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“Shit,” Reece mutters, his attention snapping up to me again.
“After beating my mom and raping her, he held her down and tattooed dziwka, whore in Polish, on her cheek.” I tap under my right eye with a numb fingertip. “Just off the school bus, I walked in on him still pinning her to the living room floor where she was naked, bleeding, and had a face sporting almost every fucking color including black from the fresh ink as he was just finishing up.”
“You saved her. You shot him.”
I nod, then clench my eyes closed, visualizing the scene in vivid clarity. I was aiming for my dad’s head, but I’d never shot anyone before. It was a clusterfuck, a daunting fucking clusterfuck. I was scrambling, they were scrambling. I was screaming, my dad was cursing. I was crying, my mom was…howling. She washowlingin pain, in misery, in utter fucking humiliation and devastation. I tried to save her. I tried my fucking best.
“Goddamn. You were only sixteen.”
I open my eyes, somehow finding Reece’s locked on mine through a veil of tears as he resumes his approach, this time much slower, like I’m a wild animal he’s afraid of.
As he should be.
“You did what you had to. You saved your mom. I would’ve done the same thing.”
He’s misreading my silence, my emotion.
I shake my head, but he keeps going, drawing nearer.
“I would’ve done the same thing forless. My dad never laid a hand on my mom, but if he ever even fucking flinched at her or my sisters, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put a bullet in his head.”
A foot away from me now, I grab his chin. “Reece, the only thing I regret about shooting my father is not having better aim.” I release him just as quickly. “I fired off more than one shot. I hit my mom, too.”
“She’s…”
“She’s alive. The bullet that clipped her skull split, thankfully missing the most vital parts.”
Her memory’s missing her darkest deeds as well as my father’s, so she has no recollection of anything regarding The Playground, Cyrus, or her husband abusing the literal piss out of her when he discovered her involvement with both.
She knows our life before wasn’t easy or glamorous, but she doesn’t know the full extent of how bad everything got. How bad she got, my dad got, or how bad I got.
And I protect the small bit of peace she does have these days by sparing her the truth. She still loves my dad, even thinking he tried to kill her during his breakdown, and she’ll never let us leave this town. She refuses to visit his grave, but makes me because I carry his blood.
If I could bleed myself dry of him without killing myself, I would. When I was younger and didn’t see a way out for either of us, I tried anyway. I triedbecauseI thought it’d kill me. Hoped it would.
It never did and it never severed the last tie to my father either. All it did was leave me scarred and give Cyrus a reason to keep a closer eye on me.
“So what about Cyrus? Where does he come in?”
“The bullet I caught my dad with was fatal, killed him instantly, but… My mom had a pulse. She was unresponsive but alive. I knew Cyrus had money and connections, so I begged him to help.” If I’d confessed to shooting my parents, I would’ve been locked up with no way to pay for the life-saving surgeries my mom suddenly required—the life-saving surgeries I caused her to suddenly require. We had nothing to help cover the cost, no health insurance, no life insurance, no savings, no friends or family to pitch in, no caring community to start a fundraiser. We had fucking nothing. It was all on me to find a way to keep her alive. So I did. “He made me promise to go live with him and do anything he asked, then he shot himself in the foot to make the story he came up with more believable before the police showed up.”
“I don’t understand. You called Cyrus?”
“I didn’t have to. He was already there.”
“There? Cyrus was fucking there?”
“Him randomly stopping by to talk tattoos was the only part of the story that was true. According to him.”
“You don’t think he was?”
“At the time, I didn’t know any better, couldn’t have even fathomed anything other than what I was told. Now though… One of his employees spilled Playground business as well as Cyrus’s personal business to someone that wasn’t on his official payroll. The reason my dad had an unregistered gun in the house was because a few weeks prior, Cyrus paid him with it in exchange for a tattoo. You saw his safe. He didn’t need to make trades back then any more than he does now. He was nearby when everything came to a head, close enough to walk through our front door while the gunshots were still echoing off the walls.
“When he was discharged from the hospital for his foot injury, he took me straight to his warehouse where I lived with him until I was eighteen. I got to know Cyrus better than anyone. He put the whole thing into motion, orchestrated every fucking part of it, then sat back and waited for it to unfold.” I pause for a moment to consider his particular predicament. “You said your dad used a gun to commit suicide. Did you ever find out whose gun it was? Or even how he came to have it in his possession?”
His jaw flexes and he shakes his head.
“Cyrus doesn’t buy loyalty because loyalty bought is loyalty that can be resold. So he creates scenarios that earn true loyalty, priceless loyalty—the kind only given freely, usually between family members. When he finds a family housing someone he’s deemed useful to his business in some way, he picks them apart until they’re unrecognizable, until they’re either on the brink of ruin or just past it. Then, and only then, does he swoop in.” I’ve seen him do it numerous times.
