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Addilyn

Five Years Later…

My ears rang as I sat stiff as marble while Mother and Lloyd’s lawyer read her will.

Mother had loved her alcohol, but she’d never once popped pills to escape reality. An overdose, the coroner had said, but I didn’t believe the autopsy report. Refused to. Even after her funeral, I couldn’t be swayed into thinking my mother would stoop to such a pedestrian level to take her own life.

She’d been living it up, having all that “me time” she’d bitched about wanting.

No more kids in the house.

No more responsibilities except for luncheons, parties, and spa treatments.

Even if she’d been miserable, she would have never taken her own life, merely out of fear of what her peers would say over her grave.

I felt sure Lloyd had something to do with her death, but I had no proof.

None.

She was gone. Mere ashes in a piece of pottery resting beneath the Alaskan soil.

She’d never truly wanted me, never loved me the way I’d needed with physical touch or kind words. I’d never been good enough, but I’d been unable to hate Mother—even when she constantly believed her husband’s word over mine about how he’d sexually abused and tormented me for those two years.

The chair my stepfather had brought into his office for me pressed hard against my bony shoulder blades and tailbone through my pantsuit. I might have found strength in order to leave home, something I hadn’t known I’d possessed through anger—but being in the presence of Lloyd swept my fortitude away like dead leaves in a winter’s wind.

He made me weak rather than pissed off. Timid, regardless of my lifted chin and straight spine. Thickness tightened my throat to the point of pain.

A hot tear slid down my cheek, but it stemmed from disappointment in myself, not grief. I didn’t bother to blot it with a tissue. It dripped free from my chin, splashing onto my clenched hands atop my lap.

I’d escaped their household, but he’d managed to gain control over me until I turned twenty-one.

I’m powerless again.

I swallowed against the harsh truth which ripped clear down to my stomach like jagged glass. I had moved out the day I graduated from high school, desperate for freedom from that monster. Gideon, Lloyd’s son, had begged me to stay away from him. He’d been dragged away in cuffs for beating up my ex-friend, his only concern my safety. Mother had encouraged the decision for me to leave and seen to my expenses without question.

But she’d always been lavish with gifts, buying pretty much whatever I wanted. I’d figured that was how she’d shown the love she had for me. Or perhaps she had believed my accusations against her husband and thought caring for me monetarily would clear her of guilt for bringing that monster into our home. But with her gone and my inheritance in his hands…

Two months until I turned twenty-one, until I had access to the funds to keep up to date on the taxes for the house Mother had bought me, to pay college tuition, to pay bills, and to put food on the small table my only friend Ciarra and I shared. I just needed to stay out of Lloyd’s hands until then.

“Do you have any questions, Miss Reed?” Mother’s lawyer asked me, breaking through the blackness of my mind and making me aware of the nausea stirring at being in close proximity with my abuser.

Glancing over at Lloyd, I didn’t bother answering the attorney. I’d heard enough—more than enough to chill and twist my insides up tight.

The heat in Lloyd’s dark eyes said it all and only made me colder. I once more shivered under his stare as I’d often done beneath his bruising touch.

He was in charge, same as when Gideon sat behind bars and I had no one to protect me from Lloyd’s advances. He would take what he wanted, or he would find a way to make me penniless, his steady gaze promised.

A tremor wracked through me, and I wrenched my focus off him before vomit rose to spew over his desk. Dark memories slithered upward, ones I’d shoved deep down into my bowels where I’d attempted to shit them out over the years. They stroked my mind with the same inky, putrid touch of Lloyd’s fingertips. His cruel lips. The hard length that had stolen my innocence with so much pain I hadn’t been able to find pleasure with anyone since, no matter how hard I tried—

“No. No questions. Excuse me,” I choked out, hopping from my chair and rushing to the powder room as my stomach roiled.

Mere bile erupted from my gut, splattering into the toilet I hugged. My hands grasped the seat in a white-knuckled grip while I heaved over and over, as though my body tried to purge the memory of Lloyd from my life.

My face broke into a sweat from gagging so violently, and my hair stuck to my cheeks. Still, my insides rolled and clenched.

Never should have come.

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