Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 101985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
I practically know his entire life story, and it hasn’t been easy. I keep having to remind myself of that while I sit here on the sofa, hands folded in my lap where he can see them at all times. He paces the length of the room, occasionally looking out through the balcony doors. He won’t go out there, but he keeps checking. Waiting to see if Zeke will show up.
He will. I know he will. He would’ve gotten the message on his phone. Please, be paying attention, I beg silently. Maybe if I wish hard enough, he’ll hear me. It doesn’t matter right now what happened earlier. His lies, the way he covered up everything my father tried to hide. He’s been complicit this entire time. I can’t worry about that. All I want is to get out of this alive, for both of us to get out of it alive.
Right now, I’m not sure our chances are all that good.
Because the second Zeke steps through that door, he’ll be ambushed. Unless I do something about it.
“I hope you understand I hate him just as much as you do.” Do I sound convincing? Maybe not—Dean doesn’t even react. Like he’s already hardened himself against anything I might say. “He led me on all this time. He went out of his way to lie and hide things from me.”
“You didn’t try too hard to figure anything out, though, did you?” he asks, disgusted. His eyes shine with an unnerving light. He’s losing it.
“What was I supposed to do? Everything I did was tracked and monitored. Even what I did online.”
His head bobs up and down. “No shit. The son of a bitch logged into your Facebook and everything.”
My heart skips a beat, but I manage to keep my voice even. “That doesn’t come as a surprise. I’m sure he had all my passwords and everything.”
“But you let it happen.” He sits on the coffee table, close enough that our knees touch. I have to deliberately keep myself from flinching. I can’t let him see how it unnerves me, being this close.
“Haven’t you ever been in a situation where you didn’t have control?”
“That’s been most of my life.”
“Then how can you judge me? I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t seek out my birth father after my mom died, either. Pretty much all of this was decided for me.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“What choice should I have made?”
His eyes harden. He senses I’m challenging him. I have to back off. “I was alone in the world,” I murmur. All the memories come rushing back, and that’s probably not a bad thing. I don’t mind sounding vulnerable right now. I need him to think of me that way. “I was so scared. Mom was all I had. I always wondered who my father was, but she would never tell me.”
“Yeah, and now you know why.”
“Now I know why. Yeah.” And I have to wonder how she’d feel about him bringing me into that world. “But he took care of me. He still takes care of me.”
“Stockholm syndrome.” He gives me a firm nod. “It’s not even your fault. You’re already too far gone to understand.”
I have to clasp my hands tight to keep from screaming. He couldn’t be more wrong. “Listen, it’s not like I’m saying I love him or anything like that. I don’t think I’m ever going to forgive him for not coming clean with me. But he wanted to protect me. That has to mean something.”
“My father wanted to protect me, too. He was all I had.”
“But you got through it, right? Look at you now. I mean, this isn’t an easy school to get into.”
“I got lucky.”
“Just like I did.”
“No! Not just like you did.” His reflexes are scary fast. One second, he’s sitting on the table. The next, he’s leaning over me, boxing me in with an arm on either side and his face inches from mine. I can smell his sour sweat, and my nose wrinkles before I can stop myself. Of all the things to care about when a maniac is practically on top of me.
I force my voice to be steady. “How not like me?”
“I had to go through three years of foster care before my mother found me. She was in Europe with her new husband when your boyfriend blew my dad’s brains out. She didn’t even want to take me with her when they moved there. Nobody bothered telling her he was dead—can you believe that? And she obviously never tried to reach out and find out how her little boy was doing, or else she would have known sooner that I ended up falling through the cracks. Nobody gave a shit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care about your pity,” he spits. “I only want you to understand. You have no idea what happened to me. How I was used. Humiliated. Beaten and tortured. Nobody cared. Nobody spoke up for me. Nobody paid attention. And even when my so-called mother looked for me, I was so lost it took them another year to locate me. That’s how fucked the whole system is.”