I had made the mistake of picking up.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”Noah’s voice was a low, controlled roar, vibrating with the kind of cold fury that only a man of his stature could manage.“A back-alley tournament, Tristian? Fighting again? And with that low-life Darragh?”
I stopped in front of the window, staring at the city lights but seeing only my father’s judgmental face in the reflection. “Darragh wasn’t involved this time.”
“Oh, so you’ve made one positive change at least.”He huffed.“When are you going to get your act together and join the family business?”
I set my jaw. “I’m not.”
“Fantastic. So I’m just going to have to spend the rest of my life cleaning after my grown man-child son.”
My knuckles tightened, white. “I didn’t ask you to do that. That’s on you.”
“You think I want to do this shit?”he snapped.“You’re a Locke. You belong in a suit, in this office—not bleeding for pennies in basements like some goddamn degenerate.”
My grip tightened on the phone. “Let me rot if it bothers you so damn much.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t care at all?”His voice dropped an octave, turning deadly quiet.
“Nope,” I shot back, ready to end the call.
There was a calculated pause on the other end.
Then he said it.
The one chain he knew I couldn’t break.
“If you go to jail... or if I stop making things go away... how will you be able to keep track of how your mother is doing? How will you pay for the care she needs?”
My blood turned cold.
Noah always knew how to get under my skin, how to make me feel inferior by using the one person I loved the most.
“Why do you always bring her into everything?”
“Because the only reason you’re such a pathetic excuse for a man is that you refuse to listen to me and still cling to your mother.”
I kicked a chair in the corner, sending it skidding across the floor. “Fuck off. All you do is leverage everything I love to get what you want.”
“And yet here we are,”Noah said, unmoved. “If you’d actually take care of yourself, I wouldn’t need to control you. Join the firm. Drop the underground bullshit with Darragh before someone puts you in a grave.”
“I have a damn job,” I growled. “It may not be as corrupted as yours, but at least it’s something.” Fighting back the urge to punch the damned wall, I spat, “And for the last fucking time, I amnotworking for Darragh.”
Noah took a deep, rattling breath.“Tristian... you need to stop getting into trouble and try to learn from your mistakes—”
“Fuck you,” I grunted, cutting him off.
He sighed.“You know what you need to do if you want your mother to continue living the way she is. Think about the partnership I’m forming. Think about your future—”
I ended the call and hurled the phone onto the sofa. The silence that followed was worse than the shouting. With a roar of frustration, I lunged forward and buried my fist into the drywall. The plaster crumbled around my knuckles, the intense pain a welcome distraction from the suffocating pressure weighing me down.
I leaned my forehead against the wall, breathing hard.Pathetic excuse of a man…I felt like exactly what he’d called me. And I hated him for being right.
Slowly, I pulled my hand back, white dust coating my bruised skin. I looked toward the sofa where my phone lay.
Ingrid.
The thought of her cut through my rage. I remembered her face at the tattoo parlor when she pored over my sketches, the way she looked at me—like she saw something in me that wasn’t broken.
