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He was slumped over in a chair at the bottom of the stairs, my father, the man who had done this to me. Passed out, as I’d expected. The booze was likely wearing off now, and it wouldn’t be long till the withdrawals started. I'd seen him in the first stages of them before, hands shaky, face coated with a thin layer of sweat, eyes distant and bleary. Even the thought of it was enough to set my teeth on edge.
I shouldn’t have given a damn about him, not really. I should have walked out of there and let them do what they wanted to him. But I couldn’t. Despite it all, I still cared for him, and I was still willing to give him one last chance to make things right with me.
"You sure you want to do this?" Maxim asked me, his hand brushing against mine softly. He could tell how hard this was for me, how emotional, but I just nodded.
"Yeah, I am," I replied. "Can you give us some time alone? I want to talk to him. Just the two of us."
Maxim nodded and glanced over at Damyan, jerking his head back towards the club. It was silent, empty of the crowds of people who usually filled it out, and that silence hung in the air, ringing in my ears, giving me no choice but to take on what was right in front of me.
I made my way down the stairs and into the cold basement, wrapping my arms around myself and trying to keep warm. His head snapped up as soon as he heard my footsteps on the stairs, and I froze when his gaze fell on me.
We just stood there, staring at each other for a long time. He blinked, leaning forward, as though trying to work out if this was really happening.
"Mina?" he muttered. "Is that you?"
I nodded, continuing down towards him till I was standing right in front of him. It was almost surreal, seeing him like this. I couldn’t believe he was actually here. I had accepted, deep down, that I was never going to get a chance to see him again—that maybe it was better for me to keep my distance instead of trying to rebuild whatever we’d had before. I didn’t know what to make of this, of his presence in front of me. I wished I had the nerve to scream at him and tell him what a bastard he was for everything he had done to me.
But, instead, I just greeted him softly.
"Hey, Dad," I murmured.
He couldn’t take his eyes off of me, as though he had seen a ghost.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. His voice wasn’t as slurred as I was used to. Like he was trying his best to hold himself together—like whatever had happened at the hands of Damyan had been enough to snap him out of the mess he usually found himself in.
"Damyan kidnapped you," I told him bluntly. It was hard to have much sympathy for his current situation, given that it was the exact same one he had put me in. I could still remember the sheer terror of those men putting the bag over my head, dragging me out of the house, with no idea what they were going to do to me, how they were going to treat me once they’d gotten me where I needed to go.
"Why?” he asked, struggling against the cuffs that trapped him in his seat. "Was this your idea?"
I shook my head.
"I would never do something like this to you, Dad," I muttered. It was the truth. No matter how much he might have deserved it, I couldn’t have done this to him. His face dropped. He knew the irony in what I was saying; he could hear it, even now—he could see how much this hurt me, how deeply my chest ached with the knowledge of all he had done to me.
"Are you okay?" he asked me. I bristled at the question.
"Do you even care?" I snapped back. "You’re the one who sold me into this, remember?"
"It’s not what I … I mean, it’s not what I planned," he blurted out. I raised my eyebrows at him.
"I know you did this," I told him. "There’s no point trying to bullshit me. I know you got into debt with those assholes, and you decided I was the only way you could pay that up."
I spat the words at him with a fury I had never even heard from my mouth before. I hated this. I hated him. I wanted to tear him apart right now, wanted to make him suffer for what he had done to me, but …
"I’m sorry," he told me, his voice cracking as he spoke. "I … They had me over a barrel, said they would kill both of us if I didn’t pay up as soon as they wanted me to. And then … I had no money; they told me there was only one thing they would accept, and it was …"
He looked up at me.
"It was you."
I closed my eyes as I took those words in. They didn’t change anything. They didn’t make this better.
"You sold me to them," I shot back at him. "You sold me, and you had no idea what they were going to do with me—"
"What other option did I have?" he exclaimed. My eyes widened, and I tossed my hands into the air.
"You could have come to me with all of this!” I pointed out. "You could have made an effort to actually discuss this with me instead of … instead of letting me get kidnapped from my own home in the middle of the night with no warning!”
He let out a sob as I came out with those words, like he couldn’t believe I had been through that. What? Had he been in denial all this time, about the way they had treated me? Thinking they had been kind to me? He really was fucking delusional …
