritance documents and my mother’s journal. Rob held Naomi still as Adam wrapped a cord around her wrists and ankles. I could tell that the cord was painfully tight by the way she was screaming and cursing at them.

Good.

I hoped it hurt her.

Just because I was going to follow my mother’s wishes didn’t mean that I was going to make this an easy experience for Naomi, not after everything that she had done to hurt me and the people that I cared about.

“When I get out of these bindings, I will make sure you pay for what you’re doing!” Naomi screamed at the guys.

“Sounds to me like that makes it a good idea to never untie you then,” Rob sneered.

Adam chuckled and Naomi lurched forward and tried to bite him. He was right; she was a crazy bat. I walked up to her, not close enough for her to spit on me or bite me, but close enough that she could hear me and see the look in my eyes.

“Naomi,” I said. “I’m going to try to help you because that is what my mother wanted me to do. But I’m not going to put up with any more of your violent, selfish bullshit. If we need to keep you tied up with cords so that you don’t try to kill us, then we will. If we need to knock you out in order to get you to be quiet, then we’ll do that, too.”

She laughed at me as her eyes flared with rage. “You couldn’t knock out anything,” she said with a cruel smile on her face.

I took a step closer to her, cocked my arm back, and punched her in the face so hard that I felt the tiny bones in my knuckles crack. Naomi’s head slumped forward and her body went limp in Rob’s arms.

“Damn,” Rob laughed. “That was quite a punch.”

“I’m really glad she finally shut up,” Adam said. “I wanted to punch her myself, but I thought you would have gotten mad.”

“I would have,” I said as I cradled my hand. “I wanted to be the one to do it.”

Rob threw Naomi over his shoulder and Adam held the door open as the two of them went out to put her in the car.

“How’s your hand?” Michael asked as he reached for me and carefully tried to unfold my fingers which were still clenched into a fist.