I struggle not to pull away as his fingers stroke down my cheek, but I’ll only have one chance to surprise him. So I wait, letting him explain his little fantasy. I wait for the perfect moment to fight back.
“I already know you’ll be a good fit for me. You need a firm hand, but not a dangerous one. I remember one video, and—” He steps behind me, his sigh loud as he presses his face to the side of my head. “It was just disappointment. A sigh from him, just like that, and the tears started. And when he took you from behind,the tears fell so thick they should have made a lake for you to drown in.”
Drown.His voice changes there, the word getting a lover’s caress. And the change in tone whips my discomfort to straight up fear.Drown.A word that might just be a fantasy, but one that hints at a real risk to me should Trevor Westerhouse ever get angry enough to act on whatever horrors live in his mind.
Drown.
And I’m standing three feet from a pool.
Chapter 78
Trips
Falk takes me down to the gym several times over the next week, alternating between leaving me to cross train and sparring. He’s a good teacher. And with every day that passes without my father taking me to task for the meeting with Walker and RJ, I trust the older man more.
“Good,” he says, wiping sweat from his forehead. “But this time, swoop first, then go for the drop.”
I follow his directions, and even though I know he’s letting me get the drop on him, it still feels good to slam him onto the mat.
Once I’ve got him down, he lowers his voice to barely above a whisper. “Your father is sending you to the blue room again tonight. And twice over the weekend,” he informs me.
“I’m surprised it took this long.”
“He’s been busy, out of the house most of the week.”
“Cancer treatment does that to you.”
His brows lower, and he pushes me off him, walking me through another series of moves, once again letting me pin him when my form is good enough. “How’d you know that?” he asks.
“You think we’d risk coming back if we didn’t knowwhymy father wants us to have a baby?”
“I still don’t get why you’d risk coming back at all.”
He taps out and we go through the whole set-up again, the combination of learning a different fighting style and information exchange a weird necessity in this house. Once he’s got me pinned this time, explaining how to break it, then not letting me do what he told me to do, I have no choice but to give him an explanation. “She thinks we can take him down.”
He scoffs, shifting his weight enough for me to practice the escape. “You’re delusional,” he says once we’re locked together again.
“Maybe. But you haven’t seen her work. If anybody can do this, it’s her.”
“Don’t let your heart and dick rule your brain, kid. It’s that kind of shit that lands you here.”
The urge to deck him flares, so I step back instead, drinking water before I lose it.
But answers matter, so I go back to the mat, knowing I’ve only got a few more moves in me before my body’s spent. This move has a lock in it I’ve done before, but I don’t warn him. Instead, I take him down and lock him on my first try, and a dry laugh escapes him.
But I use his surprise to hopefully get him to tell me more than he wants to. “Is that what he’s got on you? You fucked up with a woman?”
He tugs against me, and with a pause long enough for me to know he’s choosing to share with me, he answers. “I fucked the wrong woman. I thought I could fix her. Turns out, I couldn’t,and when she gave up, it was FUBAR. It looked like I’d killed her.”
“And my father made it all go away, for a price.”
His silence is answer enough, so I let him go.
“I’m done teaching today,” he says, spinning on his heel and marching into the attached bathroom, the door closing just this side of a slam.
Alone and free for the first time in what feels like forever, a childish part of me wants to make a run for it. But right now, it’s more important to prove to Father that I’m trustworthy, so I sip my water as the autumn sun slants through the windows on the other side of the room. Golden, like the highlights in Clara’s hair after the summer spent on the beach.
The patter of bare feet against wood floors has me pushing to mine, rushing to the door, some part of me knowing that sound doesn’t belong in this place. And as I approach the door, a figure rockets past, the flash of dark curls more than enough for me to race out of the gym after her. But two steps later I slam into my asshole of a brother, and I know without asking that he’s what she’s running from.
