Chapter 36
We returned from the tattoo parlor all freshly inked and riding high.
It had been so long since I’d felt this at ease. This… free.
When we’d run from my father, I never thought I could feel like this again. I was building something that might last—something my father couldn’t take away from me.
Boston moved behind me and I loved how I instinctively knew that it was him.
He was so tall, so broad, so strong and…
safe. That last thought surprised me. Until recently, I’d lived in fear of this man and being tied to him for life, now here I was thinking of him as a place of comfort.
So much had changed in such a short amount of time, but Boston was part of why I felt free.
All four them gave me a sense of belonging and the safety of family I’d been craving all my life.
Only I’d gotten to choose that family for myself.
The others were still in the garage, Sinclair looking at something under the hood of Dacre’s car in an effort to make it run faster. As if that car needed to go any faster.
“Can I see your tattoo again?” Boston asked, his arm coming around my shoulders.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
He paused like he was thinking about it, and impatiently I pulled up my sleeve, exposing my right wrist. On the inside sat five stars, each of them different. One had been drawn by me, the other four had been drawn by each of my guys.
It was my own little galaxy.
Just like our lives together, the five of us existed in our own universe where we decided what was right for us.
When Mickey had recovered and returned to the room, Pres had gotten ‘Sass’ tattooed across his left pec.
Sin had gotten a crown on the inside of his wrist because “you’ll always be a princess, but you’re also my queen”.
Dacre had gotten D+D tattooed on the inside of his left bicep inside a heart and everything, like we were two young lovers who’d carved it into a tree together. But Boston’s remained a mystery.
Boston ducked his head. “Are you thinking about how much you want me right now?”
I scoffed a laugh at his ego. Before I could shut him down with my answer, my father appeared across the hall like the reincarnation of Satan.
“May I have a word with you, Dempsey?”
He didn’t wait for my response, just turned on his heel and headed back towards the library. I stood rooted to the spot.
“You aren’t his to command like that,” Sin said, coming through the garage door to the house. “You don’t need to do anything he says.”
Biting the inside of my cheek, I nodded. But some habits were hard to shake, and in my old life when my father demanded something of me, I was obligated to give it.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, blowing out a long breath and stepping away from the guys.
Famous last words, I thought to myself as I made my way to the library.
What could he possibly have to say to me? Was he going to punish me for telling him to go fuck himself last week? Without Boston or any of the guys there with me, I felt vulnerable and exposed.
Taking a deep breath, I moved into the library, stunned to find my father had well and truly taken over. He’d moved furniture around to essentially turn the room into one big office space for himself. I wondered what Byron thought of it.
My father leaned back in the high-back winged leather armchair that probably cost more than most people’s cars, looking deeply satisfied with himself that he’d rung the bell and I’d come running, just like I always had.
“I can’t help but notice, Dempsey, just how comfortable you appear to be with your new husband already.”
My father grinned as though this conversation had a hidden purpose; one he was going to enjoy getting to.
“Thank you for your keen observations,” I said flatly, trying to keep my tone bored while my insides were roiling at where this might be going.
“It’s interesting…” My father sat forward to prop his elbows on the desk. “You were always so afraid of the Ivers family. Like a petrified little lamb at the mere mention of Boston Ivers. So much so you snuck off with your mother in the middle of the night and ran from me.”
Fear clenched my gut, but I worked to keep it from showing on my face. I knew without a doubt wherever this was going, I wasn’t going to like it.
“And yet, you don’t seem afraid of him anymore.”
My father let his words hang between us, begging me to pick them up, turn them over in my mind, and respond.
“I’ve gotten to know him, and I’ve come to realize that there’s more to him than brutality and violence. I misjudged him, just as he did me.”
I clocked the moment that I’d stepped into whatever trap my father was setting. His eyes lit with a warped sense of glee, and he reached for a drawer in the desk, sliding a stack of what looked like papers from it and holding them tightly.
“Does this look like the handiwork of a man who is deeply misunderstood?”
He tossed one of the papers face up on the desk between us.
Only it wasn’t another legal document he was ready to threaten me with.
It was a photograph that showed in graphic detail a man who had been gutted from his neck to his navel.
His eyes were wide open and lifeless, the organs that were supposed to be inside his body on the outside from the giant gash in his torso.
“Those hands that hold yours did this,” my father said with that same manic delight. He watched me carefully as he dropped another picture on top of the last. “And this.”
This one was of a man strapped to a chair, his hands behind his back and his shirt open.
His entire front was covered in a mess of slash wounds that looked like a child’s drawing.
The man’s eyes weren’t open this time because they weren’t there at all, just dark empty sockets where his eyeballs had been carved out.
I pressed a hand to my mouth to stop the bile clawing at my throat at the graphic image.
“And this,” my father said with mock concern over whatever he was about to show me.
He dropped another photograph on the pile, and I gripped the back of the chair in front of me when my knees went to buckle.
This image was of two people, their bodies burnt all over. Some parts of their skin were red with welts and wounds, others parts were charred black. But there was no mistaking the shapes of two bodies who had been torched together.
“Husband and wife pair, that one.” My father pulled a mock grimace as he stared at the picture, then his gaze snapped up to me not willing to miss another moment of my reaction to all of this.
“A married couple, much like you and Boston, I suppose. Let’s hope you don’t suffer a similar fate when it comes to the end of your days. ”
The threat was clear as the blue waters of the nearby ocean.
He tossed another photograph on the table between us, this one of a man around my age with a single bullet wound to the head. Then he dropped another, and another, and another.
I gripped the chair so tight the leather creaked beneath my fingers, my stomach churning. There was every chance I’d see my lunch again. The images weren’t just unsettling, they were violent, gut-churning crimes.
“While you might be feeling confident right now, Dempsey, you need to understand that I can always get to you.” All sense of frivolity was gone from my father’s tone; it was low and threatening.
“Boston isn’t a doting, lovesick fool like the Aston brothers.
He’s a heartless, violent gangster who will turn on you at his father’s order. ”
I shook my head. Boston had a heart, I’d seen it.
My father’s scorned laugh cut against my bones. “Don’t be so naive, Dempsey. You think that man loves you after just a few months? You think you’re so special that he’s changed his ways? You’re just as stupid as your mother.”
I flinched at his words, all the fear and hurt and self-loathing I’d experienced growing up in my father’s house coming flooding back.
“It doesn’t matter how much money your stepfather or stepbrothers have, or who your husband is.” He sneered at me with disdain, as though I were filth on his fresh carpets and not his only child. “If I want you gone, I can make it happen.”
My entire body trembled at the words I knew were true. I’d seen him kill people. I’d felt the pain of my father’s wrath on my own body time and time again.
If he wanted to hurt me, he knew how. And he wouldn’t hesitate to do it.
He clapped his hands together, making me jump, lightheartedness filling him once more as though he hadn’t just threatened to kill his only daughter.
“I just wanted to make you aware of who you married before you get too carried away with yourself. Boston is a trained soldier for his father’s empire; he won’t turn his back on that for a pretty little thing who opened her legs all too easily.”
The words clanged through me, and I wanted to throw up.
That wasn’t who I was to Boston… was it?
I wanted to scream at him that he was wrong. That Boston wasn’t any of those things, that Boston cared about me, and that my father was the one who had forced me to marry him in the first place.
But I didn’t know what I thought or felt right now, or what the hell I was supposed to do.
And this was exactly who my father had always been—someone who could scare me, and undermine me, and steal my confidence until I was insecure and afraid. It was almost as if he had read my mind and knew he had to exert his power once again.
“If Boston can turn on those poor souls like that,” my father went on. “Imagine what he might do to you if you push him too far.”
I wasn’t safe with Boston. That’s the message my father wanted me to hear.
No matter how comfortable I felt with him or how close we became, Boston was still a product of my father’s world, and he had wanted to remind me in the most graphic way.
“Are we done here?” I asked, unable to keep the tremble from my voice.