Mallicks: Back to the Beginning (Mallick Brothers 5)

He had expected disappointment. Being one for appearances much like our father, he couldn't grasp that I couldn't have cared less if it was Dad's car from when he was my age so long as it drove.

Except, of course, I didn't get freedom when I turned eighteen like I had planned on.

Helga got sick.

Something chronic and debilitating, making her take to bed for days or weeks on end, terrified all the while of losing her job.

Being the only mother I could even remotely remember, I had put my plans for escape on a back burner to step into her place when she was too unwell to do the work herself.

Two years passed.

And something was coming.

I could feel it in the air.

My ignorance of my father's dealings was long gone, replaced with a bone-deep understanding of what, exactly, his business was.

Drug dealer.

My father was a drug dealer.

It explained the nice house, the new cars, the expensive dinners and furniture and the never-ending supply of new cufflinks and watches, all that cost more than I had saved in working at the local diner four nights a week since I was sixteen, and summers pulling a day shift at the concession stand on the boardwalk. And more recently, serving at a local bar.

It also explained the guns.

The ones no one even bothered to conceal around the house now that my brother and I were grown.

And the white powder on random surfaces - the console table in the hallway, the bathroom counters, the edge of my father's desk.

Cocaine.

My father sold cocaine.

And my father was a very dangerous man.

Not just because he had murdered my mother right outside the door from where I was standing listening when I was a little girl.

No.

But because I heard that sound more times than I could say over the years.

The boom I mistook for thunder at five, tried to convince myself was a car backfiring as a teen, but knew better as an adult.

I wondered at times how many crime scenes Helga had cleaned up over the years, how many times she removed evidence, helped him cover up murders.

It was clear, as well, that he had been grooming Michael to be a mini him. Worse, honestly. Where my father simply demanded respect he felt due, Michael wanted everyone to know exactly how beneath him they were. I could remember countless times he had been in fights in school because someone couldn't keep their trap shut, nearly beating one of the guys to death on the beach one night.

He was violently unpredictable with a cruel streak that ran even deeper than my father's.

It made him lash out at Helga.

It made him slam my finger in a drawer then not even bother to claim it was an accident.

It made him seek out ways to hurt someone.

He would be a vicious leader some day.

And by that day, I hoped to hell to be long gone.

I'd asked Helga one night when she was - like my mother used to - trying to pretend she wasn't crying, why she wouldn't just go with me, just run off with me, just leave all this behind finally.

There is nowhere I can go that he can't find me.

I had maybe never bothered to think of it in that way, always having figured women were disposable to my father seeing as none ever stuck around long save for Helga and myself.

But, I reminded myself, Helga knew how many bodies were dead at his hands, what their blood felt like on her fingers, warm and sticky, the copper smell filling her nose, mingling with the bleach as she scrubbed his sins away.

And I couldn't help but wonder why I was still around, what use he thought he would have for me.

The very idea made goosebumps prickle over every inch of skin, forcing a shiver to rack my system as I stood at the sink, looking out the back window a bit wistfully, wishing for the days of innocent romps through the sprinkler, ignorant of what might become of me when I grew up.

What if he wouldn't let me leave?

What if I could never get away?

My mother sure couldn't.

Not alive anyway.

My father was a man of pride. Being left by those who were supposed to be most loyal to him would have - and had - enraged him.

It was disrespectful.

Tolerating it made it look as though he could not keep his family in check. And if he couldn't keep his family in check, then who was to say he could keep his employees in line?

I knew it then, even as I heard his voice in the other room, laughing like he hadn't a care in the world, I knew.

I was never going to be able to leave.

I was a chess piece in his game of life.

And he was going to move me as he saw fit.