Oddly, the lights are off, and panic sets in as I reach out and try to find the switch. My fear, bubbling up in a fucking mall bathroom, forces a snort out of my nose. Compared to the clubhouse, this place is a sanctuary.
All of that fades away on a shriek when I flip the light and see the masked man standing in front of me. He captures me before I even have the chance to respond. His hand clamps over my mouth just after he spins me around and presses me against the dingy, tiled wall.
“Be quiet,” he orders in my ear.
The familiar snap makes my skin crawl.
“Are you listening to me, Zoe?”
I’ve heard that question over and over for as long as I can remember.
“Dad?” My voice is trembling. He hasn’t spoken to me in several months, and he chooses this moment, this method, to reach out. I know immediately why he’s acting this way.
The Ravens Ruin MC.
“I’m going to release you.” His voice is calmer, less commanding. “Don’t scream.”
Why would I scream? Not for the first time, my heart kicks in my chest as fear wages war on my soul. The one man I’m supposed to be able to trust, the one man who is tasked with caring for me and protecting me is making my skin crawl. I immediately yearn for Lynch when I’m spun around and face the empty eyes of my father. Their darkness doesn’t change when he pulls the ski mask off his head.
“Tell me everything you know about the MC.”
“W-what are you talking about?”
“Tell. Me. Everything.”
My head shakes involuntarily as I take in his disheveled appearance. He looks exhausted, his face marked with wrinkles I haven’t seen before and dark circles under his eyes. His temples, previously salted with a few grey hairs, is covered with them now. He’s aged drastically since I saw him last year.
“I don’t know anything,” I answer honestly.
He shakes me by his hold on my upper arms. I’m going to have bruises before this is all over, but it’s the backward snap of my head hitting the wall that concerns me the most. It throbs, and if I’m not mistaken, a trickle of blood is winding its way through my hair.
“Why are you hurting me?”
He has always terrified me. The boom in his voice when he’s angry has always been enough for me to cower and obey him, but he’s never gotten physical. Only once before have I seen him so angry he had to clench his fist to keep from striking me. Today, he’s past even that point.
His tired eyes search mine for the truth.
“You need to find out everything that you can,” he urges, his tone frenzied as if just saying the words will conjure information I don’t have. “I need something worthwhile, something that will get the fucking DEA off my goddamned back.”
“B-but,” I stammer, confused, “You work for them.”
His eyes dart away, but I recognize his shame before he can school his face. When he looks back at me, he’s murderous.
“What have you done?”
His grip on my arms tightens once more with my question.
“Do you really think I could afford to send you to Andover on my salary?”
My blood runs cold.
“The DEA sent you in to get intel.”
Intel?
His eyes are bloodshot, but his pupils appear normal. My only up-close and personal experience with someone so high they weren’t truly in control of their actions was the night I had to set the fire back at school. My father is desperate, bordering on some type of emotional break, but he doesn’t seem to be under the influence of any mind-altering substances, yet, he’s not making any fucking sense.
“Molly is your friend because we manufactured it. Your position in her life was orchestrated by the Feds.” His sneer is only interrupted by the twitch in his upper lip, a simple interruption that only seems to ramp up his agitation. “We expected you to glean information we could use to bring the club down. Except you turned into a whore. They don’t trust the whores. They don’t talk about important things around the sluts that spread their legs for them. You’re more and more like your mother every single day.”
Those words are familiar, too. He repeated them, yelled them through our home when he found out my mother turned to another man in his absence. I was mad at her for betraying him, angry that she took my part-time dad away. As I got older, however, I understood. He’d be gone for months and months at a time. His time with us was negligible at best. His job took him away, kept him away, starting with the very first day he was sworn in as a federal agent. No relationship can survive that kind of distance. My mom fell in love with another man; the very same man she’s still with now. Yet, in his eyes, she’ll always be a whore.