Page 308 of Power Play

Bliss nodded slowly. “I’ve seen it.”

Easton looked at her. “When?”

“Every day since we were twelve.” Bliss pulled one leg beneath her on the couch. “Charm can be happy, then one of them enters the room or calls her. By the time they leave or she hangs up, she’s apologizing for something she didn’t know was wrong five minutes earlier.”

Aura lowered herself onto the arm of the chair. “They don’t give orders. They make disappointment feel like a consequence.”

“They love her,” Bliss said. “I think they genuinely believe they love her.”

“They love the version of her that makes them comfortable,” Aura corrected.

“I don’t know how to be somebody else around them.” My hands shook in my lap. “I can think of everything I want to say before I see them. I practice it. I hear Ryan’s voice telling me I’m trained, and I believe I’ll be different the next time. Then my father looks at me that way, and I feel like I’m twelve years old again.”

Cade finally moved away from the door. “What happened when you were twelve?”

The question sent my brother’s face through my mind. Charlie laughing behind me in the pool. Charlie reaching across the console to turn up the music because he knew it would piss off our dad. My mother screaming when the police came to the house.

I shoved the memories back into the locked place where they belonged.

“Nothing I want to talk about tonight.”

Cade studied me long enough that I knew he noticed the evasion, but he let it remain.

“My father knows exactly how to make me feel like everything will disappear if I disappoint him,” I continued. “My tuition, my future, my mother, and their love. He never says all of it at once because he doesn’t have to. I hear it anyway, and tonight he threatened those very things if I chose Ryan.”

Easton rubbed both hands over his face. “Fucking shit.”

“He threatened to cut her off once because she changed her concentration,” Aura told him. “Then he denied threatening her because he never used those exact words.”

“He asked whether I understood how difficult it would be to finish school without their support,” I whispered.

“That’s a threat,” Easton said.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I flinched, and he noticed, but he didn’t take it back.

Cade sat in the armchair Aura had vacated. His posture appeared relaxed, but nothing in his face had softened.

“I believe you were afraid,” he said.

Relief moved through me so quickly that I almost thanked him.

Then he continued.

“I believe your parents trained you to freeze whenever their love feels threatened. I believe your father knew exactly what he was doing in that study, and I believe he intended to make Ryan feel so far beneath you that leaving became the only pride he had left. The fact is, you and your dad underestimated Ryan.”

My breath shuddered.

“I also believe Ryan told you what walking into that house would cost him.”

“He did.”

“He warned you.”

“Yes.”