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The women were both attractive, one blond and one brown-haired, but neither of them were Riley.
I approached them. “Excuse me.”
“Yeah?” one of the men said. He had piercing green eyes.
“I’m looking for Riley Wolfe.”
“You a friend of hers?”
“Yeah, I am. I want to offer my condolences.” I held out my hand. “Matteo Rossi.”
“Rock Wolfe.” He took my hand. “Riley never mentioned you to me.”
“We just met…recently.”
“I see. This is my wife, Lacey, and my brothers, Reid and Roy. That’s Roy’s girlfriend, Charlie.”
Riley’s three brothers, as Fox had said. I shook hands all around. “Nice to meet all of you. But…where’s Riley?”
“She couldn’t handle the receiving line thing,” Rock said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand. I’m sure you’re all very upset by the loss of your father. I’m very sorry.”
“Right.” Rock nodded, but his lips twitched slightly.
“You coming to the wake?” Roy, the long-haired one, asked.
“Will Riley be there?”
“She should be.”
“Then yeah, I’m coming.”
“Come on, then,” Rock said. “You can ride with us in the limo.”33RileyI wiped my mouth with a handkerchief that once belonged to my grandmother. My mother had pressed it into my hand before the service, mumbling something about looking my part.
I didn’t shed one tear or sniffle once during the service. I just sat, numb, feeling nothing as I listened to my brother spew lies about our father.
He’d been good at it too.
But the worst was Father Jim’s homily.
It was more about Derek Wolfe being a paragon of society than about any lessons learned from scripture.
It was a farce. A complete farce.
Especially since we all knew who Father Jim really was. He was as sick as my father had been, and he had to be stopped.
Perhaps all the horror had ceased when my father died, but Father Jim still had to go down.
I didn’t have the strength to do it, but my brothers did.
And my brothers would.
They’d been wonderful when I told them I absolutely couldn’t stand in the receiving line and hear virtual strangers talk about how great the man who terrorized me my entire life was. They let me off the hook, and I ended up here, behind the church, puking into a rose bush.
The dry heaves had finally stopped, and I got ready to shove the soiled hanky into my purse, but then I regarded it.
The initials CW were embroidered on one corner along with an ornate pattern.
CW. Constance Wolfe. This handkerchief hadn’t belonged to my grandmother. It was my mother’s.
Connie Wolfe had always been able to spin a tall tale.
My head began to swim, and in an effort not to fall down, I grabbed the closest thing—a large branch of the rose bush.
“Ouch!” A thorn pricked my finger.
A bead of blood oozed onto my flesh. It grew larger, larger, until it dripped down the length of my finger in a tiny red river.
Blood.
How well I remembered blood. My virgin’s blood staining the white sheets on my bed. My father whisking them off and then ordering me to cover the bed with clean linens.
I was eight.
Fucking eight years old.
Eight years old and in searing pain. My face stained from tears as I walked outside my bedroom to the closet near the end of the hallway. I grabbed what looked like a new set of sheets and brought them back to my room. I did my best to re-make the bed, but within a few minutes I realized the sheets were too big and my arms were too short.
I fell asleep on top of the mass of linens and woke the next morning, still throbbing in pain.
No one came to help me. Not my mother, for certain, and when I got home from school the next afternoon, my bed had been made and was stretched taut with clean linens.
The new sheets were brown.
Brown sheets for a little girl.
I hated them, but it wasn’t until I was a few years older that I hated them even more. The brown would hide any blood. Once dried, it was the same color as the sheets.
The stream of blood continued onto the palm of my hand.
Finally, I blotted it away with the fake handkerchief from my grandmother.
Nice move, Mom. Did you even look at the design on this thing?
Next was the wake at the Waldorf.
I wouldn’t be able to avoid people there. I’d have to speak to them, and I’d have to listen to them tell me how much they admired my abusive father, how much they’d miss him, how much he’d done for them and for humanity at large.
He built a lot of luxury hotels, casinos, resorts. So yeah, he created a lot of jobs. He also gave huge amounts to charity, including his own foundation. So yeah, he helped others.
Just not his own.
Everything and everyone was more important to Derek Wolfe than his children.
Especially his daughter.
I shook my head. Guilt swam through me. My brothers had also suffered at his hands. All three of them. But by their own admission, they’d never been sexually abused by the man. Beaten to a pulp, sure. But never raped.
