Page 30 of When Kings Fall

“It’s still not enough time. You’re still a boy.”

“I stopped being a boy the moment I was taken by those motherfuckers.”

Emotion plagued his features so similar to mine. “It makes me sick that it happened, and I’m so sorry, son. But I’m not about to let you risk your life in the name of this vengeance. It will be seen to for you.”

“No!” I roared, my temper exploding like it kept doing ever since I’d been pulled out of that hellscape.

I’d never been an angry kid before. But what I’d seen and also had done to me, what had been done to her, had caused that in me. I could barely control it at the best of times.

But for what I planned to do, rage would function as power.

Power that would rip those fuckers apart.

“Levi, there’s still a lot you need to learn.”

“I don’t care! I can do this! I can, Dad!”

In the next moment, he socked me in the gut.

I choked and doubled over, but he didn’t give me any time to recover before he then swept his leg at my ankles, ripped me off my feet, then reached down and dragged me across the room.

I was gasping for breath as he threw me up against the wall and pinned me to it with his full body weight, looming over me in the process.

I screamed and struggled wildly against him. “Dad, stop! Get the fuck off me! You’re not playing fair!”

“There is no fair,” he rumbled. “Not in a real-world fight.”

I didn’t want to hear it.

I didn’t want his words to seep into me and undermine my conviction and my plan.

I pushed against him, trying to free myself.

I tried every move I’d learned over the last few months.

Nothing worked.

Nothing could help me to escape.

Nothing could move him.

“You’re not strong enough, Levi,” he told me firmly, yet calmly, a complete and jarring contrast to me in those moments. “Not yet.”

Rage bled into frustration.

And as I kept struggling, kept trying to fight, that frustration was tainted by exhaustion and was stripped away to leave the awful thing I’d been trying to avoid, to shut off, all this time.

Pain.

“I can’t… I can’t stop it, Dad. It won’t… they won’t… they won’t leave me.”

He pushed off me and uttered sadly, “I know.”

“I don’t know how to let it go without doing this, without hurting them back.”

“You will. In time. All this focus on that is toxic, son. Let me help you to put your concentration on the bright future you have ahead of you.”

How could I even think about any sort of future when I was trapped in the past, in that room at the abandoned police station.

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