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“Where did he go?”
“Fuck if I know. He was gone for a while, off building his empire. Trying to make it big in the underworld. He had all these shitty friends who hyped him up and worked with him, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t good enough to make it. He was a fucking failure of a human being, so he failed at that the same way he failed at being a decent father and husband. And he came crawling back with his tail between his legs when Vic and I were fifteen. Everything was worse after that.”
It was a long time ago now, but I can still remember the day he came back. I remember that look on his face. He seemed older than he had when he’d left, like failure had added years to him. He had scars in new places, and a haunted look in his eyes. Everything fucking pissed him off.
We walked too loud. We breathed too loud. We weren’t good enough.
Not that we ever had been.
“He blamed us for all of it,” I bite out. “If we’d supported him more, if we’d been better, if we weren’t so fucking useless, then he would’ve made it. He blamed Mom the most for ‘coddling us.’ For keeping him from shaping us the way he wanted to. So she got the worst of it. And she kept trying to put herself between him and us, which just made it even worse on top of what she was already getting from him.”
I swallow, my jaw working. None of these memories have faded with time. Every one of them is bright and vivid, so viscerally clear in my mind that they might’ve only happened yesterday.
“But even with all that, even with all the bullshit she was getting from someone who was supposed to love her, she still went and did her job at the hospital. She still had it in her to care about people. She didn’t turn her back on anyone. And then one day, we couldn’t watch her suffer anymore.”
“So you…”
Willow looks like she can’t bring herself to say the words, and I look up at her, my chest aching with anger and half buried grief.
“We fucking killed him,” I say bluntly. “He deserved it. The only thing I regret about it is not doing it sooner. We made sure he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Not that it undid any of the damage he’d already done. Vic’s still fucked up from all of it, and our mom…
I blow out a breath through my nose, tearing my gaze away from the look of sadness on Willow’s face. “And then, after all that, after she survived our dad and all his shit… Nikolai killed her. And there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do to protect her, because I was locked up for murdering our father. All her sweetness didn’t fucking protect her when it mattered. When it came down to it, it was just a weakness that left her vulnerable to the harshness of the world.”
My voice is hoarse when I finally stop speaking, rough and wrecked from the emotions inside me. Thinking about what happened to Mom always sets me off, and I slam my fist into the bench beneath me, feeling the jolt of the impact all the way up through my arm.
The new additions to my tattoo throb with fresh pain, and I grit my teeth, waiting for Willow to shrink away from the sight of my raw anger. It’s a lot of heavy shit, and women—hell, people in general—would usually rather turn away from it than face it.
Anger, bitterness, loss, grief… they’re all ugly emotions. They twist a person into something different, and most people don’t want to deal with that. So I wait for Willow to give some trite condolence and then make herself scarce.
But instead, she steps closer, coming fully into the room. I watch her as she approaches, and when she stops in front of me, she reaches out and traces the tattoo on my arm, her fingers following the lines of the letters.
D-I-A-N-A.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers as her fingertip trails down the line of the A, and there’s nothing trite about it. Her voice is full of emotion, like she not only understands the pain of what I just told her, but wishes she could take it away. “Your mom didn’t deserve that. She sounds like she was so good to you. To everyone. And she deserved someone to be as good to her. But at least she had you three. She had people who loved her.”
I open my mouth to tell her that wasn’t good enough in the end. Wedidlove her, we loved her so fucking much—but even that wasn’t enough to save her.
Willow isn’t done yet, though. With the soft pads of her fingers still resting on my taut bicep, she looks up to meet my gaze.
“You didn’t deserve any of that either,” she says. “You deserved a dad who loved you and wanted you to be happy.”
A shudder moves through me as her quiet words slam right into my chest. I feel like a wild animal barely restraining itself. Half of me wants to shove her away, to tell her I don’t need her fucking sympathy and she should save it for herself. I’ve made it this far without it. But the other half of me craves something, and I realize as I lean into her touch that it’s… her.
Everything she’s offering. The sympathy, the kindness, the sweet softness. I need it more than I need air right now, and I give in to that part of myself, grabbing her and pulling her roughly into my arms.
I drag her down so she’s perched in my lap, her legs straddling mine and her knees resting on the bench. She lets out a soft yelp of surprise but doesn’t resist as I wrap my arms around her, burying my face in her hair. She smells light and floral, the way she always does, and the scent soothes something in me, even as it makes other parts of me feel even more ragged and raw.
I mutter under my breath in Russian, the words muffled by her blonde hair as I tell her that she’s too good for this. Too sweet to be trapped here with monsters. That she should never have fallen into our lives, but that it doesn’t matter now. It’s too late.
“Yesli ty uydesh', ya naydu tebya,” I breathe. “Ya vyslezhu tebya i vernu tuda, gde ty dolzhna byt’.”
What I said to the Donovan gang that night rings even more true right now. Everything under our roof is ours.
And that includes Willow.
36
