“And your face?” Jake asked.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.” With her good hand, she cupped her swollen cheek.
“You forgot about being hit so hard that your eye’s swollen shut, your face is bruised, and it hurts to chew?” West asked her. “Why’s that, because it’s happened so often?”
“I wouldn’t say often,” she told them. “He usually avoids my face.”
6
West just stared at her. It was taking every ounce of his control to keep from losing his shit. But Felicity came first, and she needed him.
“So, just to be clear, you are saying that your brother, Spencer O’Malley, beat you, Felicity?” Jake said quietly.
“Flick,” she told. “Felicity is what he calls me.”
Fuck. And it was what he’d been calling her as well. Because he’d refused, for some asinine reason, to call her by her nickname. A nickname she used, most likely, because her asshole brother called her by her real name.
Definitely gonna be a special place in hell for him.
“Okay, Flick,” Jake said gently. “I need your verbal confirmation.”
“What happens then?” she asked fearfully. “He’s not going to like me bringing in the police. I’m supposed to never talk to the police. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”
“What happens next, darlin’,” Jake said carefully, as though speaking to someone who was delicate and about to break, “is that I call arrest him. Then he goes to jail.”
“He’ll get out. He’ll come after me.”
“You’re safe here,” West told her.
“We’re going to make sure he never has the chance to hurt you again,” Jake vowed.
“You don’t know him.” The fear in her eyes was almost too much for West to take. He dropped his head down and took a deep breath. One. Two. Three. Hold. Out. One. Two. Three. Hold.
Didn’t help much.
“You don’t know him. You don’t know the measures he’ll go to in order to keep me with him. You don’t know the power he has.”
“I’m going to keep you safe,” West told her fiercely.
“I wish I could believe that,” she said tiredly.
He studied her. He hadn’t been wrong before. She needed a nap. She hadn’t been sleeping, that much was obvious. How could you sleep when you lived under the same roof as a monster? But there was more to it than just that. It was obvious she’d been living that hell for a long time. And that she couldn’t see her way out of it.
“You fucking need to start fucking believe it,” West snarled. “Because that’s what’s happening. You. Will. Be. Safe.”
“That was two fuckings in one sentence,” she informed him, almost snootily.
For some stupid reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he wanted to smile. He liked this side of her. Was glad for it.
Sunshine was sweet and good. But he was glad to know she had an edge. That she could push back. That she wouldn’t let him walk all over her. Because he could do that. Easily, without even meaning to. He could take without giving back. And he didn’t want to do that to her. Didn’t want to take her over completely.
And it meant she hadn’t been broken by the bastard who’d done this to her. That could have easily happened. He could have worn her down into a mere shadow of herself. Instead, she got up with a smile on her face each morning. She spread cheerfulness wherever she went.
She might not have been able to fight her way free, but she’d done what she could to fight by not letting her circumstances dictate who she had to be.
Fuck. He was starting to understand how badly he’d underestimated her. Because Flick wasn’t weak. She was strong. She might just be stronger than him, because she hadn’t stopped hoping. Hadn’t given into the darkness.
Like he had.