Collateral (Collateral Damage 1)

“What do you mean took it over? Like bought McKinney out?”

“Don’t worry yourself with the details. I came to give you something.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a small revolver.

I shake my head. “I don’t want a gun.”

“It’s for your protection. Our soldiers won’t be there.”

“They’re your soldiers. Not ours.”

“They’re your protection too.”

My father has a very different perspective than I.

“So you’re giving me that as protection against Stefan Sabbioni? What do you think, I’m going to shoot him?”

“If he forces himself on you, you’ll be in your right.”

“But you were okay with McKinney’s son forcing himself on me?”

“He’s not a dirty Sicilian mobster.”

“No, he’s a dirty Irish one.” McKinney is as much a crook as Stefan Sabbioni. As my father. “I don’t want it.”

“Don’t make this hard. You’ll take it.” He puts it on the bed and I notice my duffel bag that John had taken before is there too.

I look up at my father. “I want to see Gabe.”

My father’s expression tightens. He turns and walks to the window. The topic of my brother is never an easy one.

“Tomorrow’s my day to visit. If I’m going to be gone for a month or more—”

“It’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the middle of the night and Sabbioni will be here first thing in the morning.”

“And if I’m not here, he’ll wait.”

He turns to me and exhales, shakes his head with an almost amused little smile. “Things don’t work that way and you know it.”

I do.

“What does he have on you that you agreed?” I ask, not sure I want to know.

He shifts his gaze back to the window and just keeps looking out over the distance of our land, dark and wooded, the street too far to see.

“You have to tell me that at least,” I press.

He turns, looks at me, studies me as if he’s never going to see me again and for as little affection as I feel for this man, in that moment, he’s my father.

“Every day you look more like her,” he says.

It takes me a moment to process but when I do, that affection I felt a moment ago dissipates.

Mom.

He’s talking about mom.

“I won’t remarry, you know,” he says. “Never.”

My mother drowned when I was eight. She’d taken my brother and I camping, and she drowned in the lake. She was only twenty-nine years old. Ten years younger than my father.

I watch my father, study his face when he talks about her and every time he does, something inside me hardens.

He doesn’t know what I saw that morning. Doesn’t know I bore witness to it all.

“Maybe you should,” I say, turning my back on him. “I’m tired.”

He comes up behind me. When he puts his hands on my arms, I stiffen. It takes all I have not to pull out of his grasp.

“You’re owed a punishment,” he says, his voice different again.

At that, I pull out of his grasp and take several steps away before I face him.

“I don’t belong to you anymore,” I accuse, using language he understands, hating what I feel when I say it, hating how disgusting I feel.

I remind myself that I am only a thing to him. A possession. Something he can barter with and trade.

And tonight, someone beat him at his own game.

“Get out of my room,” I tell him.

My father shifts his weight to one foot and cocks his head to the side, studying me. He gives me a sneer.

“Always the princess in the tower, aren’t you? You’re like your mother in that sense too. Ever the victim. You don’t know what you have.”

“Your thugs broke both of Alex’s legs tonight.”

“He tried to steal you from me.”

“I went to him. He didn’t steal me. Do you even hear how you sound?”

“Our family is different. You know that. You, Gabriela, should know it better than your mother or brother ever did.”

My heart twists.

I wonder how he can have no idea of the pain he causes with his careless words.

Or maybe they’re not careless.

Maybe he means to twist the knife lodged in my heart.

“Sabbioni is stealing from me now.”

“And you can’t break his legs. Why?” I spit. “What does Stefan Sabbioni have on you?” There’s only one way to deal with my father. He has no compassion. No empathy. I wonder sometimes if he isn’t a sociopath.

That twitch is back. Whatever Stefan has, it’s big.

He walks to the door but stops when he opens it. “Remember who you are. Remember where your loyalties lie.”

I bite the inside of my cheek and we stand like this, silent. I think my father is taking my measure, determining if I’m ally or foe.

What I want is to be neither and, in a way, Stefan taking me, it’s a sort of freedom, isn’t it? A sort of escape.

My father grins like he’s just read my mind.