Daddy's Stepstalker (Daddy's Little Deviants)

My back stiffened. “Maybe he’s lying. I know you had your differences with Anne, but she wouldn’t have sent her son to live with a stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger to her. He was a friend of my father’s. My real father’s dead. And he agreed to let me stay with him and to keep up the facade for her to send him money monthly.”

“But still—”

“She didn’t want me around you, Shaw. She would have done whatever it took to get me away from you. I never thought she would go so far.”

Neither did I. What he was accusing Anne of was unthinkable. She might have been familiar with this man, but how could she have sent an impressionable Ari to live with someone he wasn’t related to and trick him about it? I’d tried not to think too much of her as a bad mom, as Ari had been a difficult teen, but this was horrifying.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“The restaurant was full, so I had to wait a long time for our lunch.” He inhaled deeply. “I was waiting at the bar when he showed up. I asked him why he’d done those things to me. How could he have when I was his son? And that’s when he told me the truth. That we weren’t related at all. The bartender saw how upset I was, so he got him to leave and then walked me to my car after.”

“Did he follow you?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He might have, but I couldn’t tell. I was so shaken up by what he said I wasn’t even sure if I would have gotten here in one piece.”

He trembled, and I stroked his arms again. “I shouldn’t have sent you out on your own.”

“I think I had to,” he whispered. “I know you probably don’t understand why I’m so terrified of him, but whenever I run into him, it all comes back. The feeling of helplessness as he did things to me I couldn’t stop.”

Bile rose in my throat. I hadn’t wanted to think about what Ari had gone through. It was too difficult to think about, but ignoring it wouldn’t help us to handle the situation. I needed to know how far this thing with his “dad” went and find out how the hell we were going to deal with this man.

“Ari, I want to know what he did to you.”

His shaking was uncontrollable now. “It’s horrible.”

“I know, but I think you need to talk about it too. As long as you keep it bottled up inside, the more power he will continue to wield over you.”

“He-he was a terrible drunk,” he whispered. “He was awful when he was sober, but even worse when he was drunk. He always had friends around the house. Friends who were just like him. I stayed in my room, but then he’d start shit for no reason. I didn’t wash the dishes. I didn’t vacuum the floors. And then he would punch me. Everywhere. While his friends laughed. They hated how feminine I was. More like they hated how they responded to me, since I was a boy.”

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. “What happened?”

“I lied to you about everything,” he said with a sniffle. “I told you I had a Daddy before, but it’s not what I made it sound like. He saw how some of his friends looked at me and got this idea to sell me to the one who paid him the most money. It wasn’t consensual, but he didn’t care.” His laugh was bittersweet. “But then he regretted it because he wanted me for himself. The beatings got worse, and then he would have me do other things like steal for him. The first person I killed was because he made me do it. Said he would leave me alone, and I just wanted the hurting to stop. He lied. He didn’t leave me alone.”

He sighed. “But then I noticed how he watched me, and when he came once when he was hitting me, I knew what I had to do to make the beatings stop. So I became his little bitch. It didn’t matter if I was in the mood or not. He would just take whatever he wanted. The beatings stopped, but what he was doing to me filled me with so much hate. He had me kill someone else and then another. And I became numb. Every night after he fell asleep, I would plan out in my head how I was going to kill him one day, and I did. At least I thought I did. I didn’t stick around to find out. I ran.”

“Oh, my god, Ari.”

So much made sense now. The kind of fear he had for his father, which he didn’t display for anyone else. The way he killed without even a second thought. Or how he refused to be bullied by someone like Judd but would rather go to the extremes to eliminate them.

And I knew what we had to do. There was only one way to get rid of Ken. The man wouldn’t stop harassing Ari until he was completely taken out of the picture. But with Ari incapable of confronting the man, that left only me to handle the situation, and I…couldn’t.

I wasn’t the killer Ari was. I couldn’t take a life, even when it belonged to a man who didn’t deserve to live. But maybe…maybe I didn’t have to do it myself. Maybe I could get someone else to do it for us.

One thing was for sure. I had to protect Ari from that man at all cost.