AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jane and Eve continued thinking he was the perfect man and father. That he was a good, God-fearing Christian. But I knew the truth. I knew what lurked in his soul, what demons he fought.
The same ones that exist in me now, crawling over my too-tight, scarred skin, begging to be set free.
A bright, tinkling laugh pulls me from my spiral and I blink a few times, the bright sun blinding me once more. My cigarette is almost gone, but as I hear the laugh again, it falls from my fingers to the ground.
My mouth parts and smoke billows out as shock fills me.
Eve.
My Eve is right there. So close I swear I can smell her sweet peach scent.
She’s taller than she was the last time I saw her, and her body is more filled out. Her hair is still as wild as it’s ever been, but there’s something on her face—a genuine happiness I haven’t seen in a long fucking time that guts me.
Despite myself, I look above her head and meet my father’s gaze head on. He stares directly at me, his dark eyes scorching what’s left of my black soul.
Then he looks away.
He looks away as if he hadn’t just seen me, his only son, for the first time in four years. He looks away as if I’m nothing more than trash—and to him, I probably am.
To him, I’m just some tattooed fuck puffing away on a smoke, nothing more than a dreg of society. A memory of his not-so-pristine past.
And he looked away.
He just…looked away.
A weird mixture of relief at the fact that I won’t have to speak to him and disappointment that he didn’t recognize his last remaining family member, fills me with a force that has me doubling over. My skin itches again, the desire to scream, to cry, to bleed out here on the hot cement, bubbles up inside me.
But then the adrenaline hits. The anger. The rage. It takes everything left inside my broken soul not to chase after them. Not to demand to know what the fuck they’re doing here.
Then, as if answering my silent question, Eve pushes onto her tiptoes and presses a kiss to Isaac’s cheek. He smiles down at her, and even if his face is warm and inviting, his eyes aren’t.
I’ve seen those eyes—I’ve been haunted by those eyes my entire life, and they’re anything but warm.
With another bright laugh, she tugs on his arm and drags him to a booth a few down from Deliverance’s tent.
And, just like that, they’re gone.
They’re out of my sight like they were nothing more than the smoke I just exhaled.
A sinking feeling hits my gut, and I know not even another cigarette will squash what I feel, what I hope to not be true.
Is she fucking him?
The question is like a bomb in my head, and once it goes off, I can’t ignore it.
She’s here with him. Kissing him, holding his hand, hanging onto him as though she’s utterly familiar with his body—his touch. They look far too comfortable with each other for just a stepfather and stepdaughter.
They look like a couple.
All the rage from the last few weeks finally boils to the surface, and I stomp my way back into the tent, barely resisting the urge to rip the entire thing down and burn it to a pile of ash. At least then I’d have a visual representation of the war happening inside of me.
The destruction.
I grab my keys from the back table, my hands shaking as every emotion imaginable rolls through me.
“Where are you going?” Kon barks, his Russian accent thick with anger. Too fucking bad. “We have customers. They came all this way to see you.”
“I can’t be here,” I say, my voice too raw, too exposed, like a live wire waiting to ignite. I don’t sound like myself. I sound like the shell of a man I once was. Alone and broken. Homeless.
