Page 154 of Unholy Obsession

FIFTY-SIX

Two Weeks Later

BANE

The phone ringsagain and again. I ignore it.

It’s only Rotterdam, my father’s lawyer. I’ve been ignoring his calls and texts all week, just like I’ve been ignoring the letter that landed in my mailbox last week from my father. He’s the last fucking person I want to deal with right now. The man doesn’t understand the concept of going no contact.

So I continue to stonewall him. If you give an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take a hundred miles. And try to drag me back into his orbit, where love is a transaction. No, thank you.

I block Rotterdam’s number. He keeps calling from different ones within the firm, and I keep blocking them as soon as they come in.

I’m trying to focus on this week’s sermon, and the constant interruptions are a fucking annoyance. My modus operandi for the past two weeks has been to bury myself in work. I’ve spent more days doing prison visits and checked back with Silas. Tookcommunion to parish members who were too elderly and ill to make it into service and let them chat my ear off all afternoon.

Anything to fill the time so the clawing chasm of grief at her absence is numbed. Besides my self-destructive vices, that is. Which I’ve avoided every day except last Sunday after service when I gave in and drank an entire bottle of Glenlivet Twenty-five and spent the night violently vomiting and regretting my entire life.

Since then, it’s been strictly a course of filling my time with work and avoiding being alone. Except for the endless nights that I can’t escape. When I’m lucky, I manage a few hours of restless sleep, tossing and turning as my subconscious tortures me with memories of her in my arms—her happy laughter, her kinky quirks, her fingers in my hair, nails digging into my scalp?—

I slam my pen down on the desk, about to go for a punishing jog, the other activity I’ve taken up to fill any hours not consumed by work. But my phone buzzes again—another text from an unknown number. I pick it up, ready to stab the block button.

My eyes dance across the quick four-word message.

Unknown: Your father is dying.

That stops me in my tracks and has me sitting back down heavily in my chair.

Dying? Mad Blackwood?

A strange sensation bites at my ribs, something tangled and messy I can’t name. The old man was always larger than life, a force of nature in a bespoke suit. He can’t just die. He wouldn’t.

I glare down at the phone. Is this just a ploy? I wouldn’t put it past my father to demand my attention with a lie.

After a sharp exhale, I punch my finger against the number to call it.

Rotterdam immediately picks up.

“Bane! Thank God you finally picked up.”

“Is it true?” I bark. “Is the old bastard actually dying?”

“Yes,” comes the immediate response. “That’s why we’ve been trying to reach you. He wants to see you. He doesn’t have much time left.” He’s speaking rapidly as if to get the main points across quickly in case I hang up on him.

I’m still trying to process the concept of my father, a bull of a man his entire life, beingsick, much less dying.

“What the fuck happened? He’s only sixty-three, and God knows he can afford the best doctors money can provide.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Rotterdam sighs, sounding exhausted. Considering how much my father leans on him, I can only imagine. My father is notoriously cruel to anyone he considers an underling, but Rotterdam has stayed longer than any of the others. I know it’s only for the money, not out of any love for my father.

He gives me the name of the disease, and I only register that it’s something other than cancer. I scribble it down haphazardly. “The doctor only gave him a few months to live.”

My hand clenches on the phone. A fewmonths?

I swallow hard, my jaw tightening. I hate the man, but hating him has given me structure and defined a large portion of my life. And now he’s just going to die? Just slip away, without giving me a proper target to throw my rage at?

My breathing gets shorter.

“Where is he? What hospital?”

---