Page 36 of Abduction
Chapter Twenty
Josh
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AS THE WHEELS OF THEMerc rolled smoothly along the road, I stared out of the window and watched for any sign of movement.
Out here in the suburbs, I knew the chances of us running into any trouble were slim. But still, there was a part of me that sincerely hoped we did. Because I needed a chance to blow off some steam, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep it all in.
It had been just over a week since my father had blown up at me, and I was still carrying the marks to prove it. Since then, I had been put on all the worst jobs they could give me, going out to the middle of nowhere to pick up debts from people who owed us. Right now, I was being driven into the middle of the dead suburban neighborhood to pick up money from Ronald Feo, a compulsive gambling addict who had come to owe my father more than perhaps he could afford to pay back. My job was to get at least a good portion of it from him and to make sure he got that the rest of it would need to come sooner rather than later.
“Are we nearly there?” I asked the driver, Kieran. He glanced at me in the mirror and nodded. This wasn’t the first call he had been sent on with me in the last few days, and in the previous one, he’d had to talk me out of doing some serious damage to the guy we were supposed to be dealing with.
The anger that had been boiling inside of me against my father was getting harder and harder to hold in. How could I, when I was being asked to confront and scare people to get cash out of them? I had someone, plenty of someones I could take this out on, but I was still expected to hold back and keep myself from flipping out at them.
I hated this. This impotence. Not being able to take out my rage, knowing I’d just make it worse if I did. Much as my father hated some of the people who were in debt to us, he knew there was no point taking them out. They would never be able to pay him back dead, and they were far more use to him alive, no matter how tempting it might have been to turn it around and take them out.
“Nearly,” he replied. “A couple more streets.”
“You seen this guy before?” I asked. Kieran nodded again.
“I have.”
Shit, he didn’t give away much. What was his problem? Was he worried I was going to use something he said to go off against this Ronald guy? I didn’t care. I just wanted to know what I was going to be coming up against.
“And what’s he like?”
“He’s easy,” he replied. “He’ll pay what he can. You don’t need to push him too far.”
That felt like a warning. Maybe it was. He didn’t want me to turn this into a bigger deal than it needed to be, and frankly, I didn’t blame him. The way I had been acting lately, it was obvious I was struggling to control myself.
I wished I could have said I didn’t feel the same way, but I did. My head had never been as scrambled as it was right now, and I knew the chances of getting myself back on track were slim. I wanted to be able to trust myself again, but after everything I’d done, everything that had happened, I felt as though I was on the edge and threatening to go over at any second.
I blamed my father for the way he had treated me the other day. Did he really think he could just throw me around like that, hurt me, and expect me to bow to his every wish? I wasn’t going to fight him too hard on this, but I refused to let him lay hands on me again.
Well, don’t give me a reason to.I could practically hear his voice inside my head telling me that. If I didn’t want to get hurt, be treated the way he had treated me once more, then I would need to get my shit together and prove I didn’t need to be. No matter how hard things were, it was on me to hold myself together and handle whatever my family needed me to handle. I might not have liked it, I might not have enjoyed the thought of giving everything over to them, but I didn’t see what other choice I had right now. I wished I could have dealt with myself a little better, but I had allowed myself to get so distracted by what was going on with Amber, it had slipped through my fingers.
My brother would have told me to get my head in the game. Honestly, I had grown more and more pissed at him the more I had thought about what had happened with my father. Why hadn’t he done anything to try and stop it? Did he really think my dad would brush him off if he told him not to bother laying hands on me? He could have put himself in the middle of it, at least tried to pretend like he cared what happened to me.
But at the back of my mind, I knew he thought I deserved it. He would never have said it out loud, of course he wouldn’t, he was too decent a person for that. But he probably believed I deserved it, just to make sure I didn’t screw up the same way all over again. I needed him to understand I wasn’t doing this to cause trouble, I was just...I felt more and more disconnected from the family with every day that passed. More and more like I might have been born into the wrong one, whether or not I knew it.
