Page 155 of Deacon

The corner of his mouth jerks up. “I called her Laurie. She used to get so mad because she wanted to be Laurel Rose.”

I can’t speak. Not even dead drunk has Aiden been this vulnerable before. Now, he’s sober, and his eyes are like open sores.

He runs a hand over his face. Silence falls again.

“Why did she really leave?” I whisper.

He lets out a slow sigh and reaches into his pocket to take out a pack of cigarettes. He turns it over in his hands. The corner is crushed, and he keeps worrying it with his thumb.

“We had a fight, things got heated,” he says. “I might have done some things…I didn’t mean.”

Sickness passes over me in a wave, making my breathing come short and fast. Aiden snorts, looking toward the boarded up window.

“She overreacted,” he says. “And she did the same thing Lady did, threatened to take my kids. I told her she couldn’t leave with the boys. So, she decided to stay, but she wasn’t right after that. Started getting high, just bottomed out. She left for good six months later.”

He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Nobody takes my kids,” he says softly. “You call me what you want, but I was never a fucking deadbeat. I raised you all.”

Anger rises like a storm in me.

“I’m not your daughter,” I snap. “You didn’t raise me. I raised myself.”

He stands, shoving the cigarettes in his pocket. “Yeah, you’re not. You were never anything but another mouth to feed. Which is why I don’t mind to use you as bait.”

Hatred like I’ve never felt pours through me. “Is this about Deacon? Or about me?”

He gives me a long stare. “Not everything is about you.”

“But this is,” I say. “This is personal. There was no reason you had to smash my collection.”

“Jesus,” he says under his breath. “You still fixated on that shit?”

I stand up, aware there’s nothing intimidating about me. He’s over a foot taller and has a hundred pounds of muscle on me. I’m shivering in nothing but my slip, blood still caked on the split on my mouth.

“It meanteverythingto me,” I whisper, fists clenched.

His eyes flare. “Nobody ever fucking laid their hands on you, and all you do is bitch like they did.”

The anger I’ve pushed down for years boils over. Without thinking, I surge forward and swipe at him. Quick like a snake, he grabs my wrist, spins me, and slams my front into the wall. Pain splits through my head, a hot throbbing below my right eye.

He’s breathing hard, forearm against my lower back.

“I will break you,” he says, voice harsh.

A sob works its way up my throat. He already broke me so badly, I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully healed. And for years, he sat at his place at the head of the table and watched me try to put myself back together again and again, like a bug squirming on its back.

Aiden has left scars on me I’ll always live with. It’s how my brain formed, like a tree growing around a thick chain. I can extract him, but I’ll always have the empty places he left behind.

He lets me go. Slowly, I turn around to face him.

His eyes are so close, burning black and blue. Sweat etches down his chest, down his neck, down to the collar of the shirt I scrubbed with my bare hands. The shirt he wore out putting food on my plate.

My heart thumps in my mouth. His hand comes up, and I tense, waiting for the blow. Then, his hand stops, palm open, but relaxed, like he’s reaching.

Then, he touches me, middle finger on my jaw.

The world spins.

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