Page 25 of Lani

“I would suggest you back up. I will fucking shoot you if you dare to speak to her like that again.” Vinny pushes him back, and he stumbles dramatically and his back hits the wall.

“You don’t have a fucking daughter, because you’re a pathetic fucking excuse for a father.” I point my finger in his face. “You forced her to marry a man when she was thirteen years old! She is a baby who has a baby! Do you not see anything fucking wrong with that! As a father you’re supposed to protect her from the fucking pedophile who married her!”

I try to catch my breath. I want to cry, I am so fucking angry and hurt this happened to her.

Charles’s face pales.

“Tell me, tell me I shouldn’t call the police and lock you up! She is a minor!” I threaten him. I want to fucking choke him. I want to pound it into his brain that what he did was wrong!

I turn to his mother, who is crying. “You…you’re to blame also. You didn’t protect her,” I tell her in a much softer voice, because I know she has had a hard life.

Etta looks so conflicted, and I address her. “Sweetheart, if you want to leave, I will take you so far away from here. You can have a whole new life, college, friends and be a normal eighteen-year-old.”

“I’m married,” she whispers, looking at her mother, who looks completely haunted with everything that is happening around her.

I take her hand. I want to take her away too. “It’s your choice. How old were you when you were married?” I ask her.

She pushes her hair behind her ear with shaking fingers. “I was fourteen; it happened right after Vinny left, but I don’t have any kids. He tried and tried, but I haven’t gotten pregnant,” she confesses.

“The marriage isn’t real, it’s not legal,” I inform her, and she looks completely shocked.

“What do you mean it’s not legal?”

I wince internally at how clearly brainwashed she is, the abuse she has suffered.

“I’ll come with you. I want to be with my sister. Our brother Danny left years ago. I don’t know where he is,” she tells me and looks at her father, then her mother. “I’m eighteen now, I’m an adult. I can leave as I please.”

She walks out of the room by herself and opens the front door, then I see her through the window walking to the truck with her arms above her head, feeling the breeze.

I smirk when I see the horrified look on her dad’s face. “Why are you scared? No one to bully anymore?”

Vinny doesn’t speak. He grabs his dad’s face in his palm and forces the back of his head to hit the wall hard, then he turns away. I can see the anguish on his face, the hurt.

He is devastated.

Trey looks at me and flicks his eyes to Vinny. I walk over and wrap my arms around him and hold him.

Trey takes Vinny’s place and picks his father up by the throat, slamming him onto the table right beside his wife, who finally wakes up and screams.

Trey laughs at her, right in his face. “Let me go, faggot!” Charles screams as Trey squeezes harder and harder on his throat, until he stops speaking.

With his free hand, Trey takes out his gun, dragging it up Charles’s body to his temple. “Vinny, do you want me to kill this sorry excuse for a man?” He grinds his gun, taunting him.

“I think he deserves to die. He isn’t even a man.” I taunt right back. I peer over Trey’s shoulder, sickened at the sight of him.

Then I realize something. When I first saw her, I noticed that Vinny’s mom was quite a bit younger than Vinny’s dad. “How old were you when you married him?” I ask her, and Charles starts fighting Trey, trying to get loose.

“Mom?” Vinny asks her.

She bends her head. “I was thirteen like Lynn. He was in his twenties.”

This is blowing my mind. How can something like this happen for so long and no one get caught?

“I am going to kill you,” Vinny growls and tears Charles off of the table, dragging him by his throat out of the house to the back yard.

“You don’t deserve to live. You don’t deserve another second on this earth. Fucking pedophile.” Vinny tosses him onto the ground and takes out his gun, putting it in the center of his forehead.

Am I going to watch this happen? An idea hits me.

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