Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)

He’d always loved the dark hours, even as a kid.

His father had seen it as a sign of rebellion.

Night was night, he said. Day was day. It was against the laws of nature, God and man to try to replace one with the other.

When Zach had tried to explain that it had nothing to do with any kind of laws, his father had voiced his disapproval.

Sitting on his terrace in the chill day-after-Thanksgiving morning, a mug of coffee held between his hands, Zach snorted at the memory.

Voiced his disapproval? The old man never “voiced” anything, unless it was a command. What he’d done was beat the crap out of him for disobedience.

“If I say it’s a law,” he’d said, “it’s a law. You got that, boy?”

Zach got it.

He got everything. Beatings, demands, commands. That was how life was.

His father was in the service. A Marine. Even worse, a Marine sergeant major who had been the kind of badass drill sergeant that made the movie versions look like pussies.

Georgios Castelianos ruled the Castelianos household with an iron fist.

Up at dawn. To bed by nine. By the time you were four, you knew how to make your bed so that a coin dropped on it would bounce how to scrub your face and hands, how to slick back—not that a military crew cut left much to slick.

You were a Castelianos, you had rules to live by, you and your mom both, and God help you if you broke those rules.

Growing up, moving from base to base, Zach had known lots of kids whose fathers were Marine Corps strict. He’d observed their families and, yeah, it wasn’t always easy to live with dads and husbands who lived regimented lives.

What he’d never observed or seen were kids who were beaten for the bedding not bouncing that quarter high enough, or women who learned to cower even before the first blow fell.

That was good. It taught him that not every family lived in fear and that not all men who wore uniforms in the service of their country were bullies, but it wasn’t enough to change the way things went in his own life or his mother’s. His father was a dark presence that at first engendered fear, then rage and, ultimately, rebellion.

By the time he was sixteen, Zach was pure trouble.

He drank beer until he puked, popped whatever pills he could get his hands on, skipped school more often than he attended it. And he screwed every good-looking girl who was willing, and damn near all of them were because by then he had his old man’s height and leanly muscled build, his mother’s dark hair and green eyes.

At first, his mother pretended not to know the dangerous game he was playing. That had been her pattern with him; she never acknowledged anything that happened to him, even the beatings. There’d been a time he’d despised her for it. Eventually, he’d figured it was her method of survival and, after a while, whether she loved him or not no longer mattered.

But there came a time when not even she could ignore his behavior. He knew it was because she feared that the old man would blame her when he finally found out that his son was bad news.

“You have to stop misbehaving,” she said, early one morning.

A morning just like this one, Zach thought as he sat on the terrace of his condo.

It had dawned cold and clear, the scent of winter in the air and Thanksgiving a day-old memory.

Why he was thinking about all that now was beyond him, but he’d awakened early even though he’d been out late last night. Force of habit, after all these years. He hadn’t been doing anything special: Thanksgiving was just another day.

Sitting on the terrace, wearing sweats, his feet bare despite the chill, he could almost hear his mother’s admonishing voice after the school counselor phoned and warned her that one more incident of insolence and her son would be suspended.

“You have to stop misbehaving! Daddy’s bound to find out, and you know he’ll be upset.”

Zach had laughed, first at her insistence on calling the monster who abused them Daddy and then on her making it sound as if he’d be in for a verbal reprimand.

Two hours later, when the old man arrived home, his mother told him about the call from the school. About Zach laughing.

The old man took a well-worn Garrison belt from where he always kept it, hanging from a hook in the kitchen, a constant reminder of what the word discipline meant.

Zach got the worst beating of his life. It might have killed him if his mother, for the very first time, hadn’t tried to stop it.