Counterfeit Love

"I only know a few names," I admitted. "Others... I just know things about them."

"Well, if you ever want to sit down with Aunt Janie and me, we can try to fill in some other blanks. I should have known you would want to know. You want to know everything."

"We didn't know you would want to know so you could take them out," my father said.

"Why didn't you take them out?" I asked, looking between the two of them. I knew that neither of them was opposed to killing. Hell, the day they came to help save me, to get Ferryn and me out of that basement, they had killed their fair share of people there.

"Because I was worried that you might want to do it," Dad told me, shrugging a shoulder.

"But you left men like that out in the world who--"

"No, honey," my mom cut me off, shaking her head. "We didn't leave men in the world who got to keep abusing little girls. As soon as we knew who they were, we put people on making sure that didn't happen. Which was why I didn't have the money to fund your little task force, Chris. I was running one of my own. Each time one of these sick assholes found a trafficking connection, I had to send someone out to take out the traffickers while we created car problems or work problems or general life problems for the dickheads while our guys got where they needed to be to handle things. I'm shocked in all these years, Ferryn and I haven't crossed paths."

I was too.

But more than surprise, I felt an overwhelming surge of love.

For these people.

This once happily childfree couple who came across me and decided they wanted to take me and all my baggage and all my damage into their home and make me their own.

It hadn't been easy in those early days, I knew.

Especially with Cash.

I'd taken more to Lo for obvious reasons. She was female. She didn't hold the same threat that men did for me. And more than that, she was a survivor in her own right, someone who had built herself up, and made something amazing out of her life.

It was easy to love her, to cling to her, to confide in her, to let her help me.

With Cash, it wasn't so easy.

First, because I'd never had a father in the first place. The concept was foreign to me, even if there had been parts of me that had longed for one in my youth.

But second, clearly, because I had just spent months in hell where the only men I saw wanted to hurt me. In hideous, unimaginable ways.

Even if I knew he was a good man, a moral man--if for no other reason than I knew Lo would never have a man in her life who was anything else--I felt panic surge when he walked into a room with me. I flinched if he reached for something near me. I slept with my door and windows locked with heavy pieces of furniture blocking them.

I couldn't pinpoint the moment where things had started to shift for us.

It felt like forever that I had lived with that knot of fear about him in my gut.

But he was always there, always patient, never overstepping any lines, never trying to force connection.

He gave me his support. He offered his advice if he thought I was seeking it. He sat and watched movies with me. He taught me how to drive. He taught me how to shoot. He told me stories about his youth, about being in the MC, about meeting Lo, about how they came together.

But when I pulled back, he let me. When I flinched, he never got angry. He just let me be. Let me learn to trust.

Until one day, I slipped in the shower, going down hard, dislocating my shoulder.

I immediately yanked down the shower curtain, covering my nudity, because at that point I was still struggling to accept that I had a body, let alone embrace it.

But then when I called out, I didn't call for Lo even though she was home. I called for Cash.

And when he came running, pausing to ask if he could come in, touch my shoulder, help me out of the tub, I knew things had changed with him.

His long-sought trust had finally been given. And I never flinched again from him.

"Why didn't you tell me this?"

"I don't have a good answer to that," my mom said, shaking her head. "I think that after some time passed, after you started to improve with therapy, come into the woman you were meant to be, I didn't want to drag you backward, I didn't want to undo all your progress. So I sat on it. Waited to see if you came to me with it. Us with it."