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His hand curled around the can he clutched, crushing it, and imagining it was Hayley’s neck. Beer sloshed over it, and he sucked it off. Maybe he’d have a little fun with Hayley Hood before he tortured and killed her.
“J-Jay?”
He startled at the sound of the voice, lurching to his feet so quickly his chair toppled over, clattering loudly against the linoleum floor. As he turned around a smile—or more accurately a snarl—curled his lips.
“Hello, Maria,” he said slowly. It looked like his day was going to pick up a little after all.
“I-I came as-as quickly as I could,” his wife stammered, her gaze fixed firmly on the floor. It hadn't taken long to teach her that a woman should never look her husband in the eye unless she was asked to.
His father had taught his mother that same lesson.
Jay was three the first time he remembered hearing the sound of flesh slapping flesh.
That thwack as a hand connected with a cheek or a bare backside.
The way blood bubbled up at the corner of someone’s mouth when knuckles slammed into a delicate face.
The way tears seemed to hover perilously before slowly sliding down a pale cheek stained red with a handprint.
Those things had been his introduction to life.
It wasn't just his mother that his father used to like to beat up on. His older brother used to get the brunt of their dad’s anger before he grew bigger than their dad and the cowardly old man turned his attention on his daughter. His sister had been a pretty girl before their father smashed her face into a mirror when she screamed while he was raping her. After that, her face looked more like a jigsaw puzzle than the face of a thirteen-year-old girl.
With a son he was too scared to lay a hand on, and a daughter he no longer found beautiful enough to head to her room when he was drunk after dinner, his father had no one else to turn his violent temper onto but Jay.
On a good day, he was lucky to just get a belt to the back of the legs.
On a bad day, he might be locked outside in the snow, given nothing to eat, be beaten so badly he couldn’t get out of bed to go to school the following day.
But time was on his side and not on his father’s. He grew bigger, taller, and stronger while his father—crippled by a lifetime of alcohol abuse—grew weaker. The day he turned fifteen he realized that he was now bigger than his father, and when the man attempted to swing a fist into the side of his head, he blocked it and then shoved the man so hard he went right through the kitchen window.
After that, his father kept his temper focused solely on his wife.
Jay felt no pity for the woman. She had done nothing to try to leave the man who beat her senseless, and who abused all three of her children. She deserved everything she got. If she couldn’t keep her house and herself and her children the way her husband wanted then she should have been beaten.
His mother had failed as a wife and mother.
His wife wasn't doing any better.
“Come here,” he ordered.
Maria’s eyes darted up, met his, clearly conveyed her panic, then dropped back to the floor, and she walked the ten feet to the table.
“Where is Kinsley?”
“She-she’s still in-in the foster home,” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
“Why didn't you get her back?”
“Th-they said that-that they couldn’t be sure that-that I wasn't involved in-in what happened to-to Leah,” she stammered. Her eyes grew watery at the mention of their oldest daughter. She was grieving, but Jay didn't care that the teenager was dead, he just wished that he had been able to teach her to mind her mouth when she was in his presence.
“What are you going to do to get her back?”
“I-I-I don’t think I can.”
“That seems to be a habit of yours, doesn’t it? You couldn’t get Leah to shut that sassy mouth. You couldn’t get Kinsley to shut her mouth either. Now you're letting strangers keep our kid. Strip.”
Once again Maria’s blue eyes flew to his, begging him not to do what she already knew he had made up his mind to do.
