Page 112 of Wait for Him

Here we fucking go.

Chapter Eight

Jackson

The sound of my father's nose breaking is the most satisfying thing I've ever heard.

I've never considered myself a violent man. Just a man capable of violence. I think every man has a line drawn somewhere inside him, something he can spend his whole life believing he'll never cross until the right person puts a foot over it.

Mine, it turns out, was drawn through her.

Wesley's shirt is bunched in my fist while he throws his arms up, trying to block the blows I keep doling out. I barely feel my own knuckles splitting, barely register anything beyond his face and Rose's voice playing over and over in my head.

I was brutally raped by a man I looked up to.

I was a virgin when it happened.

It took five years before I could be with anyone after that.

"A fucking rapist!" I slam his back into the wall hard enough to rattle every framed piece of bullshit hanging on it. "How many?"

"Son, please—"

"How fucking many, Wesley?" I haul him up until we're eye to eye, until he can see exactly how little of his boy is left in me. "You don't get to call me son."

When I realized the man Rose was describing was my father, it took everything in me not to fall at her feet and beg forgiveness for a sin I didn't commit but somehow felt filthy carrying anyway. The other half of me wanted to pick up the phone and find somebody who could make Wesley Finnegan disappear so completely there'd finally be a headstone for Rose to spit on.

But she needed me present that night.

So I stayed present.

She needed all of me, and I gave it to her. I held her while she talked, held her while she slept, and stared at the ceiling afterward doing the impossible fucking math of how a man looks his father in the face after learning something like that.

Once we left New York, the mask got harder to hold. I felt Rose watching me on the flight, felt her clock every inch of distance opening up in me, and I hated letting her think for even a second that it had anything to do with us. But the closer we got to Los Angeles, the more the rage burned everything else away, until the car door shut behind her at the Sullivan building and there was nothing left in my head except getting here.

Him. The wall. My fist.

"It was the drinking." He's sobbing now, blood running from his nose and over his mouth while he tries to talk through it. "I didn't know what I was doing half the time. If I could take it all back, I would. I swear, Marcus. That's not who I am anymore."

I stare at him.

Of all the things he could've said.

"The drinking?"

He opens his mouth.

"You don't get to hand this shit to a bottle." I shove him back against the wall. "You don't get to stand here and tell me you weren't yourself while you were destroying somebody else's fucking life."

"Marcus, I swear—"

"Fucking liar. All you do is lie."

My wrath climbs another degree because even now, even bleeding and cornered, he's performing. Looking for the version of the story where he's sick instead of cruel, where alcohol did it and remorse somehow wipes the ledger clean.

"Do you have any idea what your sins have cost me?" My fist tightens in his shirt. "I'm being blackmailed to keep your ass out of prison. I married that psychopath of a woman to keep your goddamn hands clean. Three fucking years of my life shackled to her. Three years cleaning up somebody else's disasters because I thought I owed you for raising me."

I look at him, really look at him, and something underneath the anger finally dies.