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Her eyes faded into a familiar place I was currently standing in.
Hell on earth.
You’d think after everything I discovered, I’d have the will to keep her at arm’s length.
I didn’t.
If anything, my desire to hold her was stronger, more vivid and alive. Beating into me with each breath she took. I wanted to fucking kill him, so I grabbed my whiskey glass instead and threw it as hard as I could against the bulletproof window, spraying the contents everywhere. Shards of glass shattered in every direction.
It still didn’t stop her from declaring, “I didn’t want to do it then, and I don’t want to do it now. I’ve never wanted to do it. I hate him! I’ve hated him since I was a little girl. He’s an evil bastard. Always slapping my mother around and treating her like shit. He’s a nasty drunk and snorts blow like it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” She frowned for a moment, inhaling a deep breath. “My mom always protected us. She always tried to hide us from him. We’d spend summers in Europe, and it was the only time I remember being happy as a kid. He never followed us there for whatever reason, but I knew it would be short-lived. The end of summer would come around, and we’d have to return to Cuba for school. She tried to push boarding school to get us out of the house, but he refused, so we went to a religious school instead, which was the biggest irony of it all.”
“Sloan—”
“I prayed all the time. I thought if I was a good girl, God would save us… but God never came.”
I couldn’t imagine being raised in that environment.
To have a father abuse you wasn’t something I expected out of her mouth for one second. It was one thing when she was his wife. It was a whole other when she was his daughter.
The insanity of this was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I dealt with a lot of different fucked-up men, but this motherfucker took the cake. It was his daughter…
Like what the fuck?
She took another deep breath, anxiously shaking a bit. “I was born into this life, Luke. This life is all I’ve ever known. Violence. Made men. Trafficking. Guns. Drugs… it all goes hand in hand. My memories are what keep me up at night. It’s why I don’t sleep. I don’t know how to sleep without worrying that someone is going to come into my room and show me how powerful of a man they are.”
“Darlin’, I?—”
“I’m a woman in a man’s world, and I have absolutely no voice. I do what I’m told, or I’m tortured. There’s no in-between with him. No gray area. He’s always right, and if you argue that, he’ll cut off your tongue. I’ve seen him do it. Come to think of it… there isn’t much I haven’t seen my father do. Including fucking his whores. He gets off on the kink of it. Sometimes he watches me too…”
“Jesus Christ…”
I was winded.
Hurting.
Trying to remain strong for her to confess this to me.
“Papi loves to watch his good girl take it in every hole, Jameson.”
I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat.
“In fact,” she stated in a sharp tone. “I’m certain the only reason he wanted me was to sell me off to whatever benefited him the most. He knew he could use me as a tool for his businesses, and my mom was powerless to stop him. She didn’t have anyone. All she had was him. All we ever had was him.”
She backed away, and I stepped toward her, afraid she would take off on me. She was a loose cannon at this point, and I had no idea where this could turn. I barely knew how to keep it together with everything she shared openly.
She lifted her hand, stopping me. Completely unfazed with my gun still aimed at her forehead.
“The first time he let someone touch me, I was eleven, and I didn’t understand what I was doing, only that I had to do it or else. He didn’t give a shit about the shame or the confusion that caused me. There was no talk about it. He dressed me in a babydoll dress with pigtails, and I knew the second my mother wasn’t with us that something bad would happen. Maybe it was my intuition trying to protect me. We drove to a house I’d never seen, and I followed him inside.”
“Sloan…”
“I was just left in a room with a man I didn’t know, asking me if I wanted some candy. Just like that, my innocence was ripped away from me. On the ride home, he threw some money on my lap and told me to buy myself whatever I wanted. That it was his gift to me for being his good girl.”
I swallowed hard.
“You understand how confusing that was for me, right? Wanting to please him so he’d be nice to me and maybe nice to my brothers and mom too.”
With the coldest, detached voice I could muster, I strained, “And your mother?”
