Chapter 44
FORTY-FOUR
You can do this.
You can do this.
I’ve been standing outside the door to his suite for a little over ten minutes, pacing frantically. I wring my hands, slide them through my hair, bury my face in them, and keep muttering those words to myself repeatedly until it all begins to meld together.
“Okay,” I breathe, stepping up to the door, fist raised to knock. “You can—”
It swings open before I have a chance to finish.
I’m not sure what I imagined my biological father to look like, but this sure as hell isn’t it.
He is a mountain of a man, standing just a bit taller than the twins, with beefy, tatted muscles that are easily seen beneath the tight, painted-on black T-shirt.
His graying black hair is cropped short, but he has a bushy salt and pepper beard.
He looks like a mountain man. His eyes are the same crystal blue, with deepened edges hidden beneath bushy brows.
Jesus, I’m related to the brawny paper towel man.
“Hello, Bailey.” His voice holds a deep, thunderous timbre that sinks into my bones.
“H-hi,” I stutter out.
Kill me now.
The big man grins, the simple action lighting up his face.
“My name is Toph Eriksen.”
I swallow against the lump in my throat. “I’m Bailey.”
“I know.”
Insert facepalm here.
“Right…”
He chuckles warmly. “I see you got your mother’s awkwardness. She could stampede right through a sea of half-drunk bikers without a second thought but introduce her to someone new and she was all thumbs.”
“Can you tell me about her?” I ask. “And… you?”
A sadness creeps into his features. Longing and regret.
He opens the door wider and motions for me to enter.
I step inside, my footsteps tentative. I’m shocked when Seamus informed me that his father has set Toph up in one of the rooms on the guest floor.
I hadn’t expected the hatchet to be buried so easily.
The television in the den is going. The footage of Richard Crowe’s failed announcement for his bid for presidency has been running on repeat for the last twenty-four hours.
I learned that a few things had taken place yesterday, not just my rescue.
While they were breaching their way into the brothel, Ava and her right-hand man, Vas, had gone after Drew and Brittany.
Both of whom are now dead.
I can breathe easier on that front.
At the same time all of this was going on, Crowe was in the middle of giving his speech on doing what is right for the country and how if the people elect him as president…
blah, blah, bullshit. Unbeknownst to him, the screen behind him began to play every depraved home video he made with the underage girls he trafficked into the city.
Shocker.
So much for family values.
He was arrested on the spot. A lump grows in my throat as I watch the footage replay. Reporters hammer down the door at the house, and cameras flash as Sarah is led away in handcuffs for her part. Complicity is a bitch. She got what she deserves.
“Dalia. Dalia.” The reporter on the screen hounds my former “half-sister.”
“What do you have to say about the actions of your parents? Were you involved? Did you know what they were doing?”
She presses by them, her gaze hidden by a pair of dark sunglasses. Are they red-rimmed from crying, or is she as stone cold as her mother?
The screen flashes to show Crowe’s face, and I flinch.
It is the same look he had back in that room.
It is full of anger, but there is a knowing twist to the corner of his lips.
What does he know that gives him such confidence?
Does he believe that the charges won’t stick?
The entire city—no, the entire nation—has seen what a despicable, corrupted individual he is.
“He won’t be a problem anymore, Bailey,” Toph whispers next to me. His assurance feels confident, and it warms me.
“He’s got nearly every judge and politician in his pocket,” I murmur, unable to tear my eyes away from the screen. Toph grunts.
“He won’t live long enough to even get bail. Trust me.” He flips off the television just as my name and photo fill the screen. The Crowes aren’t the only ones to have had their lives blasted on television for the world to see. My entire life story is laid out for the world to see.
They herald me as a victim.
But I am much more than that.
I am a survivor.
Toph waves for me to take a seat. I sink into the warm leather chair across from him, gratefully accepting the tumbler of whiskey he offers.
“You were three when I last saw you,” he tells me, taking his own seat. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, fixing me with his full attention. No one except the twins has ever done that before, and it stirs something in me. “I’ve seen…” He hesitates. “Photos, but they were…”
“After I was beaten,” I finish for him. His hand clenches tightly around his own glass. He gives a terse nod.
“They never told me about you,” I tell him.
“I was raised as an outcast. Told lies and manipulated to believe that each of those beatings was something I deserved. They had a therapist who repressed my younger memories until all I knew was what I was told. He made it seem as if I deserved and needed to accept whatever I was given. I was raised to believe that the beatings were for my own good. I never questioned them. I just accepted it. I was weak.”
“You are not weak. Not then and not now.” He growls the words so fiercely it startles me. “You were manipulated and groomed. None of that is your fault. The only weak one here is me. I should have—I should have listened to your mother, but I chose my club over her.”
He takes a swig of his whiskey. There are tears in his eyes, the crystalline blue shining under the lights of the room.
“Your mother was the center of my world.” He smiles fondly.
“The first time we met was fate. She’d been chasing down the same scumbag we had.
He’d stolen from us, but your mother never cared about that.
She cared about what he’d been doing to his teenage daughter.
She and her ragtag group of biker women swooped in and took him right from under our noses. ”
He laughs.
“Then she delivered him to our door a day later with our missing money and a note stapled to his forehead that he was ours now.” He shakes his head, smiling. “She’d castrated him and used it to…” He coughs. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
I can’t help but chuckle at his reticence.
“After that,” he smirks, “I was a goner. She was everything. Took me forever to get her to agree to a date. Made a fool of myself trying to take her to some upscale restaurant. I’d dressed up and everything.
She laughed in my face and made me drive back to the compound to change.
Ended up having hot dogs and beer at the pier.
It was one of the best days of my life.”
I smile at him warmly as I take a sip of my whiskey.
“What was the second-best day?” I ask the question, expecting him to say the day that he married her or some other memory of my mother that he would open with.
His gaze holds mine and he smiles. “The day you were born.”
Shit. My inner child is openly crying while holding on to her stuffed unicorn. Not small cries either. These are big gulping sobs that could probably start a tidal wave.
“I used to play you AC/DC while you were growing in your mother’s stomach,” he snorts. “She told me that if you were born with a mullet, she’d never forgive me.”
I let out a watery laugh, tears welling in my own eyes.
“You weren’t.” He sighs dramatically. “But you were still beautiful all the same. I remember the first time I held you. You wouldn’t stop crying, and then the nurse placed you in my arms. The world shifted beneath me, and I swore I would do everything to make sure you always felt loved and cherished.
I swore I’d protect you and your mother with my life but… ” He hangs his head.
“What was she like?”
Another fond smile. “You look so much like her,” he says.
“You’ve got my eyes and hair, but everything else is hers.
Lizzie was all fire, but where I was brash, she was calculating.
Her world had been tainted in college, but still, she managed to see the good in it.
Her smile could light up a room, and her laugh—her laugh was infectious.
She’d give you the shirt off her back and never ask for anything in return.
She’d built a community around her. A community of people she loved and respected. One she trusted.”
I beam. “The Vixens.” Yelena gave me her number after the rescue and ordered me to call her when I was settled.
“The Vixens were her family. Victims of sexual assault or trafficking. Some were family members of those who fell into those categories. They wanted justice any way they could get it. They ran an underground network of vigilantism. People reached out to them to exact the justice the courts refused to give. It was her life’s work. ”
He rubs a hand down his tired face.
“Your mother was supposed to meet a potential client at the warehouse her club operated out of. She’d taken you with her, set you up in your playpen in your room there.
She often brought you along to the club because she hated being separated from you.
There was no way of knowing it was a trap.
One of the club girls I’d banned for doing drugs had somehow managed to gain access to the warehouse.
She sold the information to one of your mother’s old friends. ”
“Sarah Crowe,” I breathe.
Toph nods. “Sarah had been after your mother since college. She’d set her up to be drugged and raped by her boyfriend and his friends. What I hadn’t known was that Lina had been in on it too.”
“There was no way for you to know who she was,” I assure him. “Crowe admitted that he’d paid good money to have her nipped and tucked enough so that no one would recognize her as Marilina Brandt.”
“Your mother knew,” he points out with a deep sigh. “She might not have known exactly who she was, but she knew something was off, and I-I didn’t listen. Lina was a club favorite, and I chose my men over her. It’s still my greatest shame.”
“If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t linger on the mistakes of the past.” My teeth sink into my lower lip.
“You can’t move forward if you’re stuck there, and I’d like very much to move forward with you.
” I pause, heat spreading across my cheeks as a sudden bout of shyness creeps over me. “If you would like that too, I mean.”
His answering grin settles any nerves that have crept into my mind.
“I would love that.” He leans back in his chair, shooting me a devilish smile. One full of mischief. “Have you ever ridden a motorcycle before?”