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“You think that I suffered there?” I asked, shaking my head.
I wanted to scream at him that I had never suffered more than being in this house with him and his son. These past two years had been hell for me, not only because Jace had hurt me, but also because Harlan had taken Mom away from me. As soon as we had moved in, everything had turned sour between me and her. She didn’t care like she used to, not about me and especially not about Dad.
Instead of blowing up at him—because I could see it in his eyes that he was seconds away from breaking again—I turned away and looked toward the closet. “Where is my dad’s stuff?”
“At the dump. Shredded. Covered with more trash. With a family that actually deserves ripped clothes like that.” Harlan stared at me with rage in those green eyes of his. “They’re long gone, Allie. Forget about them and forget about him. You have a new father.”
The words coming out of his mouth disgusted me more than anything. A new father? Did he think that I would ever call him my father? He didn’t even deserve the word stepfather. He was more like a piece of shit.
“You’re not my father,” I said, grasping Dad’s dog tags between my thumb and forefinger. If I didn’t have any more clothes from him, then at least I had these and all those memories of better days. “You’ll never be half the man he was.”
Storming toward me, Harlan grabbed the chain and ripped it off my neck. I reached, screamed, scrambled to get them back, but Harlan stuffed them into his pocket, gripped my hand harshly, and stopped me.
“You’ll get them back later,” he said to me. “But I never want to see them again. Never.”
“Give them back to me now!”
Harlan grabbed my upper arm and pulled me out of the room. “We’re going to spend some much-needed time together. Just me and you, Allie … me and you. And then, if you’re good and you do as I say, you’ll get your father’s filthy chain back.”
