Page 57 of Enforcer's Obsession

“Did he…?”

“Threaten me? No, but he didn’t have to. I’d seen what had happened to my mother, and when the police came, I didn’t even try to tell the truth. It would have been of no use, so I didn’t say anything. They sent me to counselors, and then decided since he had been my stepfather for so long, and I was a poor orphan, abandoned by her selfish mother, that I should stay with him. I remember the social worker telling me she wished more of the kids in her case file had adults willing to step up like he had,” she said.

My gut churn with rage, and I saw something like that reflected in her eyes, but only for a split second.

“So after that, it was survival mode. It wasn’t so bad,” she said, and the optimism, earnestness, of her words almost broke me.

“As I got older, I got smarter. Knew how to stay out of the way. I was a model student. Went to every extracurricular I could. It was mostly okay. When I was sixteen, he fractured one of my ribs. I told the hospital that it happened in soccer practice. But other than that, I just survived. When I turned eighteen, I got the hell away from him.”

“And what happened to him?” I asked.

“I have no idea, and I don’t want to know. I left on my eighteenth birthday with the clothes I was wearing, and a picture of my parents on holding a sonogram of me. I haven’t looked back since,” she said.

I grabbed my phone and fired off a text to Enzo.

I prayed that her stepfather was already dead. And as soon as Enzo got me the information I’d asked for, I’d know for sure.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“I stayed on the street for a couple of nights. Then found a shelter. I managed to graduate high school and get a certificate from the community college. Then I just started working, saving up. Got the job at the animal shelter and do some dog grooming on the side. And maybe one day I’ll be able to go back to school,” she said.

So she had been out there alone, fighting for herself.

Even after my family was killed, I’d had a place to go.

But not her.

I was simultaneously disgusted at the world for leaving her in that position, and impossibly impressed.

My Hope was a survivor.

She’d proven that.

She smiled, seeming to come back to herself.

“What about you?” she said.

I looked at her for a long moment, overwhelmed with desire to speak, and pissed beyond belief at myself.

“Are you done with your breakfast?” I said.

She blinked, looking stunned.

“Yeah,” she finally said.

“Then let’s go. I need to handle some business.”

SIXTEEN

Hope

How fuckingstupid could you be?

A rhetorical question if ever there was one because I couldn’t be any more stupid than I had been during that breakfast.

I was back in Nico’s house, pacing the bedroom, wondering what the fuck I had done.

I couldn’t put my finger on what had compelled me to tell him so much.

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