Slashed (Extreme Risk 3)

The boy you love kissing another girl.

And now, for me, my father grinding on top of my mother—grinding—on my long-lost mother—on the family-room sofa. My father.

Suddenly I know exactly how Oedipus felt when he jabbed those pins in his eyes.

Slamming my own eyes shut in a frantic attempt to block out the image of my parents writhing together on the dark blue couch, I turn back around and start to fumble my way out of the room. But I only make it a step or two before dropping the glass in my hand. It hits the wood floor hard, explodes into a thousand small shards as water splashes over the walls, the floor, my bare feet, and the bottom of the jeans I pulled on over my swimsuit before leaving the lake.

Shit. What a fucking mess.

“Don’t move, Cam!” my dad calls as he leaps off the couch—and my mother. My mother. Just the words—just the reality of her—is enough to have me making a mad dash for the front door, despite the broken glass that litters the floor around me.

The pain doesn’t stop me, even as I feel the shards cutting into my foot. Pain I can handle. After all, I just spent the afternoon trying to learn enough new wakeboarding tricks that I can keep up with Luc—and slamming into the water again and again and again as I failed to master the really complex ones. And I did it all while Luc, despite our small, short-lived truce, looked at me like I was something he scraped off the bottom of his snowboard.

A cut foot doesn’t begin to compare.

Besides, I’m desperate to escape, desperate to make it to the door, to my car, so I can get the hell out of here and pretend that none of this ever happened.

I’m good at pretending—God knows, I’ve had enough practice.

Too bad I don’t make it out of the house. Just as I reach for the doorknob, my dad’s hand hits the wood directly above it. I’m strong, but I’m no match for a man who’s spent his life doing physical labor. The door doesn’t so much as crack open.

“Cam, honey, just settle down. Let’s get you sitting down somewhere and I’ll clean up your foot.”

“My foot’s fine.” Again, I try to pull the door open. Again, I fail.

“No, it isn’t, Cameron.” I stiffen as she speaks for the first time, her voice soft and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth sweet. It makes me want to puke. Even worse, it makes me want to cry.

How can she still sound the same? It’s been seventeen years since I last heard her voice and everything has changed since then—everything. So, how can she still sound exactly like she did when I was four years old? Soft and floaty, like wind whistling through pine trees? And how—why—do I even remember that? “Go into the kitchen and sit down so your dad can figure out how bad the cut is.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” It’s a kneejerk reaction, the words tumbling out before I even know I’m going to utter them. I don’t regret them thoug

h—she was definitely giving me an order and that’s something she gave up the right to do a long, long time ago.

“Cam.” My father’s eyes narrow, and his voice holds a definite warning. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

“My mother?” I look at him incredulously. “I don’t have a mother.”

“Stop it,” he growls to me under his breath. “It took a lot of courage for her to come back here after all this time and I won’t have you disrespecting her.”

For a moment all I can do is stare at him, mouth open and mind whirling. This whole day has been just a little off, like everyone and everything is blurred at the edges. But to come home to this? To have my father defending that woman after what she did?

“I’m disrespecting her?” I finally manage to get the words past my too-tight throat. “She’s the one who went to the grocery store to buy ice cream and didn’t come back for seventeen years.”

Seventeen years, nine months, and twenty-six days to be exact—not that I’ve been counting.

“Stop it!” This time my dad’s the one doing the ordering. “You’re acting like a child. In fact—”

“Jake, I think I’m going to go see if I can find the first-aid kit,” she interrupts.

He turns to her with a comforting smile. A smile, for God’s sake, when she’s the one who left him alone with seven kids and a pile of hospital debts. “Thanks, Lily. Cam and I appreciate it.”

No, I don’t. I don’t appreciate anything about her being here. I have just enough self-control to keep from blurting that out, too.

We both watch her walk away and when he turns back to me, my father’s face is filled with resolve. “I want you to settle down about your mother, try to be nice to her.”

“Be nice to her? Are you freaking kidding me?”

“No, I’m not. She wants to spend some time talking to you, getting to—