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“You watch that mouth, young lady. Or you won’t see the sun for a month!”
“You don’t have control anymore over this situation,” I said. “Stop it, Daddy.”
I watched him falter for just a moment before his hand came down at his side. He looked weary. War torn. Very unlike the strong man I grew up with. Now, he seemed weak. Vulnerable. All of those things he tried to teach us not to be. All of those times I heard him beat my brothers’ asses for pulling stupid shit and all those times my mother shielded me from his anger.
It brought us all to this point. Where the four of us stood against our parents.
“I will not tolerate this. I still have control of your trust funds, boys,” my father said.
“I don’t have one so, you guys have a rebuttal for that?” I asked.
“One, we think you should have a trust fund. That’s a load of shit,” Hunter said.
“Two, we’re hoping if you stand your ground on this marriage thing, then maybe we can marry people we love as well,” Lorenzo said.
“What?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s different for women, obviously. But men get married off, too,” Finn said. “Dad tried to do it to me a couple of years ago, but things fell through. Mostly because Lorenzo sabotaged the efforts.”
“You what?” my father asked.
“I did. Trickled some lies through our group that got back to Dad. Had to do some serious damage control, though. It almost ruined that young woman’s reputation,” Lorenzo said. “She was a great lay after, though.”
“You slept with her? Nice,” Hunter said.
The two of them clapped hands above my head as I stood there, rooted in shock. This was why my brothers were always so encouraging of my insane ideas. This was why they always helped me out whenever I needed to get away and breathe. Our father tried to control them as much as he tried to control me.
I had no idea he did that to them.
“This is absurd!” my father said with a roar. “I will not have my children wandering about like a lost herd of buffalo! You ungrateful, small-minded toddlers. Everything I built was to hand down to you guys. All of this wealth. This house and your educations—”
“Well, their educations,” I said. “I didn’t get one.”
“You will listen to me!” my father roared.
“I will not!” I said. “I will not stand here and continue to be berated. And now that I understand that my brothers are just as unhappy, I will not stand here and allow you to wreak havoc on their lives either. You have a choice, Dad. You can give us the freedom to discover our own lives and have us around, or you can cast us out and be done with it. But I can promise you this. I’m sure the media would love to know exactly how you treat your family on a regular basis. I bet that wouldn’t bode too well for what you built to pass down to us, would it?”
My fists were clenched at my side as my brothers stood around me. Our eyes were trained on our father as he loomed over us. He seemed taller than normal. Darker and angrier than I had ever seen him. My knees shook, but I couldn’t show him weakness. Businessmen like my father thrived on weakness. The moment I showed it, he had the upper hand and there was no getting it back.
I looked into his eyes as my mother shed tears behind him. My heart leapt out for her. I loved my mother, I really did. But the life she had chosen for herself was one that had been imposed on her. She was as happy as she portrayed herself to be, but that was it. No one could ever be able to convince me that this was the life she would’ve chosen had someone stood up for her. Stood beside her, like my brothers did for me.
“Get out of my sight,” my father said. “We’ll discuss this later. Like civil adults.”
I sighed as a smile crossed my face.
“But if you think the three of you are getting any slice of anything I’ve left for you after this blatant portrayal of disrespect, then you are sorely mistaken,” my father said.
“We can discuss it later,” I said. “Like civil adults.”
Fourteen
Travis
Every day that crept by had me more and more worried for Ava. I figured she would’ve already come back to the cabin by now. At least to update me on how things with her father went. Each day that passed by without her presence on my doorstep made me wonder what he had done to her. What type of punishment he had imposed in order to get her to fall back in line. No one could blame her if she had. Not even myself. She was a scared, uneducated twenty two year old girl whose knowledge of life came from nothing but the books she could sneak into her own home. She wanted a life for herself. She craved the ability to make her own decisions.
But it was hard to fight a burning passion with years of habits and tradition.
I went out to get the mail and scanned the horizon. I listened out for any sounds of a car coming up the driveway. I pulled the scant mail from the mailbox and sighed, resolving myself to the fact that Ava wasn’t coming around today either.
