“We had each other,” he finally tells me. I know he’s thinking about the same shit I am. All the shit we went through. There were five of us, five brothers, but Daniel and I were the oldest and the two our father paid more attention to. If you can call what he did attention.
I let the anger and every other emotion fade, opening up the laptop to cue that this meeting is over. The truth slips by me unintentionally as I point out, “It’s not the same.”
“I just want to know you’re not hurting her.” He won’t let it go. My grip tightens on the laptop as I try to remain calm.
“You have to trust me. Everything is about to change and if that girl had stayed where she was, she would have died.” He waits for more. Proof, maybe. I don’t know what he wants, but the less he knows, the better. “There’s so much you don’t know.”
“You could tell me.” There’s a hint of sadness in his voice, or maybe I imagined it.
“Soon,” I promise him. “Soon.”
He doesn’t say goodbye as he walks away. But as he makes it to the door, gripping the handle and swinging it open, I remember what he said about Addison. “Daniel. Give her this,” I call out to him as I open the drawer. I have a few vials of S2L inside the small safe and toss one to him. He nods once and says something about Jase, but I don’t hear, and he’s already gone before I can question him.
Staring at the closed door, I think about how my brothers are the only constant I’ve had. Only them and no one else.
But admitting the truth out loud… I can’t trust myself to do it.
The last time I admitted something of this weight, my world changed. I sparked the depraved monster inside of me to life and it changed everything.
The day Talvery left me to rot where he found me. I’ll never forget the feeling as I heard my father’s truck come to a stop. The old thing sputtered, and the sound was so comforting until his door shut and the anger in his voice was clear.
“What the fuck are you doing out in the open? Do you want someone to call the cops?” he yelled at me and when he tugged on my arm, the burns and cuts shot a horrible pain through my arm that made me scream in the dark alley. Bloodied and bruised, my father still tossed me around like I was nothing.
Couldn’t he see what they’d done to me? I could hardly open my eyes.
“We’ll get whoever did this, but come the fuck on before someone sees,” he hissed between his teeth.
“They wanted to know who I worked for,” I barely spoke as I hobbled to the car. Every bit of me hurt just to breathe. I slumped into the seat as he rounded the truck. And I know they saw. They had to have been watching me. Waiting to see who would come.
Country music played out as my father shut his door and took off down the street toward the dirt roads. I wanted to roll down my window so badly. I remember thinking I was dying, so I wanted to feel the wind on my face one last time. I’d coughed up so much blood, there was no way I’d be okay. My father ignored me as I asked him to do it, and instead, he turned down the music so only the sounds of the rumbling truck and his questions could be heard.
“Who’s ‘they?’” my father asked as he raced over a speed bump and my body jolted forward. I cried out like a bitch and he screamed the question again at me. It was fear in his voice though, not anger.
I know it now. Fear is what dictated his actions. Not strength like the man who’d done this to me.
“Talvery,” I answered in a single painful breath. As I said his name, I remembered the look of Nicholas Talvery’s freshly cleaned face only an inch from mine. I would never forget the way he looked at me like I was nothing and how much joy it brought him to know he could do whatever he wanted with me.
“What did you tell him?” he asked, and I looked at my father. I made sure to really look at him as I told him he was safe.
“I said I was just selling my dead mother’s cancer meds. I said I was no one. And they believed me.”
My heart has never hurt as much as it did at that moment when my father nodded his head and seemed to calm down. He was good at taking care of himself. He was good at living in fear