“Confused about what?”
“How someone can be so kind and so…”
“Psychotic?” Brio filled in, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Well, sort of,” I agreed.
“Wanna ask me why I’m so fucked up?” he asked. His voice was tenser than usual, and I knew this wasn’t something he would normally want to talk about with anyone.
“It has something to do with the scars on your back, doesn’t it?”
“See, our generation of the Family, we developed a set of morals,” he told me. “Mostly because the generation that raised us didn’t have them. Lorenzo’s old man was a fucking bastard. Did some crazy-ass shit. Made his wife miserable, then locked her up for years when he couldn’t control her as well as he wanted to.”
“How? How does that happen?”
“Has to do with an old sheriff’s house with a built-in jail in the basement. It was a fucked situation.”
“Yeah, it sounds like it.”
“On the plus side, he didn’t kill her. So Lorenzo got a nice reunion. His kid has a grandma. It shook out in the end, even if the beginning and middle was shitty.”
“But I’m assuming your situation didn’t… shake out.”
“My old man was Lorenzo’s father’s cousin. He was fucked from the cradle. Once pushed a girl off the swings at a park and broke her leg in three places. Just because he wanted to hear her cry. At least, that was what he told me.”
“He told you that?” What kind of monster said that to their kid? Even if it was the truth?
“My old man liked to remind me that he wasn’t burdened by anything as inconvenient as morals or sympathy or a conscience.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking of my own father, and the amount of love and support I’d gotten, despite how hard his own life had been.
“Don’t think there was a single day I wasn’t getting my ass beat over something. Or nothing,” Brio went on, clearly too lost in his memories. They were just pouring out. And I got the feeling he needed them to, that he didn’t get a chance to really purge it all before.
“I could deal with that, though,” he said, shrugging. “It was what he did to my Ma that fucked me up. However hard he went at me—and he went hard, sometimes not stopping until I pissed myself from the pain—he went harder on my Ma. And I was so fucking little. I couldn’t do jack-shit about it.”
“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been,” I said, meaning it.
My father had always treated my mom like spun gold. They’d cherished each other. I think that was the only reason they managed to make it through such tough times. Their love got them by.
I couldn’t fathom having to sit by and watch my father beat the crap out of my mother, and not being able to do anything to stop it.
“She wasn’t allowed to work or leave the house much at all since she was always fucking bloodied and bruised. I’m not sure I ever saw her true face. It was always swollen from getting hit.”
“Oh, Brio…”
“As I got older, I figured out ways to try to direct his anger toward me more than her. Trying to get between never actually worked. The one time I really tried, because I was sure he was going to fucking kill her, he threw me so hard I ended up throwing up for days with a concussion he wouldn’t let me go to the hospital for.
“And because I tried to interfere, he went at her even harder than usual to punish me by hurting her.
“So it was easier to just… fuck up. Or back talk. Get him to focus on me instead of her. Which only worked for a while until he wised up to what I was doing. Then shit… it got bad again.
“Thing was, by that time, I was getting bigger. And getting scrappy. I was working for the Family before I was out of middle school. Hardened me up good and fast.
“Then the day came when I was big enough.”
“You made your father pay,” I guessed.
And, honestly, it wasn’t shock or revulsion in me at the idea of a son murdering his father.
There were times when I would pick up a knife out of the sink to wash, and clearly picture stabbing it into Eren’s chest when he cocked back to hit me or when he rolled over toward me in bed.
If he caught me in that very moment, well, I wasn’t sure what I might have done.
But I was absolutely capable of violence. Everyone was when they were pushed hard enough.
I’d endured abuse for a year and a half. I could only imagine how done I would have felt if it had happened my entire life.
Or if it was happening not only to me, but my mom.