Page 88 of Edge of Control

Oh, how the tables had turned.

There were many times Gio would be over the house when I’d have bruises from my father’s beatings, or I’d be silent after spending days locked in the bathroom. He was well aware of the horrors I was being put through, and he’d done nothing to stop it. For all I knew, he encouraged my father’s actions. He was also likely one of the masterminds behind Pressure Point. It explained how he was able to stick around so long as my father’s right-hand man.

I pushed the end of the crowbar harder into his throat. The skin turned pink around the gray steel. His eyes bulged.

The monster inside me uncoiled, swallowing myemotions whole, leaving nothing behind but a cold and cruel anger.

“Please,” he whimpered, coughing the word out against the crowbar crushing his windpipe.

How many times had I pleaded as a child? Just wanting to be left alone? Long forgotten were the pleas for love, for compassion. Those died out after the years of abuse. I just pleaded to be left the fuck alone.

No one ever listened.

I raised the crowbar and slammed it back down on Gio’s head. His skull gave a sickening crack, and his eyes rolled to the back of the room. Blood poured out onto the scratched-up hardwood floor.

Please.

Finally.

Someone listened.

With the two men taken care of, I grabbed the gun off the floor and bolted toward the stairwell at the back of the bar where Gio had appeared from, taking the steps two at a time. The basement door loomed ahead, slightly ajar, light spilling through the crack. I could hear voices—my father’s low, venomous tone and Jace’s strained, defiant replies.

Pushing the door open, I stepped into a scene straight from my nightmares.

Jace was tied to a chair, bloodied and bruised, his face pale but his eyes blazing with fury. My father stood in front of him, a silenced pistol pressed to his lips. He turned when he saw me, his cold blue eyes—eyes we shared—narrowing in disdain.

“Put the gun down, Dad.” I raised my own gun, aiming it directly at my father.

“This is a surprise.” He didn’t listen. The muzzle was still sitting between Jace’s jaws. His eyes were wide, pupils blown open with fear. It made my heart drop. I’d come to love this man with everything I had inside me. He’d fixed me. Made me heal old wounds I thought would never close. He gave me hope that there was some kind of better future ahead for me.

And now, he was a trigger pull away from having his brains sprayed all across the wall.

Thatwould be something I could never recover from.Thatwould be my father’s ultimate act of cruelty.

“Let him go.”

I could shoot him, but I risked missing the shot. If I did, it would take my father seconds to end Jace’s life.

That simply wasn’t an option.

“You were always a bossy one,” my father said. His expression was sinister. I flashed back to being a child. Having absolutely zero power over the situation. I’d been a cockroach under the heel of his boot. He was a twisted man, and all of that abuse and darkness came bubbling back up to the surface of my psyche. I could feel the panic rising.

Have to control it. Have to control it for Jace.

“I didn’t think this would be how you’d find us. I wanted to leave Jace with the same pair of wings you’ve been leaving all of my employees. You caused a pretty big mess, you know that, Theo? Just like when you were a kid. Always fucking things up for me.”

“You were the one that fucked things up. You ruined us. You stole our childhood. And now you have the fucking balls to name a bar after my sister. This place needs to burn to the ground. With you trapped inside it.”

My father moved so that he stood behind Jace. I looked into Jace’s eyes. They pleaded with me for something. To run? To fight? He didn’t speak, but was his body language trying to tell me something? His eyes darted down to the right, toward his arm. My father lifted Jace’s head with the pistol pressed up against his chin. He pushed the muzzle against the side of Jace’s skull. “You can still leave, Theo. I can give you that one mercy. Maybe I haven’t been a good father to you. This could be my way of making things right. Leave. Let me kill this man. No one besides me will know you were Nevermore. As long as you don’t mess with my business again, then I won’t mess with you.”

“You consider that a mercy?” I spit on the floor between us. “Fuck you and your mercy. Too little, too late.”

“That’s a shame.”

“You’re such a fucking piece of shit.”

“Relax there, Theo. Don’t get me angry. You know what happens when I get angry.” His finger rubbed over the trigger. A slight twitch would end things. My heart pounded with fear, but I couldn’t show him that. My father fed off fear. It made him stronger.

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