Teenagers nowadays…
“I’ll be there as soon as I can but…”
“I don’t want to miss. Silver said she would be there, remember?”
“Ahhh,” I said. “Okay. That makes sense. I’ll be there soon.”
She was already out.
She’d promised she would go to…
The Grand Am pulled into the parking lot, and I nearly did the palm to forehead move.
Stupidly enough, I hadn’t even thought to look for her car.
I just knew that she walked to work, and she never drove if she didn’t have to.
Which had seriously gotten under my skin because I didn’t like her walking to and from work in the near dark.
I walked to her car, fully expecting to see her get out of it, and frowned when I saw her dad.
“What the fuck are you doing driving her car?” I asked. “On a suspended license at that.”
Barry rolled his eyes. “I got my license back.”
“Sure you did,” I replied facetiously. “Just like you don’t know where my girl’s keys are.”
I had my phone out and I was hitting locate on the AirTag that I’d bought her for this exact reason.
He didn’t know it was an AirTag, though, or he would’ve disabled it somehow.
The beeping started in Barry’s pocket and I saw red.
“Give me her keys right now,” I said. “And I might let you walk away from me without a broken jaw.”
“You wouldn’t hit me,” he grinned. “I’m your daughter’s stepdad. I can and will make this harder for you. I have Elizabeth wrapped around my little…”
I punched him.
Not hard enough to break his jaw, but hard enough that he fell backward into the Grand Am and groaned, his hands going to his face.
I walked up to him and emptied his pockets.
I took both my daughter’s keys and Silver’s and said, “You touch either one of their cars again, I’ll fucking end you. I’m serious. Even the keys. If you touch either one of their things, I’m going to start playing dirty, and you won’t like how that ends for you.”
He pulled his hands away from his face, his tongue going to his lip to lick the blood at the corner of his mouth, and said, “You got a thing for my girl?”
“I got a thing for Silver. She happens to be your daughter, but from what I hear, that’s about all you are. A sperm donor. Just like her mother was just an egg donor,” I shot back.
And something swiftly changed in Barry’s eyes.
He went from being pissed off and ready to lunge to cold and calculating in a single heartbeat.
“You think that you know everything, don’t you?” He chuckled, splitting his lip open even more. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know that my daughter’s very much aware of everything that I do. She even helps me. She finds ’em for me. Helps me bleed ‘em dry. Helps me move on to the next bitch. Why do you think she’s so deep into your family? Going to Jit Jitsu to watch your daughter’s first day? Yeah, right. She’s just a fuckin’ con, just like me. Only better at it because she has a pretty face. When we’re done with your family, we’ll be just richer and smug about taking you and yours down a peg.”
Anger coursed through my veins at his words.
I tried to be rational, tried to deny his words.
