Looking down at her hands, she nodded her misery. “Yes. That’s mostly true, but it was a long time in the making.”
“Tell me,” Nina ordered softly.
“He’d abused my mother all my life. Day after day, year after year. There was always a bruise she was trying to cover with makeup, a broken bone and some doctor he’d paid off to set it and keep quiet. As I got older, I knew I had to get away from him. I knew my mother had to get away from him, but she wouldn’t listen. She refused to let me help her. I was terrified all the time. And as he got older, he only drank more and things grew worse.”
Thinking about that last year in their house with him before she left for college and moved out for good probably left her with the most guilt. Maybe even more than the night her mother died.
Because back then, there had still been time…
Nina scoffed as she tightened her grip on George. “Was it the fucking money? Was she afraid to leave the money? He was a billionaire, right?”
George shook her head with the memory. “He was, but it wasn’t the money that kept her with him. It was fear. My father was a very powerful man, Nina. I’m sure you read that. He’d have had her killed if she left. There was nowhere to hide, and believe me when I tell you, I knew he wasn’t just spewing platitudes when he said he’d hunt her to the ends of the earth.”
Nina sat silently, but her nostrils flared and her lips thinned.
Sighing, George looked out into the dark night. “Anyway, as I got older, my later teen years, I guess, I started to push back. I got mouthy, but the harder I began to push, the harder he came at me until one night, just before I was due to leave for college, he nearly choked me to death, and then he hit me. It was the first time ever. He’d intimidated, bullied, frightened me into submission for as long as I can remember, but he’d never put a hand on me until that night.”
Nina balled a fist against her thigh. “The motherfucking pissant.”
Her throat tightened and constricted, but the more she talked, the easier it became to speak the words. “My mother took the brunt of that attack when she stopped him and shoved me out the door. Her reward for keeping him from almost certainly killing me? He beat her nearly senseless. I’d never seen her look as bad as she did that night.”
“Jesus fucking hell, Wings.”
Shaking her head at the helplessness of it all, George inhaled. “I was so afraid after that. I went to my counselor at school, who told me only my mother could help herself. She advised me to talk to the police about what my father had done to me, but I knew what would happen if I did. The police, like everyone else, were in his back pocket. So she told me to walk away and do it fast. To remove myself from the stress of trying to get my mother to listen to reason—to hear me. She said I had to lead my own life and it was unhealthy to do anything else.”
“Fuuuck,” Nina muttered. “That’s tough, but she was right.”
A tear fell to George’s lap. “But I couldn’t…I just couldn’t leave, Nina. I couldn’t stand the idea he’d hurt her and I wouldn’t be close by. I couldn’t give up. So I went to community college and worked two jobs. I kept my distance, refused to take anything from him, including his money. Not that he was offering. He eventually, officially cut me off financially, but I didn’t want it anyway. When I’d call, my mother would always say everything was fine in their big ugly mausoleum of a mansion, but he refused to let her see me, and Mom was always too afraid he’d catch her and hurt me if he found us together.”
And that had hurt. It had hurt so much.
Nina obviously sensed how wounded she’d been by that. She took George’s hand and held it to her cheek. “That kind of abuse fucks with your head, kiddo. I know you have to know that. It fucked with your mother’s head, but it didn’t mean she didn’t love you.”
Tears welled in the corners of her eyes but she swiped them away, frustrated with how that horrible man had brainwashed her. “Anyway, the night my mother died…”
That awful, horrible, terrible, freezing-cold snowy night.
“If it’s too much, you don’t have to,” Nina said softly.
But she was already knee deep and there was no stopping the story from spilling from her lips. “Fast forward to only a couple of years ago. I’d long been on my own, earning my own living at Mom and Dad’s Place, sneaking visits with my mother for years when my father was out of town. The short of it is, he’d grown suspicious and had her followed, thinking she was cheating on him, and that’s how he found out she was actually seeing me. He caught us. A fight ensued. He called me any number of names, and then he went after my mother. Only this time, I fought back.”
“With that hard right to the fucking face?”
No. No hard right. If only that was all it had been.
Shaking her head, tears fell down George’s cheeks in splashes of salty water. “No. I tried to pull him off my mother, but even at his age, he was as strong as an ox. He knocked me off and to the marble floor. But my mother…I don’t know. Somewhere along the way, she produced a knife, and that’s when everything went off the rails. She managed to stab him a couple of times with it. But he wrestled it from her and stabbed her over and over and…and that…that was that…”
Twenty-two times, to be precise. He’d stabbed her twenty-two fucking times.
Nina rested her cheek on the top of George’s head. “Jesus fucking Christ, Wings.”
That wasn’t all of it, but it was enough for now.
“It was a bad night,” she murmured, remembering the blood on her father’s expensive marble floors, her mother with gaping wounds in her chest and abdomen, and her father hovering over her, crying.
He’d had the audacity to cry over her lifeless body. The filthy bastard.
“So he died of a heart attack the night he killed your mother, right?”
“Yes. I guess the stress of beating a woman to a pulp culminating in stabbing her was too much stress for his coal-black heart. He died that night, too.”
And she’d been glad. And she couldn’t take that thought back—wouldn’t. She wouldn’t feel bad about the end of his reign of tyranny.
“And you were injured, too?”
“Yes. When he knocked me to the floor, I somehow landed on the knife, but I healed. At least physically.”
Mentally…mentally, she’d suffered in ways she almost couldn’t put into words.
“He left you all his money, didn’t the asshole?”
The irony, right? The daughter he hated ending up with all his worldly possessions? George nodded. “He did, the asshole. It felt like a move made out of spite, knowing I never took a thing from him and then leaving me with his myriad companies and responsibilities. I haven’t touched any of it, and I left all the other nonsense in the hands of a financial planner and some board members—or whoever takes care of that kind of thing. Maverick Industries is still up and running. I guess it’s all been okay.”
And she didn’t care if it wasn’t. Several people collected hefty paychecks to deal with every last bit of it because she couldn’t live with the idea that any of her father’s employees would be left jobless. They’d obviously done their jobs well.
“Okay, so all this was a couple of years before you thought about offing yourself, right? Isn’t that what you told the kid? Why? Why would you do that so long after, Wings?”
Why indeed. The only thing she could say was she’d been hanging by a thread.
“I can only tell you…I was tired. I just felt so tired. Tired of trying to find a place in this world, trying to fit in somewhere I didn’t fit—somewhere I would never fit. Tired of being lonely. Tired of feeling the guilt about what my father did to my mother—that I couldn’t stop it, that I didn’t say the right things to make her leave him. That I could have tried harder. That I just didn’t try hard enough. That maybe I was as lazy as my father accused me of being. It all just became too much. It became all I thought about. I think I was just sad, and I didn’t know how to find my way o
ut. I felt trapped—and alone. Always so alone.”
Nina pressed her cheek to the top of George’s head and gripped her tighter. “So you thought ending your fucking life was the only answer? Jesus Christ. You do know the shit with that fucknut of a father you had isn’t on you, don’t you? Say you believe what you told the kid. Say it.”
George inhaled hard, letting her chin fall to her chest. “I do now, but back then…back then, everything felt like my fault and it was more than…more than I could bear. It suffocated me. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I didn’t know who to tell. I was too afraid to tell…”
“So that dick for a sperm donor did this to you. I’d kill the asshole and never look back if he was still fucking alive.”
“The guilt of walking away from my mother when she refused to leave him, finally having to walk away because I couldn’t watch how he was killing her slowly—if not by the bruises he left behind with his fists, then by his words—ate a hole in me. All the time it just simmered and simmered. I’d have dreams of busting into my parents’ house and snatching my mother up, kidnapping her and taking her somewhere I could get her the help she needed. But it never happened. I never could get her to listen to me…I should have tried…harder.” She choked on the last words, unable to express how helpless she’d felt for almost all her life.
Nina gripped George tight to her side. “No. No. No. That’s wrong, Georgina Maverick. You’re motherfucking wrong. I’ve learned a lot doing this for so long now. I’ve fucking seen some shit. Some really crazy shit. But I’ve also seen that you can’t make someone do something they don’t fucking want to do—see something they don’t want to see when they’re that fucked in the head from years of that kind of abuse. I know you know it’s the truth, and now you have to find a way to fucking live with it. Because you can’t leave here. Not when you have us. I won’t let you.”
Hot tears fell down her face, hot tears of shame and years of regret she just couldn’t shake.
Nina wrapped her other arm around George and began to rock. “Living can be really hard, but we’re here, and the fuck I’m gonna to let you forget that. We’re here. Just like you’re here for the kid. I’m fucking here, and that means you have to be, too. For better or worse. You have to stay here. You GD matter. To the seniors at your job. To me. To us. To Dex.”
Her heart, so empty for so long, felt full for the first time in almost ever, and she wondered if she was finally finding a place to belong. A place where she could find acceptance, flaws and all. A place where someone had her back, where forced silence didn’t exist.
The wind whistled in her ears as she smiled at how happy that revelation made her. “It might be a little early in our relationship to mention this, but I think I love you, Vampire Lady. Wanna get married?”
Nina laughed and leaned back. “You’re not my fucking type. I like ’em taller. But you know somethin’, you are Dex’s type…”
Was she? George blushed and for the first time she admitted to someone other than her reflection and Gladys that he was her type, too. “I like Dex. A lot.”
“I guess because he’s your guardian angel, he already knows all the shit about your father and what happened?”
George shrugged. “Mostly, yes.” She kept her answer vague, but it was all she could offer at this point.
Nina nodded, tucking her dark hair away from her face. “It’s better to start a relationship with honesty.”
Yeah. Honesty.
“Are we starting a relationship?”
Nina looked up at the sky, where more snow had begun to fall. “I think that’s up to the two of you, but from where I sit, I’m pretty damn sure you’re starting a fucking relationship.”
And then she made another confession. “I’m afraid, Vampire Lady,” she whispered.
Nina tweaked her cheek. “We’re all afraid, kiddo. But every day, you gotta get the hell up, put your warrior pants on, and grab the day by the balls, even if it’s scary as fuck, because that’s what little spitfires like you do.”
George held up their entwined hands. “Will you hold my hand when I do?”
She rolled her eyes and groused, “Yeah. I’ll fuckin’ hold your hand.”
George planted an unexpected kiss on her vampire friend’s cheek. “If you won’t marry me, would you at least consider a long engagement?”
Nina cackled a brittle laugh that landed in the cold night air. She dropped a kiss on the top of George’s head and whispered, “Fuck you.”
Making George howl with laughter.
Chapter 20
George saw Marty rushing toward her office from the window facing the hallway, waving her phone frantically. She popped her office door open and poked her blonde head inside.
“Got a sec?” she asked, her perfectly made up blue eyes on fire.
George pushed back from her desk and nodded, turning away from the computer she’d been pointlessly staring at. “Always for you.” She motioned for Marty to take the chair in front of her desk. “Sit.”
She dropped into the chair and showed George the face of her phone. “Look what I found out about Effie Sampson!”
Effie Sampson would keep her up at night if she slept. It had been a bit since her last encounter with Effie. She hadn’t heard any voices in her head with the kind of direction she’d received for Justin, and each time she ran into Effie at work, the woman went in the other direction, leaving George wondering if Nina’s mind-meld had truly worked.
Yet, she still had no idea what Effie needed.
George looked at the phone and the picture of someone’s Facebook page. “Isn’t that the guy whose page Effie had on her laptop?”
Marty nodded with obvious excitement, her blonde hair cascading over her shoulders. “Yep. It is—and guess who he is?”
Maybe she should have tried to figure that out herself? After all, that was her job as an angel, but she’d let her focus falter when Justin came onto the scene. Add in the attempt at stealing her wings, and her job, and she was doing a piss-poor job of keeping her responsibilities on point.
She cupped her chin, leaning her elbow on her desk. “Who is he?”
“Effie Sampson’s son!”
Her mouth fell open and she blinked. “What?”
“Uh-huh. He’s her biological son. Remember when you told me she lived in Texas? Weeell, she left Texas because she had a baby. A baby she gave up for adoption!”
George was flabbergasted. “How did you figure this out?”
Marty waved a hand with a facetiously coy smile. “I fished around on Facebook and found out he lived two towns over from where Effie lived when she was in Texas. I found out where she lived before New York purely by chance, when I was chatting with one of the seniors who’d tried and failed to get to know her. Anywho, she left for New York the same year he was born. Then I dug some more and found a friend of a friend of David Eisen’s mother. I went to his mother’s page on Facebook and saw a post advocating adoption. And theeen,” she drawled, “I dug around some more. It was a long and winding road, but suffice it to say, Effie’s his bio mother.”
A sizzle of excitement left her with goose bumps. Could it be that this was how she was supposed to help Effie? Reunite her with her son? Maybe helping her didn’t have anything to do with being with her when she died?
Maybe she only wanted to meet her son before she left this world? That made total sense. Total and complete sense.
So was she supposed to help Effie connect with her son?
But adoption was a tricky thing. Some adopted children didn’t want any contact with their bio parents, and vice versa. This could get ugly and sticky fast.
“How can you be so sure? This isn’t something that I can afford to be wrong about. And I really want to know why no one from up there,” she pointed to the ceiling, “is giving me any help.”
Dex rapped on her door just then. He waved at her through the window of her office.
She waved him in and smiled, her heart sk
ipping a beat when he smiled back with that warmth only he could generate.
He stuck his head inside the door and waved to Marty. “I’ve got some news about Effie.”
Her heart sped up. “From upstairs?”
“Yep,” he said with a wink, coming in and closing the door.
“Well, tell me already!” she urged, the excitement in her voice hard to contain.
“Effie Sampson has a son.”
Marty nodded with a knowing smile as she held up her phone. “See? I told you.”
Well, at least now they had definite confirmation. Pushing off her desk with the heels of her hands, she said, “Okay, Boss. But Effie hasn’t even told me she’s dying, let alone that she has a son she wants to see before she dies. What do we do next?”
Dex smiled at her. “We wing it.”
George gnawed the inside of her cheek as they took the steps up to Effie’s stoop. The sky was darkening, the air frigid, her heart clamoring with her nerves.
“The last time I told her I was an angel, Dex, Nina had to wipe her memory. It didn’t exactly go aces. We kinda went belly up. I’m worried.”
Dex sighed as they stood outside Effie’s door, rubbing his temples. “Sometimes that happens, but our best bet is to be honest, and the only way to do that is to tell her we’ve had help from upstairs. I mean, it’s a hard pill to swallow, so the only way to prove it is with your ethereal glow—might even have to break out the big guns.”
She winced, tightening her coat around her neck. “The wings?”
Dex nodded. “The wings.”
“Okay, so we just go in there and tell her we know she has a son because we’re angels, and the people upstairs told us she has a son, and then ask her if what she wants is to meet him?”
“Yep.”
“Jeez, Dex. Just like that? It feels so abrupt. Like such an intrusion.”
Chucking her under the chin, he shook his head. “It’s not an intrusion if in the end, she has what she wants, and what she wants is to meet the child she gave birth to all those years ago. Effie doesn’t exactly pussyfoot around, George. She’s pretty blunt. I’m hoping I’m guessing right when I say she likely admires the same in other people.”
Accidentaly Divine Page 18
