Truth or Dare (The Dominator 2)

What’d happened to the sweet girl? Was she having an Angel-style meltdown? Taken out of her carefully constructed world of pretending and after the miscarriage now she couldn’t hack it? I threw her life into a tailspin, ripped her world apart by telling her we knew her secrets. And it made everything unravel for her. Poor thing. Poor thing, yeah, but we couldn’t let her put our family in jeopardy, either. Tommy and I needed to do damage control.

As for my Angel I was trying out a new method. Getting her to be naughty. I was keeping her obedient during the day and naughty when it was the two of us, using sex. When all the drama bullshit was over I’d opt for naughty more and more until eventually I just let her decide who she needed to be. If I did that and eased her out of the slave world but kept the Master card in my back pocket and saved it in case she had a meltdown it could work. I hoped it would. The night before had been fucking hot, her going crazy like that to get a spanking. I got hard while driving just thinking about it.

Gan Chen had his resources working hard to get Jason Frost in. I had a quandary there, though. If I analyzed all that I currently knew it could be that Frost simply wanted to save her from that slave life. Could he be a good guy stuck in a bad situation? If he saw that she was okay with me would he be able to let go of the guilt of her getting pulled in to Kruna because of his failure to keep her safe?

If that’s all that this was, I could conceivably get him off our backs. But then again, how would I do that without revealing my cards? If I revealed to Jason Frost that I wasn’t Angel’s Master but a guy who’d fallen for her and a guy that wanted out of the Kruna association, that could put Angel, me, and my family in danger with Kruna. It was a fucking conundrum, for sure.

Maybe I should just let Gan Chen catch him, do away with the guy. After all, he was connected to Kruna, the nephew of the sadistic prick who’d fucked her up for 7 months and even if he was trying to save her now, he’d waited almost two years to do it so he couldn’t be that concerned with her welfare.

But I could also look at it like this: I was Tom Ferrano’s son. I shouldn’t be persecuted because of my father any more than Jason Frost should be persecuted because of his uncle. Was letting Gan Chen and his guys catch him the best thing to do or if I did, would I accrue more bad karma? What to do?

** ** **

When I got to Pop’s place I heard Tommy and Tia arguing in the kitchen.

“You didn’t have to break his goddamn face! It’s not like I was gonna leave with him. It’s not like he’s any real threat to our relationship, Tommy.”

“No?” My brother’s voice boomed, “The fucking guy is digging around in my family business, he’s trying to get you to fucking betray me. He disrespected me. He needed his face fucking smashed in. He’s lucky he’s not in the fucking ground!”

Tia’s muffled voice grumbled, “No! Don’t touch me right now. I’m not fucking happy with you.”

“Don’t tell me not to touch you. I’ll touch you if I wanna fucking touch you,” he growled, “I’ll do whatever the fuck I wanna do to you.”

I caught sight of Sarah and Tess in the family room, both with horrified looks on their faces. Sarah was holding baby Nicky.

I stepped into the kitchen.

“Hey guys. Chill. Ears out there.”

Tommy had her pinned against the wall and his hand was on her throat. He let go of her. She was red-faced. She gave me a relieved look as she passed me. She stormed out of the kitchen. Tommy put a hand to his forehead and stared at the floor.

“Hey, man. Let’s go talk,” I said, “Let’s talk first and then we’ll talk to Lisa. She still in her room?”

“Yeah,” he nodded and followed me out to the back yard. Luc was out there with the other kids. I motioned for her to take the kids inside.

** ** **

He wasn’t interested in talking to me about his fight with Tia at first but clearly she was pissed about finding out Tommy’d been arrested for assaulting her ex-boyfriend. He’d only been in for a few hours as the charges had been dropped but Tia had found out. Between him being pissed with her for what’d happened with Lisa the day before and her being pissed with him about beating up the ex and getting arrested, plus the whole lockdown scenario and Lisa’s state of mind things were heated. I talked to him about a few things businesswise and he seemed to plug into the discussion and put his beef with Tia aside.

Then, once he was a little calmer, we tried to talk to Lisa. She was little more than catatonic, though. I spoke gentle words, told her I was sorry about the baby, but that she needed to talk to us. She just stared off into space. I didn’t have a good feeling about this. We had Dex stay in the room with her, telling him to restrain her if she tried to leave or hurt herself and to keep phones and computers away from her.

After we left Lisa Tommy told me that he was discussing the Nick Gordon thing with Zack outside when Tia’d overheard him through an opened window. Although the charges had been dropped the cops tried to make Tommy’s life miserable and not before some cop who was evidently unsatisfied about how the Pop case was handled tried to quiz him about Pop’s murder. It hadn’t been a good day for Tommy. Then he came back to the house to Lisa freaking out and calling him out about Pop’s death right in front of our sisters and Tia.

My brother said he just needed some space and to spend time with his heavy bag. He also said he was gonna hole up in a bedroom later on and get on Skype with his counselor as it was time for his weekly appointment anyway. I figured that was good timing.

I got back late and without any word from Gan Chen about Jason Frost. Zack was digging deep and told me he was getting some good info and would update me in the morning with where things were at.

So I drove back to the cabin and got there as Nino and Luke were swapping out with two other guys for the night shift to keep watch.

** ** **

“Are you hungry?” she asked me after I kissed her hello.

“Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to eat.”

“I just made a clubhouse sandwich. I can whip you up one if you want?”

“Sure.” I sat on the sofa and checked my emails on my phone. Then I jerked my chin up at her and said, “Your hair? Why is it straight?”