Page 77 of Dance for Me

They worked. She’d never tried to bite him again.

“She’s quiet as sin,” her mother drawled. “Guess there ain’t nothing she can say. Knew she was a wrong 'un from the start.” Diane stepped forward as Abraham pulled Bodie to her feet, then curled her fingers around her daughter’s windpipe tightly, digging her nasty inch-long nails into the vulnerable skin. “Flitting about like you own the fucking world while my girl rots in a goddamn chair. Should’ve been you dead from the waist down.”

Bodie stared into eyes the same shape and color of her own, repulsed by the manic gleam of hatred in them. She hoped she never became so bitter, so jaded, that one day she looked in the mirror and saw her mother staring back at her. “The accident wasn’t my fault,” she choked out.

Abraham’s fist flashed from nowhere, crashing into her already swelling jaw and wrenching her from her mother’s grasp. She felt the sting of skin ripping, the warmth of blood trickling down her throat, then the almighty pain of the blow come to full fruition. Tasted the familiar copper tang of blood in her mouth.

“Keep your lies to yourself,” he snarled, raising his fist for another shot. “Alicia told us what happened. How you led her astray, letting her tag along when you went to meet one of those teenage pricks so he could fuck you behind the dumpsters. How you shoved her off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic when she was gonna be a good girl and tell us what you were up to behind our backs.”

Same old bullshit. Alicia speaks no falsehoods. Alicia the perfect.

“I was going to the goddamn library!” Bodie spat, unable to hold the words back anymore. For years she’d held her tongue. Any attempt at discrediting Alicia and proving her sister to be a liar resulted in violence. “The goddamn library, because you had whores and fucking drug runners in the house!”

It was Diane who struck her this time, the second part of the destructive tag team that was her parents. Her fist smashed into the soft flesh below Bodie’s sternum, doubling her over as best she could while still pinned by her father’s hand. “You got something against our friends, our employees, you snooty bitch? All fucking high and mighty now, ain’t you? Those whores and drug runners kept food in your belly and clothes on your fucking back.”

“Fuck you,” she wheezed. As far as she could see, she wasn’t exacerbating the situation from a beating to murder. No, her parents knew she was cutting off their cash cow from further milking, and they were here to do what they did to every loose end in their life.

Snip snip.

She was kind of surprised they didn’t already have a tarp on the floor and gasoline cans lined up for the grand finale.

Abraham launched her across the room, sending her careering into the paper-thin wall. Plaster dust rained down on her as she came to a stop half in, half out of the flimsy barrier.

That’s definitely the security deposit gone.

“Alicia followed me to the library,” Bodie ground out between wracking coughs. “They wouldn’t let her in after the last time she went and set a stack of books on fire in the kid’s section. So she had a tantrum and said if I went in, she’d tell you I was meeting boys for sex.” She winced, bracing herself as Abraham stalked toward her, fury alive in his dark eyes. His mane of silver hair seemed all the more intimidating from down here, lending him an otherworldly edge. But she kept talking while she still had a tongue in her head. “She started playing chicken in the street, daring me to go after her and pull her out of the way. Almost got hit twice, and the third time, I pushed her from in front of a fucking bus.”

Had damn near been creamed by it herself. Bodie remembered the gaping sensation in her gut when she’d realized her sister had pushed her taunting too far. She’d run across the road, connecting with Alicia’s smaller body and knocking her onto her back on the sidewalk.

Alicia had been safe, Bodie had felt the brush of the bus against her back as it blew past with an obnoxious bellow of the horn, and then all hell had broken loose.

While she dealt with the shock of almost being run down by a bus, Alicia had lain silent on the sidewalk, her eyes open and mouth moving silently. Bodie wouldn’t find out until later that Alicia had fallen awkwardly, breaking critical vertebrae and severing her spinal cord.

Abraham was an ungodly shade of red. “So you admit it.”

Bodie tried to crawl out of the wreckage of the wall, yelped as her father snagged her wrist and wrenched her free. “I’ll admit to saving my sister. I did the only thing I could in that moment. If I’d done nothing, she’d be dead. Maybe that would’ve been kinder than leaving her to rot under your roof.”

In the next breath she took, Bodie understood she’d just pulled the pin on the grenade of her life. She kissed Braun goodbye in her head, settled her aching cheek against the breadth of his powerful chest, and whispered the words she hadn’t been courageous enough to give back to him yet.

She held herself in that vision, kept herself anchored in her Master, as the world stayed still for a long, quiet moment.

When the pain hit, Bodie stood straight and hit right back.

*

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me she lived in this dump?” Braun demanded of Liam as they cruised into town. He shook Bodie’s note at her best friend, infuriated she’d managed to let this little detail go undetected. “You think I’d have even let her think about coming back on her own if I knew she lived here?”

Liam glared at him. “You’re her Dom, Braun. She’s been living with you for a goddamn week; you didn’t think to ask?”

Atticus's massive truck was filled to capacity with five Masters. The man himself was driving, following Liam’s directions rather than following the navigation system. Jasper, faster than the rest, had called shotgun immediately. Liam was wedged between an irate Braun, and a napping Loki.

When he’d realized his subbie lived in a notoriously shady area, Braun had summoned his buddies. Leaving a bemused Connie in charge of Avalon while the plumbers worked their magic—something Braun was going to pay for painfully, if the look of intent on her face meant anything—the Masters of Avalon were riding to Bodie’s aid.

If she wanted her old apartment clearing so badly, well, it would be cleared. In half the time. He wanted her nowhere near anything dangerous, and he certainly didn’t want her to be a sitting duck if her asshole parents turned up for one of their regularly unscheduled visits.

“No,” Braun admitted grudgingly. “We covered a lot of stuff but where she lives exactly didn’t crop up in conversation.” He clenched his fist, bouncing it off his knee. A kernel of unease wound its roots into his belly. “How much longer before we get there?”

“Well, if our resident chauffeur takes a right here, and then the second left, we should be there.” Liam leaned between the seats to point, then his back stiffened as two shiny motorcycles revved loudly, tires almost screaming as they came around the corner at speed.

---