Page 80 of Deacon

She shakes it. “Nothing.”

I place my hand on her throat, holding it so she can’t turn away. “Talk to me.”

She swallows beneath my palm. “Aiden fights like you. I have a lot of feelings inside me right now… I’m grateful you saved me, but I don’t like what you did. It was violent.”

She spits out that last word like it’s poison.

“Aiden had that coming,” I say.

“I know,” she sighs. “But I don’t like it.”

I open my mouth to answer, but she clears her throat. Her eyes meet mine, and her lashes glitter.

“Do you know how terrifying it is to be a woman in a house with a man who can’t keep his temper?” she whispers.

My mind goes back to Phil and Amie, and I almost say that I do, but I realize at the last minute that’s not right. I take a beat and think it over.

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

I release her. She takes a shuddering breath. “Aiden hit the tables, the walls, broke the glasses until I gave up and we drank out of red plastic cups. When the factory closed, he put a chair through the window. Bittern fixed it, but we had plastic over the window all winter.”

My stomach sinks.

“But you’re sure he never tried to hit you?”

She shakes her head. “He didn’t need to. I’ve seen what his fists can do. He hit Ryland, Bittern, and Wayland—Bittern more than the others.”

“What do you mean? Like beat them?”

“No, he’d fight with them,” she says. “He said he needed his sons to be able to take a punch.”

I’m quiet. It’s no wonder she’s frightened by what I did tonight.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, sweetheart,” I say. “As much as I’m happy to give another man a beat down, I’ve never raised my voice to a woman.”

Her lips part. “What stops you?”

“Never had any desire to,” I say honestly. “And I never hit a motherfucker who didn’t deserve it.”

She fixes her eyes on the ceiling. There’s a long silence. Then, she clears her throat again.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m in a washing machine, just churning through the same cycle over and over again,” she whispers. A tear etches out and slides into her hair. “Aiden hits people because his father hit people. My mother ran from a drunk and ended up with somebody worse. Lady did the same thing.”

“Who’s Lady again?” I ask.

“Aiden’s first wife. Bittern, Ryland, and Wayland’s mother,” she whispers. “Well, he never married her officially, but he called her Lady Hatfield. I didn’t meet her, but Bittern talked about her a lot. Aiden ran her off when she threatened to take his sons and split up. It wasn’t too much later that my mother came along. She was…really young. She didn’t stand a chance with Aiden.”

Her voice is flat, like everything is just trickling out of her mouth and she can’t stop it. I clear my throat, because it’s time for me to be honest.

“The people who adopted me had similar problems. I saw him, and I swore up and down I’d never make any woman’s life hell the way he did,” I say.

She turns to look at me, her big eyes glimmering with tears.

“And that just…fixed you?”

“Sometimes, all it takes is for one person to make that choice,” I say. “I want a family. A wife who’s happy, kids who aren’t scared of me. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to not hurt your girl if you never fucking started in the first place.”

“But…did you ever get hit as a kid?”

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