Page 79 of The Fates We Tame
“What happens to my family has nothing to do with you.” He passes a piece of paper through the locked gates of the compound. King steps forward and takes it. He reads it, then hands it to me.
The words begin to blur with tears, but before it becomes too hard to read, I catch words likeconservator agreement.Legal guardian.Unable to make decisions.Brain damage.
“They can’t make me go with them, can they?” I ask Theo.
“We’ll figure it out.” But Theo doesn’t look at me as he speaks. His gaze remains focused on Luca and Leo.
“You expect that letter to mean anything to me?” King says.
“It means my daughter is incapable of making decisions for herself. It means your man has taken advantage of a woman, my daughter, because she can’t make good choices. You hand her over, and we’ll leave here and consider this situation resolved.”
King laughs. “Pretty sure the earbashing she just gave us suggests she’s more than capable of making decisions for herself, right, Sophia?”
I step forward, fighting the tears that threaten. “I know everything.”
“You know nothing,” my father shouts.
“Don’t do this. I’m happy with Theo. I know what you planned. I overheard Leo and Luca talking about it. Was I ever more than an asset to be traded?”
Leo curses.
Luca says nothing.
A muscle in my father’s jaw twitches.
“I wasn’t alone when I overheard them either. There were other witnesses. Everyone in this clubhouse knows.”
At this, my father casts a sideways glance at Leo, who blanches. I guess the power my father has is happily exerted against his own sons too.
Suddenly, his mood shifts. “You’re talking about things you don’t understand yet,Puparu. This is not how Viscusos do things. In front of strangers. Enemies. Just come home with us, and we can talk about this.”
I hate the soft tone to his voice, as if I’m a child throwing a tantrum who can be placated with an ice cream.
“That sounds like an admission,” I say. “And, no, I’m not coming home.”
“You forget who we are, Sophia. I can have a warrant to search this clubhouse and rescue you within the hour. I’ll have a witness statement from your doctor at the center saying you are mentally unstable within the same. That this man kidnapped you under pretenses to gain leverage over my family. You’re vulnerable. Not thinking straight.”
“You can’t do that,” I shout. “It’s not…”
Fair.
The word hits me hard. Nothing about this has ever been fair. I’m permanently injured, for life. “Do you know more of what happened the day I crashed than you are saying?” I ask him.
“No one knows anything,” he replies.
I look into the face I had come to trust and love in my own way. I see no evidence that he is lying, but there is so much I’ve missed. “I don’t think I can trust you.”
“Yet you trust him? A biker?”
I look up to Theo, and a very real truth settles in my gut. “I do. And I’ll fight everything you try to do to take me away from here.”
“You ready to let me step in?” Theo asks.
I nod, grateful that he gave me the opportunity to speak with them first.
“Anything else you need to say to my wife will be said through me,” Theo says. “First, if you think for a second everything you just threatened to do wasn’t recorded by one of our cameras, you’re a fool. Go get your judge, and we’ll hand over the tape. Second, in the hour it takes you to get the warrant, we’ll get the conservatorship destroyed. You think you got contacts? Well, I swear to God, ours go deeper. And third, you step foot on our land, we’ll defend it.”
Niro and Catalina step in front of me, their hands on the weapons in their holsters, and I’m eternally grateful. I guess up until this moment, I always felt there had been the tiniest sliver of a window for there to have been a mistake or misunderstanding.
