Page 55 of Yours on the Canvas

“Come home, Jack,” Ray says, softening his tone into something sickeningly paternal. “You don’t belong in a cage playing house with strangers.”

He gestures around Silas’s kitchen like it’s a toy he’s already decided to break.

“We’ve got properties, accounts, a future waiting for you. All that family money your grandfather left?” His smile curves, slow and poisonous. “It’s yours, son. Clean and waiting.”

He steps closer, voice dropping into that practiced, coaxing warmth he uses when he wants obedience.

“You walk away from this techno-geek, you walk back into your birthright. No more hiding. No more running. You’ll be taken care of.”

The words hit me like a trap snapping shut; familiar, rehearsed, designed to sound like safety while meaning the exact opposite.

He’s dangling the carrot just like he used to when I was a kid; offering safety with one hand while holding a belt behind his back with the other. He wants me back under his thumb. He wants control over my money, control over me, because breaking me was his favorite pastime.

My mother’s father had been wealthy. Stupidly so. My mother married Dad for what she thought was love. It wasn’t. Ray had been after her money, and he got some of it when he forced my dad to marry her.

She knew it. She wasn’t blind. But she told me once that Dad was different when Ray wasn’t around. He was softer, quieter, someone she thought she could build a life with. That was the man she fell in love with.

My grandfather put my inheritance into a trust fund for me, and it’s locked away until I turned twenty-five. Four months from now.

That trust fund is worth millions.

And that, I would guess, is why Ray and Dad have turned up now.

Not for me. Not for family. Not for anything they pretend to care about.

They came for the money. They came for control, and they came because they think I’m still theirs to break.

“I’d rather die than come back with you,” I spit out, my chest heaving, the pain in my ribs flaring with every heavy breath.

Ray’s mask slips for a fraction of a second, just long enough for the venom to bleed through his eyes. The warm facade drops away, revealing the monster underneath.

“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Ray steps in closer, invasive and suffocating. “You think because you found some tech-obsessed soldier to lick your wounds that you’re untouchable.”

His voice lowers, sharpening. “But you’re fragile, Jack. You’ve always been broken. You break under pressure.”

He leans in, close enough that I can feel the weight of his presence pressing down on my lungs.

“And people like us?” His smile twists. “We always find our way back to what belongs to us.”

Dad doesn’t say a word, but he steps up beside Ray, his hulking frame blotting out the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The implicit threat hangs heavy in the air; Dad doesn’t need to negotiate. He just needs the word, and he’ll tear this place apart and carry me out like cargo.

“Get out,” I say again, my voice rising, desperate and furious. “Get out before I make you.”

Ray laughs. It’s low and lazy, almost amused, and he turns slowly toward the door with a swagger that makes my skin crawl. He pauses at the threshold, casting one last sideways glance over his shoulder, his lips curling into a sick, parting smile.

“You’ll come home, Jackie,” he murmurs, voice soft enough to feel like a hand around my throat. “One way or another.”

Dad follows him, but Ray lingers, his face contorting into something close to pure hatred—as if he’s right on the edge of losing control. He yanks it back in a nanosecond, turning fully to face me one last time.

“Think about it, boy. The money, the safety, the bloodline,” Ray says, his voice dropping to a low, venomous hiss. “Or maybe think about your little friend. What was his name? Hale? Cute kid.”

My stomach drops.

“But then your friend, Finn… Runs a gym downtown, doesn’t he?” Ray’s smile twists. “Be a real shame if he took a bad fall down a flight of stairs, too. Accidents happen all the time, don’t they, Jack.”

My blood runs instantly ice-cold.

Hale. Finn.