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DarthVanKoch: If you will not return phone calls, then why am I paying for the line?
DarthVanKoch: CALL ME NOW!!!
Rolling over on the bed with a groan, I strongly consider heaving the phone across the room. Most of the night had been spent tossing and turning, so I hadn’t gotten more than a few hours of sleep. I’m exhausted with pretty much everything right now.
Whenever I did manage to fall sleep, all of my dreams centered on a sexy body pressed against me in the dark. Her breath coming in sharp gasps of desire and fear, the sound more intoxicating than any drug.
It makes me hard as a rock all over again just thinking about it.
Fuck, I’m losing my mind.
I would have screwed Evangeline in the pitch black of a storm drain if she hadn’t stopped me. She’d been right to hesitate, giving into our physical urges will just distract us. I don’t regret anything I said or did with her, but that doesn’t mean I feel good about it.
Because I will hurt her, and not because it’s what I want.
All of this can only end in fire.
My phone vibrates again with another message. My father must have figured out that I’d turned off the location feature.
DarthVanKoch: THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.
I’d spent the past week avoiding my father’s calls. It’s impossible for me to pretend that he knew someone was coming for Evangeline and didn’t warn me beforehand. My father has his identity entirely centered around Havoc House, I know he’s involved in covering up whatever happened last year.
It’s impossible to act like I’m okay with that, so I’ve been avoiding him.
But he also might have the answers that I need.
My father picks up on the first ring when I call him back. It only takes about a second for him to make clear exactly why he wanted to speak to me. Fatherly concern has nothing to do with it.
“What the hell are you boys doing out there?”
I hold the phone away from my ear, if just to keep my eardrum from popping. “Good morning to you, too.”
“I hope I’m not hearing what I think I am. Please tell me that Olivia Pratt is not pledging Havoc House.”
“Maybe you should talk to Brady about that. He’s the one in charge, apparently,” I say tightly. “You didn’t exactly give me a fair warning that he was the one coming, by the way.”
“The alumni board assumed that you all would appreciate a representative that was familiar to you. I probably should have warned them that your generation doesn’t appreciate anything.”
“Says the man who spoiled me in the first place,” I respond blandly.
“Only for you to act like an ungrateful little swine that I never should have dragged out of the mud you were born in.”
Heels click loudly on a wooden floor, so I can only assume my father is pacing around his office as he berates me.
I have too many memories of standing in front of his imposing desk while he listed off all the ways in which I’d disappointed him. According to my father, even the most minor offense deserved of punishment and he would make sure I received it.
The more worked up he gets, the happier it makes me.
It’s hard for me to believe that someone as strong as my mother would have stayed with him long enough to have a child. Their marriage lasted less time than her pregnancy with me, but I’ve never got up the nerve to ask what she saw in him.
I’m not sure that I actually want to know.
“Should I thank you for acknowledging me? It really seems like you did it for altruistic reasons.” I stare up at the water-stained ceiling. From this vantage point, it isn’t that dissimilar from the one hanging over the one-room cabin that I grew up in. “Or is it that I never would have even known your name if you’d knocked up someone else?”
My father makes an annoyed sound. I can almost see his fist wrapped around the phone like it’s a weapon.
But there isn’t anything he can do to me from a hundred miles away.
