“What… what are you talking about?” Maria shakes her head, looking lost.
“Maria, don’t listen to her,” Charles commands, his voice hard.
Ignoring his words, I point at my father as he takes the last step and reaches the ground floor. “He traded me as collateral in exchange for help from Alan Montgomery. His business was failing, and he needed a miracle. So he fucking bought one. And the price he paid was me.”
When I finish speaking, I watch in silence a few seconds as Maria begins to register what I’m saying. I watch the emotions on her face shift from confusion to horror as she puts the events together on her own timeline—the business collapsing, the debts that needed to be paid, the disappearance of her own daughter, and finally, the business making a miraculous recovery.
Rage simmers in me, barely contained or controlled. I thought my parents were both in on this sick arrangement, but it somehow makes me more angry to know that my father lied to my mother about it. He managed to convince her that I was kidnapped or that I ran away. He probably faked an entire fucking search for me, telling her he’d hired the best detectives he could get and knowing all the while that they’d never find anything.
Fucking bastard.
The rage in me seems to have infected my mother too, because she whips around violently, facing my father.
“You…” Her whole body vibrates with anger as she raises her voice. “Tell me this isn’t true, Charles. Tell me she’s fucking lying.”
He flinches at her choice of language, so vulgar for such a beautiful, polished woman. “Maria. Stay calm—”
Her voice cuts across his like a knife, sharp and biting. “Tell me you didn’t sell our daughter to save our business.”
Charles hesitates. It’s just a small pause, but it says more than words ever could.
Her face crumples, pain morphing into anger and back again, as if she’s being torn apart from the inside out by her emotions.
“No.” She makes a keening, broken sound. Her head shakes back and forth. “No. No, you couldn’t have. You didn’t… you wouldn’t. Not our baby girl. Our sweet Sabrina.”
“Listen to me, Maria.” He stays rigid and controlled, his tone calm and almost reassuring, as though if he can just get her to listen, she’ll understand that he did the right thing. As though he can explain it all away and make it better. “Everything I did, I did for you and Sabrina, for the sake of our family. Yes, I did make a deal with Alan Montgomery. It was the only way I could keep us from going under. But I had a plan. I was paying off the debt I owed him, and we would’ve gotten Sabrina back if she hadn’t run away.”
He gives me a cold glare, as if this is all my fucking fault. My hands curl into fists, the urge to punch him building inside me until it’s almost impossible to hold back.
But I never get the chance.
“You bastard!” Maria screams, lunging at him.
In less than a second, rage seems to consume her. She does exactly what I wanted to, beating her fists against Charles’s chest, scratching at him like a feral animal. He raises his hands, stumbling backward as he tries to shake her off. But he can’t. She moves with him, and even though she’s small, she’s fucking vicious.
I shouldn’t feel darkly satisfied as I watch her attack her husband, but I do.
Maybe I did get my temper from her, after all.
“Maria.” Charles finally catches her wrists, halting her attack. He tries to look down at her imperiously, but the effect is a little weakened by the trail of blood running down his cheek and his mussed up hair. “Stop this. You need to stop. This isn’t going to help anything. It won’t do any good.”
“Good?” she shrieks, struggling against his hold as she glares at him with flashing eyes. “Don’t talk to me about good, you… you…” Her body deflates a little, and a sob falls from her lips. “How could you do it, Charles? How could you sell our daughter in a business deal? You never told me. I would never have agreed to that! How could you think that’s what I wanted?”
“That?
?s precisely why I didn’t tell you,” he growls, his eyes narrowing as he releases her wrists and steps back, out of range of her fingernails. “Because I knew you wouldn’t be able to see the bigger picture. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement, Maria. It was never—”
“I don't care!” Tears stream down her cheeks as she lunges toward him again. “I don't care if it was supposed to be temporary. How could you do it?”
“It doesn’t matter now. It’s done.” I raise my voice to cut over their argument, my tone laced with bitterness. It gets my mother’s attention enough to make her stop fighting, and my father just stares at me. I meet his gaze head on. “You can’t undo what you did, and I’m not here to ask you to try. I’m not here to fix what isn’t fixable. I’m not here to absolve you.”
“Then what do you want?” Charles asks, his voice hard.
“I want your help,” I tell him bluntly. “You might be the only person I know who can help us take Alan Montgomery down and put this all to rest—once and for all.”
“No.” His answer is immediate, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he speaks.
I cock an eyebrow. “No?”