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“Gunner said you’re looking for Falcon and Soleil and that something is wrong. What’s up?”
She shrugged and looked down at the table. Deciding I’d had enough, I reached over before she knew what I was doing and I pushed up her sleeve on the arm I’d touched. A growl of displeasure was torn from me when I saw the bruising around her wrist and below her elbow. Dark smudges that I recognized as being fingerprints. Someone had grabbed her hard to create those. I heard the others all swear softly under their breaths. Holding gently onto her arm to prevent her from pulling away, I eased up the sleeve more. I revealed more bruises.
“Who the fuck did this to you?” I snapped.
She gave me a scared look, then a pleading one. “Please, don’t ask. I don’t want to cause any drama. All I wanted to know is if the kids and I could stay with Soleil and Falcon for a couple of days. I need to go apartment hunting.”
“Why do you need an apartment? You have one. Soleil mentioned where you moved to when you came back a couple of months ago,” Terror stated. I wondered how he knew that. I knew she’d moved back, but I hadn’t heard where she was living. Tonya stayed quiet for several heartbeats before she finally broke. Those tears I’d seen earlier came back and ran down her cheeks.
“It’s not safe anymore. He can get to the apartment too easily and I’m scared of what he’ll do if he catches me or the kids outside. I was hoping to find someplace that had a fence or something. I know gated communities aren’t cheap, but if it keeps us safe, then I’ll find a way to pay for it.”
“Who can get to you too easily?” I asked her impatiently.
“Dan,” she whispered.
I was hoping she wouldn’t say his name, but I wasn’t surprised. What the fuck was wrong with her ex? I hadn’t heard a peep out of Soleil about him causing trouble for Tonya, let alone her being afraid of him.
“Is he why you moved back to Dublin Falls?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What’s going on? The last I heard, you guys got a divorce. He was seeing some other woman, and you and the kids had moved away. Then you came back a few months ago. What happened while you were gone, Tonya?” Terror asked her gently.
“You’re right. When I filed for divorce, Dan wasn’t happy, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was being unfaithful, and that was grounds for the divorce to be granted. He moved out and in with the woman he was cheating on me with. Once the divorce was final, I thought it might be better to move away. He was staying in Knoxville so he could race. I took the kids and moved over to Jackson, Tennessee. It’s about halfway between Memphis and Nashville. I didn’t want to leave Tennessee, and Memphis wasn’t the place I wanted to be, so I picked there.”
“Did you know someone there?” Gunner asked her.
“No, just picked it on the map.”
“Okay, so you moved and he stayed here. What changed? Why come back?” I asked.
“At first, nothing changed. He kept calling me, trying to get me to take him back. He said he made a mistake and he loved me. That he wanted his family back. I told him he should’ve thought of that before sticking his “you know what” into someone else.” She blushed as she said it. I thought it was cute that she couldn’t say cock or dick. She continued, “He blamed it on me. Said I wasn’t giving him enough attention. Anyway, it was just calls and arguments for months.”
“But that stopped and it became more,” I guessed. It was nothing I hadn’t heard a thousand times, it seemed, on the job.
“Yeah, it did. Once I had Dylan and he was about three months old, Dan started to come to Jackson occasionally, demanding to see the kids. The court gave him visitation rights, so I couldn’t tell him no. He’d spend a couple of hours at the house with them, then leave. I wouldn’t let him take them anywhere.”
“Was he still with that woman?” Sniper asked.
“He denied it, but I saw a text by accident on his phone one time. He was still with her and she wasn’t the only one, I bet. During those visits, he kept telling me that I had no right to keep him from his family. That I’d divorced him to punish him and suck more money out of him. He accused me of wasting his money. In the last year of our marriage, he had been obsessed with making more of it. He didn’t think we had enough. He wanted more—a bigger house, a better car, fancy furniture, expensive vacations. He liked to say it was me, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t care less as long as we had a roof over our heads and enough to eat, which we did.”
She paused to take a drink of water. I could see how difficult this was for her, but we needed to know what we were up against. There was no way any of us would leave her to fend for herself and her kids.
“He wanted me to work more, so we’d have more money. I did work. I did accounting as well as raising the kids and doing everything in the house. If I tried to get a better paying job, it would require me to work outside the home, which meant we’d have to pay for daycare. He didn’t want to hear it. He started to belittle me and get angry.”
“That’s when he cheated?” I asked.
“Yeah. He was furious before I found out about that, when I told him I was pregnant again. He blamed it all on me, even though I’d warned him to use condoms. I couldn’t tolerate birth control shots or pills anymore. Something about having the twins had messed me up. They made me deathly sick.”
“He refused to take precautions, then blamed you when you got pregnant?” I asked incredulously.
She nodded. “Yes. I knew having a baby was the last thing we needed, but there was no way I’d have an abortion. That’s what he suggested I do as soon as he found out. I point blank told him that would never happen. It wasn’t long after that I found out about his affair. I knew being a single mom would be tough, but I wasn’t going to stay with a man who would cheat on me. I have more worth than that.”
“Yes, you do, darlin’,” Bandit said.
“Tell us what he did to make you leave Jackson and come back here,” I prodded her.
“Sorry. So he kept that up for a while, then he began to show up at the house late at night, drunk and pounding on the door, demanding to be let in. My neighbors called the cops. After the third time, I knew I couldn’t stay there. He scared me and I didn’t know what he might do next. Soleil and I had stayed in touch and she’d been begging me to move back here, so I thought what the hell. I didn’t own the place we were in, so I broke the lease and we moved back. I thought being closer to her would make him think twice about keeping up his strange behavior. I was wrong.
