Morganna looked at his hand and almost smirked, but again, her eyes didn’t reflect any joy. Instead, she appeared haunted. He could almost see the ghost of her husband in her dark eyes. “I never suspected, when I first met him, that our story would end the way it did.” She looked at him, gauging his reaction he guessed, because she continued a moment later. “When I think about it, sometimes, I get sad. Not that I regret the actions I took. Not in the least, he deserved what he got.”
“I’m sure he did,” Samuel said softly, watching her, waiting for her to say something more. He could tell, for the sake of her daughter… for the sake of Camila, Morganna was willing to do a lot.
She must have decided he was worthy of hearing the whole story because she went on as if he hadn’t even spoken. “Around the time Camila was born, my husband and I were having some… financial problems. I didn’t finish high school either, so when I got a job, it was only ever minimum wage. We were fine, but children need a lot of care and a lot of money to raise, you know? So, the funds started disappearing.
“Then one day, something bad happened. My husband was a manual worker, and he found jobs wherever he could, but mainly, he worked in construction. It was a lot of work for not a lot of money, but it was enough for us. Until the company he worked for suddenly closed down, and he found himself without a job. He’d looked for other things to do here and there, but there wasn’t anything steady, and a lot of the time he had to… compromise to make money. Like doing more work for even less money.”
Samuel had never been poor. He was born to rich parents, and even though he’d joined the army, and ended up in places where he got to see how people on the other side lived, he’d never had to experience that sort of struggle himself.
He could imagine, though, the kind of stress a man like that would be under. Having to feed a wife and a child when he didn’t have the funds to take care of them…
“At some point, he started drinking to drown his sorrows away. And because my husband was bringing in less money, I had to increase my work hours. I usually left Camila with a neighbor to look after while I went to work in the morning and got back in the afternoon, but I started working until late. At times, when I was late, the neighbor would leave Camila with her father.”
Samuel’s hands were clasped together, and he tightened them unconsciously, feeling the bad part was about to come.
“So one night, when I got back really late, I found Camila on the floor. Her blanket trailed from the seat, though, and she was wailing with her face red like she wanted to shatter her lungs. She must have fallen. My husband, on the other hand, was laying drunk on the couch, having left her like that. I took her to the hospital because I couldn’t get her to stop crying. She’d bruised her wrist.”
Morganna paused for another sigh. “That was where the relationship between us started going sour, probably, though it did take a while before he hit me for the first time. But once it started, it didn’t stop. Up until Camila was ready to start going to school, and we started having arguments about that, too. By that point, I hated him, and he hated Camila and me. I wanted what was best for the two of us, so I asked for a divorce…”
“And he didn’t take it well,” Samuel finished for her.
She nodded. “Not well at all. He practically lost his mind over it, and I lived in fear of him from that point forward. Before that point, he’d at least tried to hide the hitting from Camila, but after that, he didn’t bother. Sometimes, when he was there and he was arguing with me, he didn’t mind targeting her because he knew it would hurt me more.”
Samuel thought his hands would break under the strain he was putting them through. He couldn’t imagine a man that would stoop so low to try and hurt his own child. Adrien had gone wrong somewhere, but he still remembered how wonderful their parents had been. They were strict sometimes, but they had been loving parents for as long as he’d known them.
He mourned for Camila that she couldn’t have had the kind of upbringing that he did, in a warm and loving family. Just as much as he mourned for his own sister and whatever it was that took away her childhood from her. Or who.
“I would have Camila run to hide,” Morganna said. “So she wouldn’t see the arguments between us. She could still hear it though, and I wanted out of there. But my husband was never going to let us go. We lived in the lower areas of the city, so finding a gun was nothing big back then, though I did have to give up a lot of money for it. I didn’t have the courage to use it right away though, so I kept it locked away in the house. In the kitchen, because it was the one place I knew he wouldn’t look for anything besides beer in the fridge.”
Samuel could practically picture it. A younger Camila, a younger Morganna, and the out of control husband. He could picture the two women living in fear, and it made his heart ache. It was easy enough to picture, because he remembered the fear his own sister grew up with of the outside world. Or the women in the war torn areas he had been stationed at sometimes.
“So a day happened when we got into another argument. Our worst one yet, and I really thought he would try to kill me, then go after Camila when he was done with me. He pulled a knife on me. So, I picked up the closest thing to me, I can't even remember what it was, and I threw it at his head. Then I ran to the kitchen and pulled the gun from where I left it. When I held the gun to him and pulled the trigger… I didn’t even shake, and my aim was good. Got him in one shot. It was the first… and only time I ever shot a gun. And it cost me years with my daughter.”
They were silent for a while, both thinking. Samuel mulled over Morganna’s background that illustrated perfectly what she was willing to do to protect her baby girl from every monster out there, even if she thought the monster was him or his brother.
“I have nothing against you,” Morganna said after a long while of silence. “But if I have even the slightest inkling that I need to protect my daughter from you, I won’t let you anywhere near her. This is your brother we’re talking about, and if it comes down to it, I will take his life over my daughter’s and your feelings.”
She met his eyes, and her gaze was hard. Samuel found it kind of funny, because her eyes looked familiar. He’d seen them in plenty of the people he’d served with in the army, others who had left before he did, and those that remained as he left. Like they’d seen the pits of hell and it left its mark on them. Like the mercenaries he’d hired to find his brother and Camila. Like his own sometimes when he looked in the mirror after vivid nightmare of his time in Iraq.
His jaw tightened.
“You don’t have to worry, ma’am—Morganna,” he said, correcting himself when he remembered she said to call her by name. “I promise you that I will be getting your daughter back, no matter what happens to my brother. You have absolutely no reason to protect her from me, because we both want the same thing. Camila safe, no matter what.”
In fact, he’d wasted a lot of time worrying then sitting down for a chat. It was hardly the time for it. He got up, pulling out his phone to search his messages to see if any of the mercs had found a lead. If none of them had discovered a thing yet, he was going to increase the pay.
He would make sure Camila got back safe if he had to go out there and look for her himself.