Chapter 38
GALINA
“Hi, Dad.”
His face fills my phone screen as he flashes me that signature roguishly charming grin.
“Hey, peanut,” he winks. How are you…” Dad trails off as his dark brows furrow. “What the hell is that?”
I roll my eyes as the distant sonic boom of Explosions thuds from the other side of the bathroom between Ari’s room and mine.
No, I don’t mean explosions as in bombs are going off in my best friend’s room. I mean the band from The Garage two nights ago.
Arianna is now officially a fan. Which is wild, because I don’t think she’s ever listened to metal before.
“Lucia and Lena and I went to this metal concert a few nights ago at this super sketch bar,” I say, grinning. “Ari couldn’t come but Lucia sent her some songs and she loves the band now. She’s been playing them non-stop.”
Some parents…Papa, for instance…might be alarmed to hear their daughter was going to dive bar metal shows.
Dad is another story. He grew up with punk music and tattoos, immersed in the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. So rather than freak, he grins.
“Nice!” He winks at me. “Who was the band?”
“I dunno if you would have heard of them,” I giggle. “They’re called Explosions? Lucia is a huge fan. That’s how we ended up there.”
“Oh shit!” Dad hoots. “I’ve been listening to them at the gym lately!” He clucks his tongue against his teeth. “I’m jealous!”
“Where’s Papa?”
Dad chuckles, rolling his eyes. “Out with his baby mama.”
I giggle.
Papa’s “baby mama”—and Dad’s too—is my bio mother, the Chanel and Cartier model and brand ambassador Cora St. Claire.
She and Dad met on a fashion shoot when he got picked up to do some modeling for Versace, and they became friends.
When he and Papa started talking about the possibility of kids, Cora mentioned that she’d be interested in acting as a surrogate, and the rest is history.
She’s never felt like a “mom” to me or anything. But Zane and I are fairly close with her, and her and Dad are still great friends.
Her and Papa, meanwhile, are basically besties.
“And what are those two up to?” I smile.
Dad rolls his eyes. “They’re at some fucking woo-woo yoga mediation retreat bullshit out in the Hamptons for the night.” He sighs. “Your Papa talked to your aunt today and needed to clear his head.”
Well, that explains that.
My aunt Evelina is lovely. She’s kind, funny, beautiful, and incredibly genuine. Unfortunately, we don’t see her, or that whole side of the family, very often.
It’s a tough topic for both Papa and Dad, because it involves their siblings. My aunt is Papa’s sister. She's married to Dad’s brother, Vaughn Bancroft, who happens to helm one of the most dangerous and powerful criminal organizations in the world, the Obsidian Syndicate.
Again, it’s a sore subject, but at some point, before Zane and I came along, or our cousins Aiden, Anastasia, and Dorian, there was some split between Dad and Papa, and Uncle Vaughn and Aunt Evelina.
It’s not a Cold War nobody-speaks-to-each-other situation, but…well, the best word might be “strained”. That’s partly why Zane and I have never really been that close to our cousins.
There's also something that resulted in the Obsidian Syndicate being blacklisted from Knightsblood forever, but that's another story.
“So, how was the show?” Dad smiles broadly.
I really try to put on a happy face and shrug off the whole thing with Lochlan, even though I know deep down that the reason I called Dad in the first place was because I need his particular brand of telling me everything’s going to be okay.
The happy face doesn’t work.
“Hey, kiddo,” he murmurs, concern shadowing his face. “What’s going on?”
I swallow the lump in my throat and shake my head, determined not to cry.
“I…”
Well, it was a valiant effort.
Dad’s face creases with worry when the tears start to trickle down my cheeks.
“Stay where you are,” he growls. “I’m going to come to you.”
I shake my head. “No, it’s okay. Just…” I try to suck in the tears. “Can I tell you something?”
“Anything, anytime, always,” he says firmly. "You know that."
I smile wryly. “Even if it’s about a boy?”
“It is?” Dad chuckles in the driest tone possible. “I would have never guessed.”
I snort, bringing my hand up to wipe at my eyes. “That obvious, huh?”
He smiles warmly. “It is. Sorry, kiddo.” His smile slowly fades. “And now I need you to tell me which boy hurt you, so that I can skin the motherfucker alive.”
I choke out a bitter laugh, sighing. “He didn’t hurt me-hurt me. Like, he didn’t hit me or anything.”
“And yet you still look hurt,” Dad says. “Which means he’s going to die.”
I huff out a breath. “Dad.”
He inhales slowly, then nods.
“Okay. I’m reminding myself that you called me and not Roman for a reason, and that reason being that I am marginally more open than him to the reality of our daughter being an adult and having adult relationships.”
“Very marginally,” I grin.
He chuckles, and my view of the living room at home behind him swings around as he walks across it and lowers himself into his favorite leather chair. “Talk to me, peanut. What happened.”
I lean back against the headboard of my bed.
“Okay, so…there's this guy.”
“Insert dramatic gasp here.”
“Dad.”
He sighs. “Sorry.”
“Anyway, we were... together.”
Dad’s face darkens.
“Kind of. It's complicated, and I'm not going to get into details—”
“As your parent, I'm confident I don’t need to hear these details?”
My face heats. “Ding-ding-ding.”
He scowls deeply, then sighs. “It’s okay, I was way worse at your age.
But do me a favor: don’t for the love of God tell your Papa that you’ve been seeing a guy and that this guy hurt you.
Because Roman really will send some juiced-up motherfuckers to Knightsblood to geld every single male on campus. ”
I giggle. “I think I can promise that.”
He sighs. “Okay, go on. So… It’s complicated.”
I mean, understatement of the century, what with the masks and an entire secret identity that I will be taking to my grave.
“Yeah,” I grumble. “Things were good, then we had this fight.”
Translation: I let some lying waitress get to me because I’m an insecure jealous psycho. She must have recognized me as the daughter of the guy who chewed her out about hitting on my Papa and wanted to get back at me for it.
Dad frowns deeper. “Go on.”
“We made up. I thought we were fine. And then I found out he'd— ”
Note to self: don’t tell Dad about the tracker or spy cameras, unless I want to be indirectly responsible for one or both of my fathers tying cement blocks to Lochlan's feet tonight and dumping him in the ocean.
I clear my throat. “There was…something I told him not to do, and he agreed. Then he accidentally did it.”
Shit.
Dad’s face turns downright feral as his lips pull into a snarl.
“Whoa!” I exclaim, turning scarlet. “That sounds way worse than I mean.”
“Yeah, a bit,” Dad hisses through clenched teeth. “Did this fucking prick touch you or do something intimate that you’d told him not—”
“It’s nothing like that, promise. It’s just…
” I groan and drop my head back against the headboard again as I blow air through my lips.
“I trusted him, and then he did something which I do believe was accidental, but it may have destroyed that trust. And now I feel lost and crazy, and I can’t tell if it’s because I don’t truly trust him or because I’m scared that the problem might be that I can’t handle real relationships.
I mean, he’s shown me who he is. But I’m realizing that I don’t think I’ve been able to do the same, and I think I might be way more fucked up than I thought or am prepared to deal with—”
Yikes.
Talk about a dam giving way.
Dad’s brow furrows as the seconds tick by, then he slowly nods his head.
“When you were two, I found a bottle of eighty-year-old scotch in your Papa’s desk drawer.”
My brows shoot up.
Papa’s been sober since around the time he and Dad met.
Dad's actually the one who got him to stop drinking, and stayed by his side when he was going through a brutal detox. Dad will occasionally have a drink here and there now, and I don’t think Papa finds it triggering.
Still, Dad’s always been adamant about there never being alcohol in our house.
Dad chuckles quietly, shaking his head. “I went ballistic. Like, completely lost my shit on him. I mean we had two kids under five, your Papa’s job had been really grinding for months, we were exhausted, we weren’t having—”
He stops talking abruptly, but I make barfing noises anyway.
“Yeah, way too much info there,” I groan.
Dad grins sheepishly. “I mean, we were in this rocky place. And when I found that bottle, I went off the deep end. I said horrible things, accused him of being a liar and breaking his sobriety…I think I even said he was a bad father?”
Dad winces and rubs the bridge of his nose.
“Your Papa, being who he is, hit back, and also said some pretty terrible shit that was obviously meant to hurt me, which it did, and I probably deserved it.” He exhales. “It was probably the worst moment of our relationship. It was bad.”
My brows knit. “So…what happened?”
He smiles wryly. “We eventually calmed the hell down and went back to speaking like civilized humans instead of rabid grizzly bears, and it turned out that the scotch was for Cora’s father, who was turning eighty.”
I wince. “Oof.”
“Yeah,” Dad sighs. “Big, goddamn oof.”
“So, how did you guys move past that?”
He smiles. “We sat and talked. I apologized for not trusting him, he apologized for hiding it. He said he didn’t trust that I would trust him. But in the end, it was okay because we love each other, and that’s more important than any dumb fight.”
He winks as I take all that in.
“The point is, trust between two people is fluid, not static. It doesn’t stay the same, it ebbs and flows like the tide. It can break. It can also be rebuilt. I was wrong for not trusting your Papa's commitment to his sobriety. He was wrong for not trusting me about the bottle of booze.”
I snort. “Yeah, but… You didn’t trust him.”
“Not when I first saw that bottle, no, and that was wrong. Look, being with someone, whether it’s love, sex, or friendship, is about trust. Trusting them with your honesty, your heart, your feelings, sometimes your body.
But also trusting yourself. There’s no halfway point to either of those, by the way.
Like, either you trust someone or yourself, or you don’t.
You never sort of trust, because that’s not actually trust, that’s just… ” he shrugs. “Cautious optimism.”
My mouth pulls into a smile. “That’s a really good line.”
Dad chuckles. “I’m thinking about becoming a writer. What do you think, should I try my hand at those spank books of yours?”
“Dad!” I groan.
He smiles, then eyes me more seriously. “If you and this mystery dead-man-walking are going to be together, it means trust, both ways. And that trust has to be one hundred percent. So…” He tips his head. “Do you trust him?”
“Yes.”
It comes right out without hesitation.
I mean really, self? Not even a little pushback?
I sigh. “Yeah, I do.”
Dad laughs again. “Well then, that brings me to the million dollar question.” He levels a look at me. “Do you trust yourself?”
“In what way?”
He shrugs. “Any and all. But right now specifically, I mean do you trust yourself enough to know that when your heart feels something, it’s probably right? Even if your head insists on being an asshole and throwing in some doubt just because?”
I look at the ceiling. “Maybe.”
“Uh-uh, that’s the asshole in your head talking.” He points a finger at the screen. “Do you, daughter of mine, trust yourself? Enough to take off whatever mask you’re still wearing with this guy and show him the real you? Gotta tell you, big fan of the real you, peanut.”
I chew on my lip. “I…want to?”
He shakes his head with a grin. “Nope. Try again.”
I laugh quietly. “I’m going to try my best. To trust myself, I mean.”
“Hey, that’s all anyone can do,” he smiles. “What was this guy’s name again?”
I grin. “Smooth.”
He chuckles. “Worth a shot. But I guess this means I can put away the power tools and blowtorch?”
I groan. “Please do.”
A smile spreads across his face. “Well, that's the extent of my parental advice for the night. My tank runneth dry.”
I smile widely at him. “Thank you. Really.”
“Oh you can thank me by never mentioning to your Papa that I actively assisted you in making up with a boy and getting you back together with him.”
“What, don’t you trust your husband?” I say in an ultra saccharine, sarcastic tone.
“No one likes a smart ass, kiddo,” Dad laughs. “Now, do me a favor. Go join Arianna and rock the fuck out to that band. It’ll help, I swear.”
“You trying to get rid of me?” I tease.
“Never. But it’s really hard to have a deep discussion with your daughter when there’s a pair of handcuffs attached the bed frame behind her.”
Sweet. Merciful. God.
I was trying to film new Velvet Villainess content earlier because I’ve gone almost two full weeks without posting anything. I didn’t end up shooting because I’m a fucking mess right now, but I really thought I’d put everything back into my closet before calling my dad.
He’s laughing as I groan, willing myself to turn into water vapor so I can just disperse into the atmosphere.
“Those—I mean—it’s not—”
“Peanut, it’s me,” he chuckles. “Not Papa.” He cocks a brow at me. “Just be fucking safe, and respected, yes?”
I nod, my face still throbbing.
“Hey, Dad?” I mumble, smiling awkwardly. “Thank you.”
He winks. “Any time. I love you so much, kiddo.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
When we hang up, I sink into the bed, thinking.
Do you, daughter of mine, trust yourself? Enough to take off whatever mask you’re still wearing with this guy and show him the real you?
The problem is, I don’t know.
Not yet.