Chapter Twenty One
Fifteen years old
I can hear Chris sobbing and our father yelling as I walk through the front door. Tossing my bag to the floor, I run into the living room where Chris is cowering on the floor, trying to mop up something on the rug. I notice the top of a broken bottle of whisky that rolled under the corner of the sofa.
“You thieving little bitch,” Dad sneers, wobbling on his feet as he prods her shoulders and makes her flinch. “Did you think you would get away with it?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whimpers from her spot on the carpet, her shoulders drawn protectively inward, keeping her head down.
He raises a hand when I shout, “It wasn’t her fault. I told her to take it.”
He spins, a hint of relief in his gaze when he looks over to me. I pause, his relief confusing. Did he draw the line at hurting his youngest? Would he have regretted touching a hair on her beautiful head? I didn’t know, but I would never let him try to find out.
“Should have known the slut would have asked her innocent baby sister to do her bidding.” He says, ignoring Chris as she tries to tug at his ankles. I shoot her a look of warning, begging her with my eyes to let this go. To run to her room and not come out until I came to get her.
But she doesn’t move, only cries some more.
“Chris, go to your room, munchkin,” I whisper, looking directly at her and giving her a reassuring nod before focusing on our father. He starts to unbuckle his belt, and I instantly feel sick.
This is new; he’s never done that before.
Chris’s eyes widen as she scrambles to her feet and flees to the safety of her room. Dad stalks toward me and grabs my arm, dragging me to where the smashed glass still scatters the floor. He pushes me down onto the shards as they dig into my knees and shins. I grit my teeth to stop any sound from getting out.
I’ve been getting good at that lately. I think that is why he’s changing how he punishes me to get a reaction, but he won’t get one. Not anymore.
His belt jingles as he loosens it, and I flinch. No. He wouldn’t do that. Surely he couldn’t.
Dad walks behind me and pulls my jumper up to my shoulders, leaving my thin white vest top covering my back. I can hear him pull the belt free from the loops on his suit trousers and a shudder goes down my spine. I have no idea what he’s…
Crack.
The pain is excruciating as he brings down the leather belt onto my back, and I gasp. Not from the pain, although it hurts more than I could imagine, from the fright and solace it wasn’t something worse. I had no idea what he was going to do by pushing me to my knees, but I’d gladly accept getting lashed over anything else.
He whacks the belt four more times across my shoulders, my middle, and lower back, leaving thirty seconds or so recovery time in between. By the time he’s done, I know he’s torn my vest, and my back is dripping with blood.
When I get to my room, Chris is on my bed, cuddling my pillow, still sobbing when she sees me. I give her a shaky wave and thumb to my bathroom without a word. She gasps when she’s faced with my back, but I tell her I’m fine.
I am fine…
… I will be fine.
The kitchen table was littered with the information Alex managed to find on Alton Kingswood and Victor Critchley, and their connection to Jake.
The three had attended university together, but unlike his two best friends, Jake went into business management. Meeting on their first day of freshman year, they were inseparable, going to raging keggers together, spending every spring, summer, and winter break at Jake’s family’s summer home in St. Barth’s, and house-sharing in their sophomore, junior, and senior years. They even house-shared for two years following their graduation.
To say the men were close was kind of an understatement, more like brothers than friends.
Following graduation, Alton was the first to start working for Weston Pharmaceuticals, well before Jake took over following his dad’s death, starting as a wet chemist and working his way up the ladder at an impressive speed. The man was a literal genius.
Victor, however, worked for several other companies before being poached by Alton to be the company’s QP one year before Jake’s involvement. It was kind of nice to see their friendship with Jake didn’t seem to appear to influence their positions in the company. From the research uncovered, the two guys got to their positions on merit alone.
“You look like shit, Stevie baby,” Alex commented, looking up from a paper and taking in my appearance as I stepped into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes. I didn’t have to look in the mirror to know I had dark circles around them and my skin is paler than usual.
“I haven’t been sleeping great,” I replied, scrubbing my hands across my face. Alex had yet to mention my daytime nap routine that had become a thing recently. Naps that instead of helping me with lost sleep only filled my head with memories that had no business occupying that space.
I glanced at the paper I had finished reading before I slept, one about a recent takeover of a small competitor, and let out a sigh. Nothing seemed to be untoward with the company at face value and reading all these scientific and technical business words had given me a headache. Not that I wasn’t clever but give me a gun and a target and then you were talking my language.
“Anything on the licence plate I gave you?” I asked Alex, grabbing two cold bottles of beer from the fridge and holding one in front of his frowning face as he appeared to ignore me.
“Earth to Alex?” I said, clicking my fingers in his face.
“Huh?” he asked, looking up from the article he had been reading, looking confused.
“I asked if you got anything back from the licence plate?”
“Oh, no.” He rubbed the back of his neck and gulped his beer. “I had to give it to Will to look into. I kept getting sent on a wild goose chase. Every time I thought I had found who it belonged to, I reached a dead end. It was… odd.”
I hummed an agreement and slumped onto a chair at the table, resting my head in my arms.
“Did you know about this?” Alex asked, pushing a printed article from a couple of years ago towards me. “It’s about Jake’s brother’s death.”
I sat up and read the paper with the headline ‘Future of Weston Pharmaceutical Hangs in the Balance Following the Death of Heir.’ Christ, the papers could be so heartless.
“Yeah, he was two years younger than Jake. Died of an overdose at a party,” I murmured as I skimmed through the text. Alex raised a questioning eyebrow at my response. “The HR girls told me at the picnic,” I added flippantly, and he grunted, moving on to the next article while I began reading quietly to myself.
“Bradley, ‘Brad’, Weston, died last night after being taken into hospital following a suspected drug overdose. The youngest Weston had attended a party at his college campus earlier that evening and was seen by witnesses stumbling incoherently around the property before passing out. Acquaintances of Weston had confirmed this was not the first time he had dabbled in narcotics, and they were not shocked to find out he would have taken enough which subsequently resulted in an overdose.
The attending officers have issued a statement asking for any information as to where Mr. Weston acquired the pills as, according to the D.E.A., this may be linked to the alarming increase of fentanyl-laced pills being sold across America.
Was this retribution for the epidemic resulting from the overprescribing of controlled substances? And now, following the death of the youngest Weston, what will happen to the opiate giant now? Will Jacob Weston step up and take over when his father retires or will he…”
“Oh God,” I whispered, holding my fingers to my lips after reading the two-page heavily biased news article that had a clear disdain for the Weston family seeping through the journalist’s words.
Bradley was a son and a brother, and they painted him out to be some junkie who stupidly killed himself.
“Do you think the person who put Jake on Will’s radar has something to do with the company? Or his family?” Alex asked, folding his arms across his chest. I shrugged, having no idea why anyone would want to go after Jake. According to the HR girls, everyone loved him, and he was running the company far better than his father did. Plus, he had opened several rehab centres which were free to anyone who needed to use their facilities.
Alex ruffled his hair and began tidying the table.
“What are you doing?” I asked, looking at a pile we were still to go through. Getting the names of Jake’s friends and a little knowledge about his brother had helped in obtaining more information about who Jacob Weston was.
“We need a break,” he said. “We’ve been at this all day, and I could use a drink.”
I stretched in my chair and glanced at the time on my phone. He was right. He’d been sitting at the same spot, downing countless cups of coffee since ten this morning. And I could really use something fried and greasy right about now.
“Okay, fine. But let’s walk and take Rocky. He could do with being taken out.”
Rocky’s big tail clunked on the floor by my feet at the mention of his name and the jangle of his lead, which Alex had grabbed from the hook by the backdoor. He chucked me my leather jacket and twenty minutes later we walked into Alice’s Place.