Mallicks: Back to the Beginning (Mallick Brothers 5)

I was fifteen the first time I felt a hand grab at me, sinking into the soft, rounded flesh of my butt cheek by a man old enough to be my grandfather as I passed him by in the hall on my way to the kitchen to help Helga with dinner because she had broken her wrist, a fact she was keeping from my father out of fear of losing her job.

I don't have papers anymore, Helen, she had told me, worry dripping from the words.

I knew my place.

I knew my roll in this house.

Invisible.

That was what was expected of me.

More and more as time went by.

I existed.

My basic needs were met.

But my father did not want to see me, didn't want to hear my problems, didn't want to have anything to do with me.

I knew Helga wanted me to shuffle on, ignore it, avoid the touch, but the argument as well.

I couldn't tell you where the urge came from.

I couldn't say what had overcome me in that moment.

Years of pent-up frustrations, maybe.

Or the understanding, now that I was older, what that hand wanted.

And it wasn't just to touch my behind.

I had put up with a lot under this roof.

I decided right then and there that this? Yeah, this was not one of those things I would merely put up with.

In fact, I wouldn't put up with it at all.

To hell with the consequences.

"If you want to leave this house with that hand intact, I suggest you take it off my ass," I had snapped, tone venom, pure, liquid death.

He'd snatched his hand back immediately, looking taken aback like he had expected me to give into him immediately, give him whatever he wanted.

Maybe he would tell my father I had threatened him.

Maybe he would beat me, drag me through the house like he had my mother when she had tried to tell him she was leaving him all those years ago.

Maybe that would be my fate.

I'd spent my life cowering, terrified of his anger directed at me.

I couldn't describe what had changed.

Those hormones, herzchen, Helga had told me just a week before when I had been surly all morning.

Maybe that was it.

Maybe it was just my emotions being all over the place.

Maybe it was just part of growing up.

But I was done being afraid.

I had braced myself for it.

The backlash.

The call to his office.

The yelling.

But it never came.

That night, I had served dinner, claiming Helga had a finicky dessert in the oven that needed to be watched over, so he didn't think of anything as amiss.

We - me, my father, and my brother - had sat down to eat.

And I felt it.

My father's gaze on me.

Long and penetrative enough to make my head swivel in that direction, finding him watching me as I had expected, brows low and together, like I was a puzzle in which the pieces were not fitting together.

I knew then that he knew.

What had happened.

But he said nothing.

At least not about that.

"Your birthday is next week, isn't it?" he'd asked when he caught me watching him watch me.

I had to bite back a remark about how a father should know such things, and nodded instead.

"You'll need a car," he had gone on. I had said nothing, worried that he was playing some cruel joke on me. "You can have the Firebird," he had added, making my brother open his mouth to object.

The Firebird was, after all, his car.

And, honestly, if there was someone I didn't want to get on the bad side of, it was my brother. I would turn down the offer before I would let that happen.

Where my father just wanted to ignore me, my brother wanted to hurt me. Whenever and however he could. Mostly with words these days, though he had been much more violent when we had been kids.

"It's time for an upgrade," he told my brother. "Did you see those Corvettes down in Hadlet?"

So my brother was getting a brand new car, and I was getting his cast-offs.

I should have been angry.

But all I felt was relief.

A car.

A car meant freedom.

A car meant a way out of this town when I was finally old enough.

And until then, a car meant I could get a job without having to worry about walking home at night.

My father had money.

We lived in a giant house on sprawling grounds directly across from the beach.

But we lived in the band end of Alberry Park. Which meant it was barely safe to walk around in the daylight, let alone night.

"You wouldn't mind Helen getting the car, right?"

"Not at all," my brother had said, but his smile was wicked.

A week and a half later, I got the car. Caked in mud with tree sap already starting to eat away at the paint, and a giant dent in the back right fender, rust taking over fast.