Page 74 of Fragile Twisted Vows
“She ran into her room crying. Didn’t say a word to me,” he says as he continues to chop on the counter.
I look at the coffee cups from the cafe around the corner, suspicion filling me.
“What direction did she run from, Henry?” I say through gritted teeth.
He sighs as he points his knife to the front door, then down the hall where my office is, then finally, to her bedroom.
Fuck.
I speed down the hallway and jiggle the doorknob, and I can hear her shuffling around in her bedroom.
“Lucy, open the door,” I growl, and no response comes, just more shuffling.
I continue to jiggle the doorknob.
“You want to explain what’s happened in the last few hours?” I bark out and hear a small scoff.
A very depressing one at that.
“You want to explain what’s happened in the last seven years? Or rather, the last twenty-five years of my life?” she snarls, and I freeze then, her words chilling over me.
“Lucille,” I hiss, ramming my shoulder against the door. “Open the goddamn door, or I will break it down,” I growl.
“By all means, go ahead. Nothing is stopping you. Nothing ever does,” she sneers and I step back and give the door one solid, wood splintering kick.
I continue to ram my body until it breaks off its hinges. When I step inside, Lucy turns to face me, her face pale and eyes swollen from crying.
“Before you freak out and try to manipulate me some more,” she says before she flings a folder full of papers at my feet, “You want to tell me about this?”
Not just any papers, but her file. The one I dug up on Michael years ago. The one describing his hush money case with her actual birth mother.
Shit.
“Don’t go quiet now, Damien. Be a man. Face the consequences, remember?” She taunts me, however her words are much more sinister than last night.
She doesn’t just hate me right now.
She fucking despises me.
I’ve been lying to her for years, alongside the rest of her family, and now she knows.
“How long have you known?” she asks, and I decide right then to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time.
I tell the truth.
“Seven years.” She gasps.
“Jesus Christ, Damien. Are you serious?” she cries.
“I didn’t like the way your father treated you that night, the first night I met you. Especially your father. It reminded me too much of… my own life growing up,” I confess, but she doesn’t bend or melt at my words.
She doesn’t need to.
I’m a fucked-up bastard and she’s known this from the start.
“My dad used to hit my stepmom. A lot. And I watched it happen. When I started to get rebellious, he started to hit me too,” I explain, and she falls silent. She stares at me with her arms crossed across her chest and her eyes narrowed.
“It wasn’t until I discovered what he did to my actual mother. How he abused her and sent her away after I was born. It wasn’t until then that I decided to start hitting him back,” I explain.
