Page 119 of Fire for Effect

Was Cobra snarling? He looked like he was snarling.

“I know what I’m doing, sir,” the doctor said, moving on to look at my swollen hand.

“I haven’t gone to college, so he’s doing better than me,” I said, trying to stick up for the doc in my own way.

“My daughter deserves nothing but the best, and Florida State isn’t the best,” Cobra said. “And what the hell do you mean, you didn’t go to college?”

The doctor got up and left after telling me that a nurse would be in to finish bandaging me up.

“No money,”

“Bullshit!”

“Well, it’s true,” I said, with a sigh.

“How can that be? What’s your mom been doing with the child support this whole time?”

“You never sent child support.” He had insisted that he had, but I had never seen a dime.

“I’ve been putting half my profits into an account for you and your mom every paycheck since the day you were born,” he said, and I blinked, wondering if I’d had a concussion. “Your mom really never told you?”

I tried to wrack my brain, to see if maybe my mother had lied to me this whole time about my father. Teresa was a pill. She always had been. A tiger mom through and through, in every possible way. But she wasn’t a liar. Even when you wanted her to lie to you, she wouldn’t.

“I don’t think she knew,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said like he was chewing the words like a blade of grass between his teeth.

“Cobra–”

“Dad,” he corrected quickly. “Or if you’re not comfortable with it, you can call me Joe. That’s what your mom called me.”

“Joe, then,” I said, looking over at Griff’s unconscious form, lying peacefully on the white linen. “I don’t know what happened between you and my mother, but I promise you, she worked hard for everything we had, and she didn’t have some kind of… other income coming in. I would have noticed if she had.”

“She’s probably keeping it for herself and never spending it on my kid —”

“No,” I said, feeling the awkward pain of being in a position to defend my own mom. “My mother is a lot of things - the least of which might be a mother. But she’s not a liar, or a thief.”

Cobra looked at me, his jaw ticking like he was grinding his back teeth into a powder.

He stared at me with eyes I had inherited from him. And I stared right back.

“I’m getting a coffee,” he said, finally breaking off our stare down. “Want one?”

I nodded. Not because I was thirsty, but because I just needed a moment. I needed a second by myself, with Griff.

When we were alone, I rolled a chair up to his bedside, and held his hand.

I leaned forward in the seat, my elbows on my knees, trying to wrap my mind around everything. Everything that I couldn’t understand. Everything that I couldn’t feel right at that moment.

“You told me that you’ve nearly seen me die three times,” I whispered into the quiet space between me and Griff. “I’ve seen you shot twice. I’ve been with you at the hospital twice. It’s not a fun feeling.”

He didn’t respond, and there were no changes in the rhythm of his heart monitors.

I traced my finger on my face, feeling the Quasimodo-like bruising from the hits I took from my ex-husband. My late ex-husband?

We had lit up the compound like it was the fourth of July. He had to be dead.

The same day I placed Kai’s ring on my finger, the demon of my past died in fire and agony.

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