Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Laurel
Carrson helps get my father out of bed and onto the couch, where he sits, listing to one side like a ship that’s been wrecked and is slowly taking on water.
I prop open the front door to let in some light and to let out the worst of the stink.
A few phone calls from Carrson and the next thing I know I’m bundling my father into the back of a Lincoln Town Car with heavily tinted windows.
“I love you,” I tell Dad.
He lifts a trembling hand to my cheek and casts a worried glance at Carrson, who stands a few feet away. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? I don’t have to go.”
I want to tell him no. That I’m not okay at all. That I’m so scared I’m shaking inside, but that’s not what he needs to hear. I take his hand and press a kiss to his palm like I used to when I was little and he was still my hero.
“I’ll be fine, I promise.” It’s a lie, but at this point I need him to go. The quicker I pull off this bandage, the less it’ll hurt.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I say, then wonder how that’s going to work.
Will Carrson let me call the rehab facility?
Will visiting be allowed? I’m so far away from the world I once knew, I don’t understand how any of this works.
The actual logistics of it. Before I can ask, the car pulls away, leaving me in a cloud of dust waving furiously. Wondering if my dad is waving back.
“You did the right thing,” Carrson says.
“Did I?” I quirk my brow at him.
He kicks a rock, then watches as it skitters out into the road. “Of course, what other choice was there?”
“Exactly.”
We walk slowly back to Ashford House, with me avoiding all the cracks in the sidewalk. Wouldn’t want to break my dead mother’s back.
“Do you love him?” Carrson asks, catching me off guard.
“Who? My father?”
He nods yes.
“Of course.” I wrinkle my forehead, perplexed he’s even asking. Didn’t I just give up my entire life for my dad? Throw myself to the wolves to save him.
“But he failed you.” Carrson frowns, deep lines bracketing the corners of his mouth into hard parentheses, like he genuinely can’t understand. “A father is supposed to provide, to guide, to make sure you succeed—”
“I’m a grown woman,” I cut in. “I can do all that, make my own choices, fight my own battles.”
“That’s not how it’s meant to be.” He shakes his head. “If he can’t fulfill his role, what good is he?”
I stop dodging cracks and look at him. “Love isn’t a transaction, Carrson. My dad’s sick, not evil. Am I disappointed? Yes. Do I wish things were different? Also yes, but that doesn’t change my love for him. Nothing can.”
Jaw tight, he stares at the pavement, hands tucked behind his back. His words sound rehearsed, almost like scripture. “A father who can’t control his house forfeits it.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He huffs a breath. “Never mind.”
We walk on in tense silence as the landscape shifts around us.
The rundown two- and three-story apartments give way to brick homes pressed shoulder to shoulder.
Then the lawns stretch wider, and the houses grow grander, smug in their symmetry.
Gleaming white columns rise like teeth along Greek Row, where the fraternities and sororities sit in proud formation, Ashford House presiding over them all from its perch at the top of the hill.
It’s a slow, deliberate transformation. The passage from my world into his. Watching it unfold only increases my sense of unease, of alienation. Everything here is curated, manicured, suffocating in its perfection.
I remember my question from earlier.
“Where’s my dad going? Can I talk to him?” I ask, raising my voice to be heard over the cicadas that hum relentlessly from the magnolia trees above us. They cling to the waxy leaves, hide like secrets among the trees’ ghost-pale blossoms.
“The facility said no contact with family members for three months so the patient can concentrate on recovery.”
I frown, suspicious he’s lying.
Is this just another way to isolate me? Control me?
Carrson reads my silence. He holds up his hands. “Their rules. Not mine. I swear. Also, I’m not telling you where he’s being treated. Not until I’m convinced you won’t make a run for it.”
My hands ball into fists. It kills me that I can’t talk to my father, and, even worse, I have no idea where he is. “God, I want to push you into traffic so badly right now.” I point toward the street, but because the universe hates me, it’s completely empty.
Not a single car in sight.
Carrson glances at the road, then back at me, one brow lifted in amusement.
I cross my arms and try, unsuccessfully, not to pout. I expect him to get mad. I just threatened his life, after all. I brace for the argument, but instead, Carrson smiles. He steps in front of me and starts walking backward. “If you were successful, you’d make a lot of people happy.”
“Really?” I ask, still petulant. “I’m not the only one who wants you dead?”
“Oh, no. There’s a long list. You’ll have to take a number.”
He says it like it’s funny, but I can’t see the joke in that.
“You see,” he says casually, “everyone either wants to kill me or fuck me. It’s kind of my lot in life. Which one are you going to be, Laurel?”
“Kill. Definitely kill.”
I say it like I mean it, because I do, but also, I don’t.
As much as I can’t stand him, I can’t picture actually taking his life.
Or anyone’s, for that matter. It’s just not who I am.
That’s one of the reasons I want to go into medicine.
I believe every life matters. I learned that the hard way when my mom died, how much one person can mean.
How their absence leaves behind a hole far larger than the space they once filled.
Carrson wags a finger at me. “Nah. I don’t peg you as a killer. More like a lover.” With a crooked smirk, he says, “Just do me a favor, huh? Don’t fall in love with me.”
I snort and roll my eyes. “You’re literally the last person I would ever love. Did you hit your head and forget about the part where I wanted to murder you like...five minutes ago?”
He throws his head back and laughs, unguarded and loud.
“You know what I like about you?” he says.
“My winning personality?”
“Your sarcasm.” He grins. “Most people are scared of me. They just tell me what they think I want to hear. But you? You don’t give a rat’s ass. Probably because you’re blissfully unaware of the viper pit you’ve tumbled into, but still, it’s nice. A change of pace.”
“What?” I squint at him, sure he’s messing with me. “You find me saying I hate you and wish you were dead to be charming? Entertaining?”
“Both those things.” He shrugs. “Everyone else just thinks it. You actually say it.”
I shake my head. “There’s something seriously wrong with you.”
He laughs again. “I never said there wasn’t.
” Without warning, he stops. I slam into him so hard I ricochet backward, stumbling.
Before I can fall, Carrson grabs me by the upper arms and pulls me close, too close, his lips brushing my ear as he whispers, “You won’t kill me.
Which puts you in the fucking category, Kitten. ”
His breath against my skin, that slight press of his lips near the shell of my ear, hits like a live wire.
Electric. Dizzying. After everything I’ve been through, I thought I was done with lust. Thought no man could ever touch that part of me again.
But damn Carrson. His words strike a match, and suddenly I’m burning.
Heat flares across my cheeks, down my neck, low in my belly.
I freeze, breath caught, heart pounding. A second pulse throbs deep in my core.
I shove him.
Hard.
He steps back, laughing softly, with that knowing smirk like he can sense exactly what my body’s doing. Like he can smell it.
“Never,” I growl. I’m angry at him, but mostly at myself. At the way my body betrayed me so easily.
He leans in again, slow and seductive, trailing the back of his finger along my jaw.
“We’ll see,” he murmurs. “I bet someday you’ll beg for me.”
The stroke of his skin against mine is maddening. I swat his hand away, but he catches my wrist mid-motion and holds it, so firm it borders on painful.
“Let go,” I say, but my voice isn’t nearly as sharp as I want it to be. It’s too breathy. Weak.
His gaze flicks to my mouth.
“Say it like you mean it.”
I jerk my arm, but he doesn’t release me, not yet.
He steps closer until our chests touch, until I can feel the heat radiating off him like an open flame.
That laughter, that smirk is gone now. Maybe it was all pretend.
Just an act, a mask, because the man before me is serious as a grave.
His expression shifts, sharpens, turns cold.
“You can hate me. Want me dead,” he says, his voice low and quiet, as if we’re in on a dangerous secret together.
“But you need to remember I’m the only thing standing between you and your father’s destruction.
If I die, the most likely person to take over after me is Jackson.
I’m guessing there’s a reason you don’t want him as a guard.
If I’m dead he could bond you, make you his slave forever.
I doubt that’s the future you envision for yourself, Dr. Turner. ”
This time, I don’t pull away. I lean in, so close I can see the faint stubble on his jaw, the flicker of surprise in his dark eyes. He wasn’t expecting that.
I hiss, “Everything you just said only proves you know exactly who Jackson is, and yet you still protect him. You let him roam free, let him do whatever the hell he wants. That makes you just as reprehensible.”
His eyes narrow, but I don’t stop.
“Don’t think you’re special, Carrson. I don’t just want you dead. I want your entire House wiped off the earth. The things you’re doing to this town, the drugs, the guns, it’s a fucking travesty. The world would be better off with all of you gone.”
His mouth curls, not in anger, but in admiration. “There’s my Tiger.”
I rip away from him and storm off. Rage pulses through me, hot and full, as I stomp the rest of the way to Ashford House, ignoring how he easily strolls beside me, hands in his pockets, his body relaxed like he doesn’t have a care in the goddamn world.
I don’t know which scares me more, how much I hate him or how much he seems to like it.