They were my sisters, but Erika wasn’t my father’s. So that meant…
I bared my teeth. “You’re lying.”
He broke out into a smile, enjoying every second of this.
It wasn’t true.
“Natalya Delova was my mother,” I maintained. “I look just like her.”
“Be that as it may, you didn’t come from her cunt,” he said.
I stood there, unable to speak. He had to be lying. There was no way that was happening right under my nose, and I didn’t know it.
She wouldn’t have… How would I never have known that? She would’ve spoken to me or done something.
My father’s laugh filled the air more than the smoke or the noise below.
I raised my eyes back up to him.
“Schraeder Fane was out of the country for a few months,” he explained, “leaving his pretty new wife at home alone.” He tipped his chin down at me. “I just couldn’t resist having my way with his pretty little bride.”
Having his way.
Like I knew he did in rooms of our house, late at night, their cries carrying through the walls.
I stilled as realization hit of how I was conceived. “You raped her.”
He laughed and then shrugged. “Whatever.”
I did the math in my head. She was young. Still. She was Winter’s age when Rika was born. She would’ve been a teenager when I was born. Eighteen? Nineteen?
My father continued, “When Schraeder came home to a pregnant wife, there was no hiding what I’d done. He was prepared to raise you as his own and leave town with his little family, but I couldn’t have that. Real men don’t let other men raise their sons.”
I glared at him. Like he raised me at all? Intimidating me, smacking me around, and treating me like property?
“So the night you were born, I came and claimed what was mine,” he stated. “She screamed and cried. And then spent the next several years depressed and drunk. I really didn’t think she’d take it so badly, but…things got a little better for her when Rika came along.”
Rika’s mother was a mess for a lot of years. I grew up, seeing a barely functioning, pill-popping, alcoholic on the rare occasions she was in public.
It was all his fault. Not her losing her husband or anything else. She’d been barely alive, and Rika barely had a mother.
But she was always nice, wasn’t she? Now that I thought about it. Always docile and sweet.
“They ended up staying in Thunder Bay,” my father went on. “Probably to be close to you.”
No wonder he didn’t bat an eyelash when he knew Natalya was coming into my room and what she was doing to me. She wasn’t my mother in his eyes.
In his eyes, she was making me a man.
“When you were a teenager,” he told me, “I found out she and her husband were planning on telling you the truth as soon as you turned eighteen. So I took care of Schraeder. With a little help, of course.”
With Evans Crists’ help. Michael’s father.
Since he had Power of Attorney over the estate and Christiane was all too happy and drugged-out to care, Evans saw his opportunity to control another fortune. The largest fortune in town.
I glanced back at Rika, seeing her brow furrowed as she probably wondered what we were talking about. None of my friends could hear us.
I dropped my eyes to the scar on her neck.