Chapter Twenty Six
Myhandsshookas I held the documents that confirmed the car I had seen Jake get into did, in fact, belong to my father. I shuffled through more paperwork provided by one of Will’s IT guys, showing images upon images of Jake meeting with him on different occasions, all in public, always looking serious.
“Are you sure Stephan got this right? Maybe he-”
“He got it right, babe,” Alex said, placing a mug of peppermint tea in front of me, the steam rising in swirls above the liquid.
I had been sitting on the sofa since I got home, still wearing Jake’s shirt and nothing else. Standing in Jake’s bathroom to leaving him in bed was such a chaotic blur, with flashes of me grabbing my discarded clothes, scribbling a note, and running out the door, that even now, I still had my purse hanging around my neck.
“He managed to get past the firewall that kept bouncing me all over the place. I need to get better software if that jackass can out-do me.”
“This has to be about the synthetic product Victor and Alton had been developing,” I said barely in a whisper, looking at the final picture of my father and Jake shaking hands, a smarmy smile plastered on my dad’s lips.
I wanted to throw up.
“I thought Will had been keeping an eye on him, Alex?” I said, lifting my head and giving my best friend an almost accusatory look. For the first time in years, he looked exhausted. His usually vibrant dark brown eyes were dull in colour, resembling weak ass coffee. Alex always swore if he didn’t get his full eight hours of sleep, the first thing that would be affected would be his soulful brown eyes.
“He was – has been,” he said, carding a hand through his chestnut faux hawk. “Your dad had been the same as he’s always been for the past eleven years; a drunk who was no trouble to anyone. Never looked for Chris or you, even though you were on his doorstep. Just never seemed interested in making contact.”
I nodded and picked up my mug with shaky hands. I hated feeling like this. How did one man have so much power over me still, even after all these years? It had to be him, an anonymous tip to get someone else to do this dirty work. When he was sober enough, Dad was a shark in the business world and if the way he treated his family was any indication, there was no doubt he was as ruthless in the boardroom as he was at home.
He had to have been the one to put Jake on Will’s radar and subsequently hire me. To make me steal the method for Jake’s product because, in all honesty, it was sheer brilliance. Drug abuse was an issue that was never going to be resolved, so why not create a product that would cut accidental overdoses and lower the rate of addiction by replacing the root cause? There was no way my father would willingly pay for or sign on to a partnership with someone else. Especially someone he deemed far weaker than he was.
“I won’t help him steal from Jake. I can’t, Alex. I wouldn’t do anything for that man.” My hands trembled harder, causing the tea to slosh over the sides and onto one of the images I’d placed on my lap. Alex leaned in his seat and cupped my hand in his, taking the mug away while slipping the wet photographs from my knees.
I closed my eyes and pictured the day I took Chris by the hand and ran out of that house - the last time I ever saw him. Eleven years ago, when I finally realised the one person we were meant to be able to depend on would never be there for us. For his youngest daughter, to shield her the way he was meant to after mom left.
Alex moved to my side on the sofa, lifting my purse strap over my head and putting it on the coffee table. Reaching over the back of the sofa, he pulled a tartan blanket and wrapped me like a burrito before pulling me into his chest and holding me in his huge arms.
He was warm and comforting and felt like home. I closed my eyes to breathe in his birch and light vanilla scent, and then screwed up my nose.
“When was the last time you showered? You stink,” I said, wriggling away from him in my swaddled wrap. Alex barked a laugh. The sound gave Rocky a fright, who hadn’t left my side since I got home, acting subdued when he saw me walk over the threshold.
Alex lifted his arm and sniffed his pit, grimacing with an exaggerated cough.
“Fuck, that’s bad. Sorry, Stevie baby.” I wrinkled my nose and clutched the blanket around my shoulders, moving from the couch as he said, “Oh, c’mon, Stevie, it isn’t that bad. You don’t need to leave.”
“I need to put underwear on, go to sleep, and take a shower, not necessarily in that order,” I said, scratching at my head.
“Wait, are you telling me your bare ass was on this sofa?” Alex asked, his face in mock distress. “We had an agreement: no body parts directly touching the material.”
I gave him what I hoped looked like a smile, but I couldn’t make my muscles pull the way I wanted them to. Alex was trying to lighten my sombre mood, I knew he was, but this clusterfuck with Dad was in the forefront of my mind, refusing to leave.
Sixteen years old
I’m knocking and knocking in pitch-black darkness, but no one’s coming. This time he had to have locked me in here and thrown away the key. Chris doesn’t even know where I am, so I can’t get her to call for Alex or Mac.
I don’t even know how long I’ve been in here.
“Dad,” I scream for the millionth time, my throat burning from all my shouting. At some point, I had to give my voice a rest because it had started to go hoarse at the sheer volume I’d been calling for him, begging for him to come back and let me out.
I lean my back against the wall and slide to the bottom, landing with a thud on my butt. The coat closet is small and smells musty from the old expensive coats, which haven’t been worn in years. But now they’ve been repurposed as a makeshift bed, which I’ve used twice so far. So with that thought, I must have been locked in here for at least two nights if the faint glow from under the doorframe coming and going is anything to go by.
One more day and he’ll need to let me out, right? A person can’t survive more than three days without water and a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t know that morbid fact. I bring my knees to my chest and lay my head on them.
I must have dosed because jingling wakes me with a start. The click of the lock has me on my feet and the door opens, engulfing me in a bright light that fills the small closet and makes my eyes water. Dad reaches in and pulls me out by my hair.
If I didn’t love my long dark locks, I would chop them all off so he would have nothing to grab.
“I don’t enjoy having to do this to you, Stevie,” he says, but the look on his face says he’s enjoying it very much. “If you just behaved, I wouldn’t need to do any of this.”
I look at him, trying to stand up straight, but my body aches from being bent over for too long and my stomach hurts so much from the lack of food that I physically can’t.
“Now I hope I don’t need to remind you that I don’t appreciate the school calling me about my youngest. Fucking nosy bitch of a headmistress sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong,” Dad says, straightening his suit jacket. It’s then I realise he’s sober for the first time in months. “You need to speak to your sister and find out why she’s skipping school, why she has stopped handing in her assignments and has become withdrawn.”
I screw up my face, not fully understanding what he’s asking of me. Chris is a good girl, bright and happy with lots of friends. They must have got it wrong; she’d never do that.
“I have done you a favour, Stevie,” he continues, referencing how he allowed me to take Chris’s place in the cupboard. I couldn’t have my twelve-year-old baby sister locked away for days with no food or water or bathroom breaks. Not that I got any breaks, but when you’re shoved in a closet slightly bigger than the Dursley’s gave Harry Potter, you choose a corner as your toilet and deal with it.
Chris would never have been able to handle that, and I swore I’d always protect her.
“If this happens again, I won’t be so gracious by letting you take her place.”
“No, you can’t, she–”
The sentence dies on my tongue as he backhands me hard across the face. I’m so tired and weakened that my feet give out from under me, and I crash to the ground, panting hard. My eyes are stinging with tears, but I will them not to come.
Please God, don’t let me cry.
“Both of you are mine and I do what I want with what I own,” he snarls, leaning over me, and his spit lands on my cheeks. “You would do well to remember that, darling daughter.”
I sat up suddenly, clutching the front of Jake’s shirt, which I’d drenched in sweat. Alex was sitting on the empty side of my bed, propped against the headboard with a book in his lap. He moved it to the bedside table and brought one heavy arm around my waist, pulled my shaking body to curve into his, and laid us down. I gripped his forearm that lay across my chest until my breathing returned to a steady rhythm and I stopped trembling.
“I’ve got you,” he soothed into my hair while tightening his grip around me.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked, my voice wavering slightly. I removed his large tattooed arm to remove the soaking shirt, but remembered I was completely naked underneath.
I grabbed the discarded blanket I’d tossed at the bottom of the bed and struggled to manoeuvre the shirt over my head, eventually managing to replace it with the blanket to cover my chest.
“I could hear you from my room having a nightmare,” he replied. “You’re starting to worry me, Stevie. Please talk to me.” He then reached forward to brush my hair off my forehead. I recoiled and closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t seen the hurt expression on Alex’s face.
Keeping my gaze down, I began to tie the damp hair that had stuck to my neck in a clip from the nightstand and got out from under the covers, making sure the tartan blanket covered my ass.
I winced, looking at my pale reflection in the mirror.
“They’ve been more frequent recently,” I admitted with a sigh. There was no point in hiding them anymore; if Alex could now hear me from the other room, they must have gotten worse.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said, grabbing my towel from the back of the door and swiftly exiting to the bathroom before he could ask any follow-up questions. I didn’t need him to psychoanalyse the reasons why these dreams had started up again. Not today, not ever. Just a brief slip of my subconscious reminding me why I am the way I am, and nothing more.
I stood for what felt like an eternity in the shower cubical with my head against the olive-coloured tiles, hot water raining down my body and soothing the throbbing pain in my muscles.
Five more minutes, Stevie, then pull yourself the fuck together.
The same mantra I had told myself when I first started having those dreams involving that man. Five more minutes of vulnerability. Five more minutes of being the weak six or eight- or ten-year-old who couldn’t defend herself or who had to stand in place of her sister.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed the temperature gauge to the coldest setting, tilting my face toward the showerhead letting the icy water snap me out of my self-pity and bring me, once again, to the cold-hearted bitch I needed to be.
Alex was still in my room when I returned from my shower, his gaze scrutinising as he worried about how my father’s involvement was affecting me. I put a hand on my hip, the other holding the centre of my towel, and I raised an eyebrow.
“You gonna move? I’ve got to get ready for a job tonight.”
“What job?” he asked, crease lines marring his forehead. I went over to my chest of drawers and pulled up a bright yellow underwear set.
“Philip Walker,” I said, sliding the bra straps over my arms and clipping it over the towel to hold it in place like a dress. I pulled the lacy thong over my legs and wriggled it on up over my ass before pulling the towel away.
Credit where credit is due; Alex kept his eyes on mine, but his frown was still firmly in place.
“Are you sure you should be working? Everything with your–” He waved a hand around to finish the sentence.
“Everything with my father will still be happening tomorrow. At the moment, there’s nothing I can do. I need something to keep me preoccupied until I figure out my next move. And nothing does that better than holding a cold, hard metal barrel firmly against someone’s temple.”