The Little Dove #2 ✔️

67. A Time So Deadly

CHAPTER 67: A Time So Deadly

Dying.

An inevitable defeat every single person has to face.

Time. Is the essence that ticks inevitable defeat.

It was not my Dad's time, nor his inevitable defeat to leave the love that surrounds him now.

I've never seen a life drained out of someone's eyes like I watched the man who was the first to hold me when I was born, crash and fall to his knees with a knife jolting out of his back and pain not in him, but all around him.

Everything blurred around me when the first thousand knives shattered against my bleeding skin and mixing blood with water, soaking my dulled sunshine blonde curls when I watch in unadulterated fear as an iced banshee leaps towards my fighting Father and embeds a knife into his back.

It broke my focus from everything else.

A fist is sent towards my temple, but my vision was so focused on my father's falling form, Edmund growls lowly from the side of me, seeing me get a hit and he went on a rampage. He rips the guard off of me, throwing him through the air with a roar on his lips.

"MAXIMUS!" Mom screams.

DAD!

I watch my Mother scream, I hear myself scream out my Dad's name as he drops to his knees. Marvin shoves a hit into the side of Charlize's neck, crunching it to the side after shoving her away from him. My heart drops in my chest as I sprint towards them, my legs pumping strict adrenaline into my veins, my arteries, my blood ran cold but it ran fast when Mom catches Dad in her arms.

I drop in front of them, under the rainfall, "Dad! Dad!" I repeat, looking at his back as I scream for Grandpa Stevens to call for an ambulance. Mom looked indescribable, she brings Dad close as he reaches for her hand, his head on her lap.

"Don't cry...honey." He whispers into her stomach.

Mom chokes on a sob, "You promised, Maximus. Don't do this. I haven't spent my life protecting you and watching you go first, this is not happening. Control y-your breathing, don't-don't move your shoulders too much, keep a tight grip on my hand," She whispers into his hair, running her fingers through it as I hear sirens.

Mom blinks blurry emerald green eyes to me, "M-Melanie, your jacket. Press it to the wound, a-around the knife, not directly on it." She hiccups, watching my Mom break was the most devastating moment of my life. I did what she asked, moving it around his shoulder, trembling as Marvin helps me when my own eyes blur. Dad breathes the way Mom told him too as he cuddles in closer to Mom's stomach.

I seeped in a hole so dark, so damp and freezing cold. Like being palaces on a stone-cold steel table, and forced to watch and hear the ticking clocks on strands of my life that were teething and scrapping in all sections of so many strands. My lifeline, my Mom's heart and my brother's fist-was dying in front of our eyes and no special serum, no cure was working in the hands of his family prepared to lay down their own souls to make sure his wouldn't leave a planet, a family-that isn't ready to say goodbye.

"Dad." I whisper, shaking my head. I was begging him to hold on, to stay with me, with us.

There isn't our family without my Dad, without his humour, his warmth, his laughter and his love to make Mom laugh. To make Mathias whine and joke. To make me feel the comfort only my Dad has ever been able to show me. To make Marvin see a love between the woman my Dad has adored in just fifteen minutes of meeting her, for Lorraine.

He has the power to cure us...and to destroy us all.

Dad is the beating heart of this family.

I sob between clenched teeth, "Daddy." I whisper, leaning my forehead down as Marvin does the same, I place a kiss on his temple, he taps my cheek gently with the corner of his temple when I called him that. Like I did as a little girl. He loved it. He gives me a warm look now, happy his family surround him, but I hated the look of content on his face. As if he were comfortable with a knife so close to his heart and his life on the line, but just that the woman he loves and the children he created with her was with him before...I squeeze my eyes shut.