I shot forward.
“I wouldn’t lose control if I were you,” he said quickly. “You have to keep me alive. How else will I change my will to include you again?”
And I stopped.
Amusement crinkled his eyes as he waited for me to process.
I didn’t care about the fucking money.
But if not me, then who?
“Banks is more of a son than you ever were,” he went on. “I really should’ve known better. That kid was born in the gutter. Strength comes from trial. You only ever indulged. You get that weakness from your mother.”
I looked behind me at my sister who had removed her mask. She looked at me, concerned.
“Banks…” I said under my breath.
“Is my sole heir,” he finished. “I changed my will last year. She’s responsible, hard-working, and intelligent. She won’t drive my life’s work into the ground. If you’re good and get back in line, I’ll change it back.”
Something about what he said made anger knot in my stomach again. Like I still hated that he didn’t think I was good enough.
“It’s kind of ironic, actually,” he went on. “That I put all of my faith and energy into you for so long, believing a daughter could never be what a son could be, and as of right now, it looks like your sisters will be the ones with the real power in Thunder Bay. Not you.”
Sisters?
I looked at him, confused, as a slow, vile grin spread across his fucking face.
What the hell was he talking about?
I only had one sister.
Damon
Present
“They are exquisite, aren’t they?” my father asked, peering around me at whoever was standing there. “I’m not even unhappy about it. I can’t wait to see what they do.”
Slowly, I turned, looking over my shoulder, but something told me I already knew who he was referring to. I always knew.
I spotted Rika and Banks standing there, watching us and looking at me questioningly.
I closed my eyes, my heart thumping so hard. Motherfucker.
“Sisters…” I repeated, turning back around.
“It was also ironic that I could get any woman so easily pregnant, except my own wife.” Gabriel pulled out a cigar from his breast pocket. “Christiane was beautiful, though. I didn’t mean to knock her up, but I knew the kid would be good-looking with genes like that.”
I couldn’t believe it.
But then again, it made so much sense. The stars finally aligned.
He lit his cigar, the puffs of smoke clouding into the air.
“Rika…” I said in a low voice. “She’s yours.”
“Oh, I wish,” he shot out, smiling to himself. “But no, Erika is a Fane.”
What?
Then I don’t…
“A few years before her, though,” he told me, “Christiane had a son.”
And then he looked at me, taking a drag of his cigar and thinning his eyes against the smoke.
A son.
I stopped breathing.
They were my sisters, but Erika wasn’t my father’s. So that meant…
I bared my teeth. “You’re lying.”
He broke out into a smile, enjoying every second of this.
It wasn’t true.
“Natalya Delova was my mother,” I maintained. “I look just like her.”
“Be that as it may, you didn’t come from her cunt,” he said.
I stood there, unable to speak. He had to be lying. There was no way that was happening right under my nose, and I didn’t know it.
She wouldn’t have… How would I never have known that? She would’ve spoken to me or done something.
My father’s laugh filled the air more than the smoke or the noise below.
I raised my eyes back up to him.
“Schraeder Fane was out of the country for a few months,” he explained, “leaving his pretty new wife at home alone.” He tipped his chin down at me. “I just couldn’t resist having my way with his pretty little bride.”
Having his way.
Like I knew he did in rooms of our house, late at night, their cries carrying through the walls.
I stilled as realization hit of how I was conceived. “You raped her.”
He laughed and then shrugged. “Whatever.”
I did the math in my head. She was young. Still. She was Winter’s age when Rika was born. She would’ve been a teenager when I was born. Eighteen? Nineteen?
My father continued, “When Schraeder came home to a pregnant wife, there was no hiding what I’d done. He was prepared to raise you as his own and leave town with his little family, but I couldn’t have that. Real men don’t let other men raise their sons.”
I glared at him. Like he raised me at all? Intimidating me, smacking me around, and treating me like property?
“So the night you were born, I came and claimed what was mine,” he stated. “She screamed and cried. And then spent the next several years depressed and drunk. I really didn’t think she’d take it so badly, but…things got a little better for her when Rika came along.”
Rika’s mother was a mess for a lot of years. I grew up, seeing a barely functioning, pill-popping, alcoholic on the rare occasions she was in public.
It was all his fault. Not her losing her husband or anything else. She’d been barely alive, and Rika barely had a mother.
But she was always nice, wasn’t she? Now that I thought about it. Always docile and sweet.
“They ended up staying in Thunder Bay,” my father went on. “Probably to be close to you.”
No wonder he didn’t bat an eyelash when he knew Natalya was coming into my room and what she was doing to me. She wasn’t my mother in his eyes.
In his eyes, she was making me a man.
“When you were a teenager,” he told me, “I found out she and her husband were planning on telling you the truth as soon as you turned eighteen. So I took care of Schraeder. With a little help, of course.”
With Evans Crists’ help. Michael’s father.
Since he had Power of Attorney over the estate and Christiane was all too happy and drugged-out to care, Evans saw his opportunity to control another fortune. The largest fortune in town.
I glanced back at Rika, seeing her brow furrowed as she probably wondered what we were talking about. None of my friends could hear us.
I dropped my eyes to the scar on her neck.
“Didn’t expect Rika to be in the car that day, but…” my father trailed off. “And then the town doctor provided Christiane with a nice little cocktail to keep her docile for the rest of her miserable little life.”
He stepped up to me, but I wanted to back away. The walls were closing in even though we were outside, and I gripped the blade in my hand as full knowledge of what was happening fell like a ton of bricks on my shoulders.
“You never really took notice of Christiane, did you?” he taunted.
But I barely heard him as I got lost in my head.
I could’ve had a different life. Christiane would’ve been different. I would’ve had good parents.
“The way she’d look at you at parties or on the street in town,” he went on.
She was looking at me? No, I don’t remember that. What was she seeing when she watched me? What was I doing?
My throat closed up, and my hand with the blade shook.
“Her heart was broken long before Rika was born or her husband died,” my father droned on.
She wanted me even with what my father did to her? Her husband wanted me anyway?
“She would look at you for so long, completely obvious,” Gabriel continued, inching up to me farther and torturing me with what was happening right under my nose, and I never even knew it. “I actually thought she’d be a liability, and I might have to kill her, too.”
What if she didn’t like what she was seeing? What if that’s why she never approached me? What if she saw me growing up and thought I was turning out exactly like him?
What if she was scared of me?
“You honestly never noticed?” he asked, looking at me like I was the dumbest shit on the planet.
Rage filled my chest, my stomach twisted into knots, and every image of him flashed in my head.
Raping her. Destroying her life. Stealing me away as she screamed.
Forcing her to watch another woman raise me a few miles down the road.