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Rage fuelled me to the point of insanity. How dare he say that shit to me. After everything he’d taken from me…. I wanted to rip those fucking words from the air and shove them down his throat, and then I wanted to slit that fucking throat so he could never spew lies like that again.
My chest pumped furiously while I tried to suck air in. Everything he said only made this harder while my anger ratcheted up. “Why the fuck did you threaten to kill me, then?” I roared. “Fathers don’t fucking kill their children.”
“I had to make you leave, so I could keep you safe from the shit going on with the cops. You would have gone to prison, Aiden.”
I jabbed my finger at him. “No! You would have gone to prison!”
He nodded. “Yes, but you would have too. I didn’t want that for you. I knew you wouldn’t leave unless I gave you good reason to, so I threatened your girls. It was all I had.”
“Fuck that,” I spat. “I don’t fucking believe you!” The fury rolled through me, building in my shoulders and demanding an escape through my fists. I inhaled sharply and tried to keep every emotion I felt trapped inside. No fucking way could I allow it to escape while Charlie stood behind me.
“Why do you think you’re still breathing? Why do you think our girls are—”
I took a step toward him, unable to hold myself back. The air stilled, and a violent calm came over me. The kind of calm that descended whenever I was about to kill. It was the side of me that craved brutality—the side he’d instilled in me when I was a teenager. Back when he taught me how to hunt and kill. “What did you just call them?” I asked, my voice deathly demanding.
Before he could answer, Tee jumped in, fear splashed all over her. “Stop it! You need to leave, Shane!”
My attention was completely on Gibson, but there was an urgency to Tenille’s voice that fractured my focus. She sounded off. Glancing her way, I found her eyes wide and pleading silently with him.
“Tenille, you can’t control this,” he warned, confusing the hell out of me.
“Control what?” I barked. “What’s going on, Tee?”
Everything about her screamed panic as her gaze shifted swiftly between Gibson and me. Ignoring me, she begged him, “Please!”
I finally lost my shit then. I couldn’t control it any longer. Picking up the first thing I found on the kitchen counter—a glass—I threw it at the wall. “Somebody better start fucking talking, or else that glass is gonna be a head against the fucking wall!”
I barely heard the gasps that came from Tenille and Charlie. My target was Gibson. All I saw and heard was him.
“Bradley would have loved our girls,” Gibson said.
Bradley was his son who had died just before Charlie was born. I had no fucking idea what he had to do with any of this.
My fists clenched repeatedly. “Stop fucking calling them that. They aren’t yours.”
Tenille sniffed, and I realised she had tears falling down her cheeks. What the fuck was going on?
An evil smile lit his face. “That’s where you’d be wrong, son. They are mine.”
Tenille gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. Her eyes met mine, and what I saw there punched me in the gut.
She took a step away from me, but I snapped my fingers around her wrist, preventing her from going any further. “What did you do, Tee?”
Tears still streaming, she looked at Charlie before looking back at me. “It was a mistake. It meant nothing t—”
“What the fuck did you do?” I roared. The room closed in on me, and I struggled for breath again. I knew that when she uttered her next words, my life would never be the same, but I fucking needed to know.
“Charlie is yours,” she managed to get out in between sobs. “Not Brad’s.”
Everything spun out of control as those words fell from her lips. I’d thought my life had been ripped apart fourteen years ago. That had nothing on this. I existed for my child. She’d kept me going all these years. If I didn’t have her, I fucking had nothing.
“Bradley is her father,” Gibson said, continuing to tilt my world on its axis.
Charlie gasped again. I turned to her, but it was like time slowed, preventing me from catching her before she ran from the room. If my world hadn’t been crumbling around me, and if I was thinking straight, I would have gone after her, but I wasn’t. My thoughts weren’t even thoughts. The only thing filling my head was a fucking train wreck of memories and questions. And after years of locking it up tight, my heart trampled my mind, taking over with too many fucking emotions.
Gibson’s declaration that his son was my daughter’s real father sliced right through me, taking all the air from my lungs. I was disoriented as fuck as disbelief and confusion replaced my rage. I stared at Tenille. “You slept with Brad?”
She nodded through her tears. “Yes, but it was over before Charlie was born. I promise.”
