AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Start with your mother.” He guides me like he knows it’s questionable territory.
I sigh, still studying that one single drop that landed and is now fading away into nothing as it’s absorbed into the chair beneath me. Like all things, eventually they must come to an end.
“She was…” I look up at him. “Beautiful, really. Although, I don’t think that’s a fitting way to describe her.” I bite at my lip and trail my gaze downward, recalling a memory. Countless come rushing in all at once, and without focusing on any specific vision, tears well in my eyes. “She had this radiance to her. She could captivate any audience.”
When I don’t continue, he speaks, “You talk about her in the past tense.”
I nod, wiping at my cheek and reaching for my rye. “Yeah, she’s dead.” I continue before he can say the two words everyone else always says. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry. It was a long time ago.”
“What happened?” His jaw tenses.
Maybe it's the fact that I plan on killing him. Or the numerous ounces of strong rye I've already drank, but my mouth opens, the truth spilling out. "My dad—or well—my stepdad, adoptive dad, whatever you want to call the piece of shit. He killed her."
I’ve only ever told Violet the real story of what happened to my mom. And only the bits and pieces I’ve been capable of sharing. Not the fact that the man who raised me took out his anger on not just my mom, but me and my half-brother Jared, too. He beat my mom to death one drunken night and threatened to kill Jared and me if we told the police the truth. He fed them a bullshit lie that she fell down the stairs, hit her head too hard, and bled out before help arrived. But Jared and I saw what he had done. I tried to pull him off of her, but he shoved me in a closet, locking me in there, only letting me out long enough to scare me into the story he wanted me to tell the cops. I didn’t say a word. Not when the ambulance came. Not when the social workers showed up. Not when the few friends I had at school asked me where the bruises on my arms came from.
He stopped hitting me in places that would leave a visible mark. Only punching me in the ribs, anywhere on my torso, the back of my head. There was one day that Jared woke me up, shaking me profusely, his own eyes filled with tears. Blood was caked on my face; my nose was broken. Jared had thought I was dead and that he had been left alone with that vicious man.
No one ever questioned more than surface level what went on behind closed doors. No one investigated the death of my mother. No one came to save us from that monster.
Savini’s gruff voice pulls me out of my tormented memories. “Was he ever brought to justice?”
“No.”
“That’s the thing about me and you, fawn. You went to school to do things your way, and I take things into my own hands.”
I narrow my gaze at him. “What do you mean?”
“I bring justice to those like your supposed father.”
“You kill bad guys?”
His stare bores into mine. “Yes.”
But if that’s the case, how does that explain Jared? He was a nobody college kid. I understand he worked for a criminal, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die. A slap on the wrist, maybe, but not death in an alley.
His death was a coverup, just like my mother's.
“I don’t believe you,” I tell him.
“Just last week, a man shoved his pregnant wife down the stairs when she accused him of cheating. She lived; the baby died.”
“And him?”
“Fish food.”
“You’re not serious.”
"There's this little strip club on the west side. Caters to working college girls. The owner has a recruiter he sends over to Marshall University on the regular." Savini shrugs. "None of that is a big deal. Those women make the decision to do that line of work, that's on them. But when the silent partner starts to get rough with the girls, threatening them out of nearly eighty percent of their earnings…" He looks at me. "I'm not going to tell you the rest of what he's done, but I can tell you, it will never happen ever again."
Is what he’s saying really true?
"There were these two guys who worked for my main employer. Punk-ass little kids. Nearly a dozen assault charges against them they paid to have go away. Countless girls they attacked without an ounce of remorse. Entitled brats. I left them to bleed out and rot in an alley."
My heart skips a beat. Did he…no…that can’t possibly be…Jared would never, not after what his father did to us—to our mother?
Tears roll down my cheeks without a care in the world that I don’t want them to be there.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Savini reaches across the table and latches onto my hand.
