Chapter 4
Asher
She looked nothing like the innocent young girl from her wedding.
The sparkle from her eyes was gone. She wouldn’t smile with the cut on her lip. She couldn’t even open her eye. Dr Montgomery’s report had said it all and then some.
This wasn’t a one off incident.
It had likely been going on far longer than anyone wanted to put a number to.
People say they can’t recognise evil in their own children. I call bullshit. Gabe could blame it on his mother dying. He could blame it on me not being emotionally available to him—whatever the fuck that meant. Therapy speak for a generation that wanted reasons instead of accountability.
I was there. I attended every football match in the rain, every parent’s evening where teachers told me things I already knew, every school play that thankfully didn’t survive past year nine. I showed up. Consistently. Boringly. The way fathers were supposed to.
Ungrateful little fuck.
I should punch myself in the nuts if that was the fastest swimmer I had.
It wasn’t Helena’s fault either. I’d known her since secondary school—she’d been the year below me, all quiet determination and dark eyes. She’d been a good woman. A good mother in the time she had. Whatever Gabe had become, he hadn’t learned it from her.
Sayla stirred and I glanced at her again.
Her eyes were still closed.
Her face was at least four different colours.
Sayla Lawder. Daughter of Nada Dagher and Declan Lawder. Middle child of three. When I’d first had her looked into I couldn’t believe how clean the report came back. I remembered turning the page over, checking for more, finding the file simply—empty. Nothing. Not even a speeding violation.
I smiled at that.
I’d thought perhaps she might be the thing that shifted something in Gabe. When Helena and I had married young I’d had nothing but hunger and intention. The responsibility of a family had focused me, sharpened everything. I’d hoped the same might be true for him.
Now here she was. Broken and bruised on a bed in my house.
And she was still as tempting as she had been two years ago.
With a sigh, I stood.
I’d let them marry and play house for a while.
It was time for Daddy to clean up everyone's mess, including my own.
?
?
?
Every step she took was laboured. The bruising would have set in overnight—the punches alone would have seen to that, but it was the fractured rib from the kicking that would make every breath a negotiation.
There was no fever. She hadn’t been coughing up anything concerning. That was something at least.
I waited until I heard her reach the ground floor before I went to retrieve her. She’d slept over twenty hours and would be hungry. It was the perfect time to interrogate her.
She took a moment at the bottom of the stairs to straighten her back and breathe. Her hand moved to her abdomen, favouring her right side. Her black eye was to the left. The full inventory of what my son had done to her was laid out in front of me without apology.
The brutality of her beating was uncontested.
She wasn’t at a police station.
She hadn’t travelled back to her parents.
Sayla Kersey had come to me.
“Mrs Davis will have your food ready soon, but I believe we need to have a conversation first,” I said.
She startled. Her head jerked up.
Eye contact didn’t last.
Her eyes fell to the floor before she moved forward. Quietly. Carefully. The way something does when it has learned that stillness is safer than movement.
The next six weeks would be difficult for her.
She shuffled past me into the drawing room and I almost reached out to touch her dark hair. Almost.
That was the problem with playing the long game. When the noose was set to tighten, impatience was detrimental. It would do no good to spook her.
Not when I was so close.
Her movements were slow. She winced as she lowered herself onto the couch, one hand braced against the armrest, the other pressed instinctively to her ribs.
“The rib will take four to five weeks to heal,” I said, taking a seat across from her.
Hair fell over her face as she glanced up.
“Why are you here, Sayla?”
I rested my arms on my legs and leaned forward. Giving her nowhere to look except at me.
Her eyes lowered.
“He keeps finding me.”
“The police?”
Her head snapped up.
“He has money and the tongue of an angel when required,” she muttered. “I’m never taken seriously.”
Yes. Helena’s family money, sitting in a trust fund Gabe had done nothing to earn and everything to abuse.
“Do you want rid of my son?” I asked. “You did stay much longer than the rest of them.”
One bloodshot eye and one light brown eye—golden where the sun came through the tall windows—gave me an excellent vantage point of her stunned shock bleeding slowly into realisation.
“You knew?”
It was barely a whisper. It settled between us like something that had always been waiting to be said.
“Do you remember what I said to you before you signed the prenup?”
Tears welled.
One trickled down her cheek.
Others followed.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. The answer was written across every bruise on her face.
Destiny had set this time and place.
But I’d always known.