Page 6 of Taking

Even though Dad hadn’t visited me, he’d wired me the state allowed five-hundred bucks every month. All five years. Hating him still came easily though. Forgiveness for uncovering my juvie records to send me to jail couldn’t be bought. Determined to never touch the money, I’d held out until Twinkie had arrived.

His love of Jolly Ranchers and his occasional tears had me dipping into Dad’s money. Eventually, I bought a pack of the Swedish Fish I’d always stared at while visiting the commissary on Twinkie’s behalf.

Addilyn’s favorite.

They tasted like I imagined her mouth did. Sweet. Cherries.

Probably fucking delicious.

I’d never had her mouth on any part of my body except wrapped around my dick that one time, the night before my arrest. The supposed non-consensual blowjob when I’d been riding high on a blood rage, desperate for release since I hadn’t found it in beating Devon Bradshaw’s face to shit and putting him in a two-day coma.

She’d spilled to her best friend Jenny what we’d done, and Jenny told the sheriff who had the prosecuting attorney bring it up while Addilyn sat on the stand.

The innocent princess had been embarrassed as hell and wouldn’t look at me.

My dick chubbed up inside my jeans regardless of the howling wind spitting snowflakes at my face and the constant anger simmering deep in my gut that I’d become practiced at hiding.

The memory of Addilyn gave me daily boners, but her betrayal required restitution, same as how Dad would pay for his part in putting me away. Fuck his gifted money.

In boots a size too small, I trudged southward, toward Anchorage. I needed to find a place to crash for a few days. I’d use Dad’s money to get myself a car and set the plan I’d been working on into motion—paid for by his own goddamn hand.

Talk about poetic fucking justice.

A dark SUV slowed alongside me not fifty yards from the penitentiary.

I moved off onto the berm, but the passenger window rolled down. I pulled up short.

Dark eyes lined with more wrinkles than had been around them five years earlier peered across the console, meeting my gaze.

The need for violence burst open like a geyser I struggled to keep a cap on. “The fuck you want?” I asked Lloyd, my voice tight and my hands fisting at my sides.

“I came to pick up my son.”

“I don’t need to be picked up.” Jaw clenched, I started forward once more, my bowels twisting over him showing up and ruining the surprise I’d had planned. The sheriff must have told him I’d gotten out early.

Wheels crunched on stone as he kept pace beside me. “Get in the car, Gideon.”

“Fuck off, Lloyd,” I spat back, my pulse pounding.

“It’s January, you aren’t wearing a hat, and it’s ten fucking degrees. Get in the goddamn car.”

Seeing as how the tips of my ears and nose had grown numb, I decided to put up with his presence for a few minutes.

Couldn’t hurt, right? Not me, anyway.

I climbed into the SUV, the blast of heat doing little to thaw the chill that had reigned in my chest since my arrest five years earlier.

“I have a job for you,” Dad said as though a day hadn’t passed since we’d last spoken.

“Don’t need a fucking job,” I grunted, edginess twitching my muscles.

“Last time I checked,” he said, pulling onto the highway, “you just got out of jail, and you still owe me one.”

I huffed a laugh. “Those juvie records of mine you supposedly did away with got uncovered. I don’t owe you jack shit.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” he stated, his tone level. “But the monthly cash was from my pocket.”

“And why the fuck should I believe you?”

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