CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE #2
I don’t think I’m breathing anymore. I don’t think my heart is beating.
I think this is where I break down and fall to pieces.
Because that’s exactly what I thought, didn’t I?
I thought I had no choice but to keep my mouth shut.
I had no choice but to do as my father told me if I wanted to protect my mother.
So I know how she felt. How trapped and suffocated.
She probably thought it was her fate. To leave her brother behind and be alone for the rest of her life because a monster ordered her to.
A monster who killed her parents, not for collateral damage, but because she was his real target.
“And I was afraid that if I told him the accident was my fault,” she keeps going, “he’d hate me.
He was in so much pain, you know. I was, too, so I understood.
And I was such a coward, you see. Not once did I think about that girl he attacked.
About what happened to her. I just ran. I never did anything to help her.
I could’ve helped her. Called for someone.
I kept quiet, and… my parents died four days later.
My brother lost his speech, got scarred. So it was for the best anyway.”
By the time she finishes her story, I’m looking at my father.
I’m not sure why when I never ever want to see his face again, but maybe for a tiny spec of a moment, I want to see some remorse in his eyes, something to suggest he regrets what he did.
How he ruined so many lives just for the heck of it.
Maybe it would make him human, but there’s nothing.
Not one thing except anger and evil. So I do the only thing I can think of in this moment.
“Lakelyn,” I call out, still staring at my father, who goes on alert, probably at my tone.
“My father’s in a wheelchair. Eight years ago, your cousin Arsen, he beat him up so bad that his spine got fucked up.
His throat got fucked up too. He can’t speak without the help of a voice-box thingy.
So as I was saying before, he can’t do anything to you.
He can’t do anything to your brother. Not right now, while he’s still trapped in this room.
Apparently, the man who kidnapped me has turned on him too. So I’m going to do something, okay?”
“Okay,” she says quietly, her face turned back to me, confusion in her eyes.
I step toward the glass coffee table, right in front of where Lakelyn is sitting, and grab a heavy vase.
“I have a white vase in my hand. It’s heavy.
If I throw it at someone, I think I can knock them out.
At least I hope so.” My father’s eyes have gone huge now, and I hear Lakelyn inhaling sharply, possibly understanding my intent.
Still, I spell it out, “In about three seconds, I’m going to throw this at my piece-of-shit father.
So I don’t want you to be alarmed if you hear the sound of glass breaking or maybe a pathetic son of a bitch wheezing in pain.
” Lifting the object in my hand, I go, “Are you ready? Here we go: One. Two. Three.”
And then I rear back and use my entire body to fucking launch that hard object at him, or rather through him—something they taught us at gym class, back in school—and it hits him in the head and does both: It makes him wheeze out in pain and knocks him unconscious.
In captivity, time is a concept that’s hard to understand.
But there are certain things I know for sure.
I know after I knocked my father out with that vase, Lakelyn and I retreated to one of the bedrooms in the suite.
Where we talked for hours. Or it could’ve been only minutes.
We talked about her life in the convent, and I told her about mine at Wildfire.
Before we moved on to tricky subjects like my time at Rawhide and her brother.
She already knew I loved him, so I told her the truth.
That even though I did, in fact, love him, he didn’t feel the same.
I know they fed us meals at regular intervals.
We simply found trays of food waiting for us in the living room.
I also know they took my father away. Although I can’t say when or if he ever came awake before they wheeled him out.
Other than that, I know we slept on and off, Lakelyn and I.
And when we weren’t doing that or talking, I kept banging at the door, screaming and yelling at them to let us out.
For Lakelyn’s sake, I didn’t tell her that my plan to come to her rescue was an independent venture.
Or the fact that I wasn’t even sure if it helped.
I let her believe her brother was coming to save her, and it was only a matter of time.
But it’s at some point in the middle of the night, hours and hours later, possibly the following day, when a crash outside our suite wakes both Lakelyn and me.
We’re sleeping in the same room, a safety-in-numbers kind of thing, and we both scramble up in bed at the same time.
Just as I hit the lamp switch and flood the room with yellow light, the bedroom door slams open, and the person I’ve been so badly hoping to see since the moment I got here stands at the threshold.
He’s so tall and broad and so strong and safe that my breath gets stuck in my throat.
I may have also gasped his name out loud, because Lakelyn repeats it from beside me.
And those eyes that have followed me everywhere meet mine for a heavy moment before he breaks our connection and glances to my right where his sister is.
At which point I realize he’s not alone.
There are other people with him: Arsen, for one.
And a couple of men I don’t recognize and my brother.
My brother is here, and he looks so concerned that it brings tears to my eyes.
And again, for the first time—although this is a first of my entire life—my heart soars at the sight of him.
The men flood the room, including Breck, and I spring up from the bed.
I run to him and thank God, he hugs me because it only occurred to me later, standing in his arms, that there was a chance he might not have because that’s not the kind of relationship we have.
And for some insane reason, I pick this moment, this very moment when he’s here to rescue me, to look up and ask fiercely, “Do you hate Dad? Because I do, and if you don’t, then I don’t think we can ever have a relationship. ”
He looks down at me for a few seconds, surprise lurking in his gaze. Before he bends down and presses a kiss on my forehead and whispers, “I hate Dad.”
A relieved gust of breath escapes me, like I’ve been holding this very pocketful of air inside me for years, and I clench my eyes shut, tears running down my cheeks. And again, for the first time ever, I hug my brother closer. I hug him with trust as I whisper, “Please take me home.”
His answer is to flex his grip around me.
I wish I could say that through all this I’m unaware of my surroundings, but I can’t. Because I am aware.
I’m aware of where he is in the room: on the other side of it, but directly in my line of vision.
He’s hugging his sister, too, and for a few moments back there, he had looked so at peace, like he does in his sleep.
Like he did back at his ranch, and my heart bleeds for him.
Bleeds for the relief he must be feeling, the joy of getting his sister back, the sheer happiness of holding her after sixteen years.
My heart bleeds for everything I now know about the day his parents died.
About the why and the how, and everything else that came after and has been haunting him for over a decade and a half.
I made Lynnie promise that she’d tell him, because he deserves to know.
And because they can’t let my father win, not anymore.
I’m about to look away from him when his eyes find me over his sister’s shoulder and lock with mine.
My heart starts beating erratically, and my body fills with the kind of life only he can give me.
The green in his eyes looks molten, and I know if I tried, I’d be able to read what his eyes are saying.
But I don’t. I don’t even try. I turn away from him and burrow my face in my brother’s chest because it’s over. This thing is over, this fevered dream that we’ve been living in, and it’s time to go back to real life.