Chapter Thirty-Three
I KNOW WHERE I am. It smells like tobacco and mold. My old house. My old room. I also know I’m not alone. There’s someone else here with me.
My father.
I should open my eyes now because I’m awake.
I’ve been awake for some time, but I can’t bring myself to.
My heart is racing so hard, and my skin feels too tight for my body.
I feel like a little girl again, pretending to be asleep so my daddy will pass me by instead of raining down his wrath on me.
All panicky and terrified. My stomach is churning, and it feels like I’m going to throw up.
But I’m not a little girl anymore. I haven’t been a little girl in years.
The last time I was in this house, I was eleven.
I was leaving for summer camp and so thrilled to be going just because I’d be away from my mom and dad.
And then I got this unexpected, miraculous reprieve.
I was saved by the man who wore a bull mask.
He didn’t know he was saving me, but that doesn’t diminish what he did for me.
He sprang me out of this prison and freed me from years of abuse.
So I can do this. I can open my eyes.
And as soon as I do, I see him, my father.
He’s sitting at my desk by the wall with a beer bottle in his hand.
He looks old, as expected. His dark hair has thinned, and his face that always looked too sharp and cruel has sagged.
The last time I saw him was at my mother’s funeral, which was six years ago.
He wore a suit and a tie, and of course his black Stetson.
He stood there all somber and serious, looking down at the casket and the woman he killed.
And I stood beside him, the only person who knew he was a murderer.
People came and went, paying their condolences to us, and he received them, though he had no right to.
And I received them without any right to. Back then, my guilt was too strong, and it still sometimes is despite what Arsen repeatedly told me.
My father pretty much abandoned me after my mother died, as if the only reason he put up with me was because of her; because I somehow came as a package deal and wasn’t his own flesh and blood.
It still doesn’t mean that he’s going to let me go unscathed.
Not only because he’s my father, but also because he works for the Turners.
And the Turners are the ones who brought me here.
I’m pretty sure it has something to do with what he has planned. Although why they would kidnap me, I don’t know. I’m not a Turner or a Grayson. I’m just some girl who got caught up in all this.
So I push myself to sit up, and as soon as I do, my father’s beady eyes take me in.
He lowers his bottle and tips his hat up so he can look at me.
He takes in my attire, which is just Arsen’s T-shirt, and I feel naked.
I force myself to sit up straight, though, folding my bare legs to the side.
Before I can say anything, he goes, his voice scratchy and rough, “You look all grown up, girl.”
He used to say that a lot: girl. Like I’m some nuisance and not his own daughter. It used to hurt me, but I don’t have time to feel any hurt right now. I need to know what’s going on so I can find a way to get out of this mess.
For good.
I grip the sheet and ask, “What… What am I doing here?”
“Brecken’s men brought you,” he tells me. “Told him I could take you off his hands until he does what needs gettin’ done.”
I swallow. “What does he need to do?”
“Some Grayson business. Wouldn’t tell me what,” he grumbles. “Except that you’ve taken up with a Grayson.” He takes another look up and down my body, and I want to hide myself again. “And I can see that he was right.”
“I don’t understand what—”
He takes a pull of his beer. “Turned out to be a whore like your mama, didn’t you.” I flinch, but he keeps going: “Although even she wouldn’t touch a Grayson.”
“Graysons are ten times the men Turners will ever be,” I snap, unable to stop myself. “Than you will ever be.”
His dark eyes flash with anger. “See you get your mouth from your mama too.”
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
“Is that right?” He chuckles, his beer belly shaking. “Wonder how you’d feel if you knew the truth about her.”
“What truth?”
He shrugs then. “Maybe you already do. Who knows what she told you when you were both livin’ in the big city.”
My heart, which was already racing, starts beating in a different rhythm now. “What truth? What would she have told me that I didn’t already know?”
He studies me for a beat, and I think he might be messing with me. My father was always fond of using his fists, but I can’t remember him playing mind games. He was always too drunk to do things like that. But then he says, “You never wondered why you look so much like the Turner girl?”
And my heart drops down to my stomach.
Yes, I have wondered about that. How is it that we both look so similar, Peyton and I? How come we have the same shade of blond hair and blue eyes when both my parents have dark-colored hair and eyes?
“I see you figurin’ things out,” he drawls, taking another pull of his beer.
“Told you your mama was a whore. All because I wouldn’t pay her enough attention so she thought sleepin’ with my boss would make me come around.
” He spits on the floor, making me flinch again.
“Fuckin’ crazy-ass woman. And then she tried to pass you off as mine like I’m some dumb asshole who can’t tell his own fuckin’ child… ”
He says several other things after that, cursing my mother, but I don’t hear them. I’m still reeling from the fact that I’m Hank Turner’s daughter.
I am a Turner, after all.
Half Turner, but a Turner nonetheless.
I sit with it for a few seconds while my father rambles on about how my mother deserved every beating he gave her, how he was right to cheat on her, and how I deserved to be beaten as well because I mooched off him all my life even though I wasn’t his daughter.
I try to think how this news makes me feel, how it changes things.
It does explain some things. Why my father never really treated me as his daughter.
Why he was so abusive to both my mother and me.
Maybe it also explains why Peyton and I are so close. Because we’re sisters after all.
But other that that, I don’t think it means anything.
My mother is still the woman who fell for the wrong man and then got caught up in a twisted relationship and paid the ultimate price.
And even if this man in front of me isn’t my real father, my biological father is just as bad, if not worse, than him.
Most importantly, I still stand corrected about love. Love is not what my parents had, and I wish it hadn’t taken me this long to figure that out. Maybe I would’ve lived my life more fully if I’d known.
“I know you killed her,” I find myself saying.
And he stops talking, going on alert.
“I saw you,” I tell him, staring at him through the space, the man whom I thought was my father but isn’t really. “That night. I was there. I was hiding behind a couch like a coward. But I saw it happen. I saw you do it. You pushed her down the stairs. You killed my mother.”
At this, he jerks up from his seat and throws his bottle at me.
It crashes against the wall just a few inches away and shatters into loud and countless pieces.
I wanted to bait him. I wanted to be brave, like I wasn’t while I was growing up, and go head-to-head with the man who terrorized my entire childhood.
So when he comes for me, I’m ready.
I’m ready to scratch his face off. I’m ready to pull his hair.
To smack him. To kick him. To scream and howl and take all my wrath out on him.
All the times I hid and ran and cowered and took his beatings, I’m ready to make him pay for that.
I’m ready for my revenge. And how ironic that I feel this way when only hours ago, I told the man I love to give up his quest.
Maybe we’re not that different after all, he and I.
And maybe I shouldn’t be thinking of him right now because this time around, it’s really over.
He told me in no uncertain terms that he wants me gone.
So I should focus on other things, like that my father has a lot more strength than me.
He can overpower my fists and my scratching nails.
He can throw me to the floor and kick me in the stomach.
That even if I manage to crawl away and find a shard of glass to stab his leg with, my father will still come after me.
But it’s Arsen’s thoughts that keep me going. It’s his thoughts that keep me fighting. It was he who said I was brave. I’m beautiful and I’m a survivor. So I keep trying to survive.
Even when my father’s body is pinning me down on the floor and his hands manage to find their way around my neck.
He chokes me with them, squeezes my throat, blocks my airway, suffocating me.
No matter how hard I struggle, I can’t get his hands to budge.
I can’t shut his face out, his cruel eyes and clenched teeth, as he tries to kill me.
And as always, it’s his name I whisper as I lay dying at the hands of my father: “Arsen.”
I really hope he doesn’t take this the wrong way.
That he couldn’t protect me from my father.
I know it’s over between us, but I know him.
He’s going to think it’s his fault. But it isn’t.
I baited my father myself. I knew what I was doing, and so this is not his crime.
He doesn’t need to suffer for it till the end of time.
Just as my vision is blanking and all thought is leaving my body, I see him.
I see a bull mask.