"I can't tonight," daddy groaned. "I feel like shit, Em."
"You promised."
Mommy's voice was ominous, and daddy sighed.
I could see him moving through the keyhole, just a hint of his shoulders as he moved to the sealed-off door at the end of the corridor. No one had ever used it, and as far as I knew, it didn't lead anywhere.
Daddy looked at mommy over his shoulder.
"I know you're up to something, Emily," he told mommy.
She scoffed, replying, "Don't be ridiculous."
I stared at daddy watching her thoughtfully, knowing he couldn't see me. And then he opened the door and walked into the darkness.
I never saw him come out.
I woke up with a start, jumping up from the sofa with my heart beating like crazy. I shook my head and it took me a moment to realize where I was. Once I realized I was safe, with all the lights still on and no one in the house, I pulled my knees up to my chest and furrowed my brows.
That dream... was it really just a dream?
I settled back into the sofa and tried to understand what it all meant. I remembered the first part of the dream - it was the last time I'd seen my dad. The next day when my mother picked me up from school, she explained to me that he was gone. He died in a car accident, it was sudden but he felt no pain. Bottom line was - he was gone.
I'd cried for weeks. I'd never felt close to my mom, and losing my dad felt like even more of a tragedy. There was a small funeral.
I never asked mom which car he'd gotten into an accident with. We had two, and both of them were intact.
I sat on the sofa, trying to put the pieces together. I remembered that night, the tea my father had made me to make my upset tummy feel better. And then mom bringing him something to drink, too.
Could the part from the kitchen be true? I knew now the cellar was being used, something my mother had lied to me about for years. I knew now it was equipped to have a prisoner in there for long periods of time.
But maybe that wasn't the case with my father.
The farther I thought the more I remembered. He hadn't been feeling well for a while before he died. Mom used to give him all kinds of homemade medications to make it better. It never did.
I gasped when I finally came to a conclusion.
Maybe mom wasn't trying to help my father.
Maybe she was trying to poison him.
I jumped up from the sofa, pacing the length of the room as I tried to come to terms with my repressed memories. I'd had nightmares, awful nightmares as a child. They all had to do with monsters in the dark, coming up from the ground, burrowing through the floors of our house and killing me and my whole family.
Maybe the monster lived in the house all along.
I couldn't let the realization affect me too much. I knew now my mother could have been the one who killed my dad. But I also knew that if she caused the death of her child's father, she would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.
And she wanted me, to sell me off and make a fortune now that she had finally found a buyer worthy of her time.
Law was nothing more than a liability.
My face drained of color as I remembered the few times he'd mentioned he wasn't feeling well. That he was feeling sick, that his stomach was upset. How he'd grown paler over his visits in the cellar.
I knew she was trying to do the same thing she'd done to my father. And I wasn't going to let her get away with it.
I stripped off the robe, letting it fall to the floor as I rummaged in the suitcase for some clothes. I got dressed in a hurry, leaving my hair in those ridiculous ringlets. I realized I had no way of getting out of there - I didn't even know where I was.
But I would walk if I had to, walk and save Law. I needed to make sure he was alright, and I needed to show the world who my mother really was. I was determined as I set off, walking outside to find the world sleepy. It wasn't too late, only around 9:00 p.m.
I still had a chance.
If Law still wanted to send me away after I'd exposed my mother, so be it. At least I would know I'd done everything in my power to convince him of keeping me. At least I'd know I'd saved him from whatever my mother was trying to do to him - and I knew none of it was good news.
Law was the only good thing left in my life, and I needed to make sure he made it through the hurricane of fury that was my mother. Finally, I understood what kind of person she was. What she was capable of to get what she wanted.
I needed to save Law.
I needed to save my Daddy.
Twenty-Three
Law
“Lawson, put that out,” Emily hissed at me, catching me sneaking a smoke in the kitchen. “You’ll stink up the dinner.”
“The dinner you so lovingly cooked for us?” I asked her, cocking a brow.
All I got in return was a withering glare as Emily pulled out the roast from the over. She’d just heated it up, everything she was serving that night was from a gourmet chef, delivered earlier in the day with strict instructions on how to finish the courses for serving.
I took two more drags, killing off the cigarette, and then dropped the butt in a coffee cup that doubled as an ashtray. Emily’s nose was wrinkled as she did her best not to look at me, obviously miffed by my ‘uncouth’ behavior.
I would have been lying if I said it didn’t give me some joy to see her pissed off.
“You look like a bum. Red eyes, stinking of cigarette smoke… This is not what we agreed on,” she said, pursing her lips.
“Yeah, well, we didn’t agree on a lot of shit but here we are, princess,” I huffed, grabbing my whiskey glass and heading for the dining room.
It was the day after I’d left Lily in my cabin. Emily had rescheduled the dinner for tonight and I had to be an unwilling accomplice to this society shindig, masquerading as an intimate dinner between two couples. Kent and Julie had arrived more than an hour ago and the level of awkward small-talk was incomprehensible.
Julie could barely look me in the eye, practically twitching whenever I came too close to her and blushing bright red with embarrassment. Emily didn’t let it bother her at all, playing the part of the perfect hostess, but obviously investing most of her time in Kent. Rather than his lovely wife, who Emily had been fucking the day before, it seemed that the husband was the prize she was really after.
Which, again, surprised me exactly none at all.
Which only left Kent himself, who as far as I was concerned was the scum of the earth, and I’d known a lot of the scum of the earth, being one myself. It took a lot of work to be valued that low in my mind, but Kent managed to fit the bill.
I’d done my research on the guy, asking around a bit more. I’d known him to be a big buyer of sex slaves before, but now I knew his type. Preferably underage virgins from privileged, white families. Seeing as he kept buying a new girl every six months or so, I doubted any of his ‘pets’ lasted long enough to ever be heard of again.
This was the kind of man Emily had wanted to sell Lily to. My insides twisted with disgust and rage, the desire to wipe Kent’s simpering smile off his face with my fist coming to me the moment I stepped into the room.
“Dinner about done?” Kent asked me conversationally.
I grumbled something akin to a reply back at him, taking a seat at the head of the table.
Julie had been admiring some of the fancy artwork Emily liked buying and then getting rid of when it no longer fit the ‘décor’ of the room. The moment she saw me being back in the room, she flushed beet red, which with her complexion was a sight to behold.
“Dinner’s served!” Emily called out in a sing-songy voice, carrying in the big roast and setting it down in the middle of the table.
There were scores of food, far more than what four people could realistically eat, even more so considering that both of the women looked like they tried to avoid eating as a general rule of thumb.
“It looks marvelous, Emily,” Kent said with a broad grin, l
ooking over the food with an appreciative expression. “Julie, my dear, you should cook for me. A home-cooked dinner warms a man’s heart.”
Julie mumbled an apology under her breath and Emily stood up straighter and prouder, like a preening peacock. The blatantly obvious pandering to one another that Emily and Kent were doing was sickening. The fact that I had to be a part of it only added insult to injury.
“You flatter me,” Emily said lightly, doing nothing to divert the attention from her.
Obviously satisfied, she took her seat and piled small quantities of the food that ‘she’ had prepared on her plate, passing the bowls around. I wasn’t hungry, but I obliged the general theme of this charade and grabbed some food as well, filling my plate.
What I really wanted was another smoke, which probably anyone could guess just by being in the same room with me. I reeked of nicotine and alcohol, even after a long, hot shower, but I couldn’t care less. It was Emily who kept giving me disapproving glances, though, and that made it all worth it.
If I embarrassed her in front of her lover and the vile piece of shit of a man whose wallet she was trying to crawl into, it would make my day.
“I’m not saying anything that shouldn’t be said,” Kent said smugly.
That prick was just begging to get his teeth kicked out.
I tried to tune out the conversation as much as I could, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one. I could barely taste the food in my mouth and my head was a muddled mess, but I still seemed to be having a better time than Julie. Though she was dressed in a black gown fit for a gala, she almost disappeared into the backdrop, not uttering a word.
My attention shifted to her as Kent and Emily kept dancing around one another with dumbass compliments and little anecdotes and stories, filling the air with endless small-talk. Julie, however, barely touched her food and most of the time she was staring at the table right in front of her, scraping the nails of her left hand over her thighs when she thought no one would notice.
The dinner was the epitome of awkward, but even in my sullen state, I realized that there was something off with Julie. I didn’t know whether it was just the fact that I’d walked in on her and Emily, or that she had to share a dinner table with her husband, Emily and me, but she looked completely off-kilter.
And neither her husband nor her lover seemed to notice at all.
“So, Emily, about that little arrangement of ours,” Kent started as we were about ready to finish with the main course.
I perked up at that and Julie did too, slightly, at least looking up and sharing a glance with Kent and Emily.
“Yes, it’s hit a bit of a snag,” Emily said with a roll of her eyes.
A snag. A business arrangement. That’s how she was referring to her daughter.
Somehow, now it was insulting and infuriating. I’d known all along that she had no respect for Lily or even the tiniest bit of emotion in her callous soul for the girl, yet when it wasn’t me she was being pandered off to, it was enraging. My grip on the whiskey glass tightened and I took a long swig from it just to keep myself occupied with something other than screaming in her face.
“Are you saying we will not be going through with it?” Kent asked, sneaking a look at me as well before turning his attention back to Emily.
It was obvious that they’d discussed this before, and that he knew full well that Lily belonged to me.
“I’m saying I’ll find you something better. This one was… damaged goods.”
I stood up so fast that I almost kicked the table over. Emily looked at me sharply, the glare going unnoticed by Kent and Julie as they were trying to right the table before anything fell.
“Whoa there!” Kent chuckled. “You alright there, Lawson?”
Before I could respond, Emily rushed to speak for me.
“He’s fine, just a little on the edge, aren’t you, Lawson? Maybe you need a little bit of fresh air to clear your mind, before you do something we both regret… like spilling our roast on the table!”
She and Kent were both laughing at her little joke, but I saw the tension in Emily’s face. She knew she’d fucked up with her choice of words, but of course the little bitch wasn’t going to correct herself.
“Excuse me,” I spat out through gritted teeth, grabbing my glass and pulling my smokes out of my pocket before I even made it out of the room.
I had to get a handle on myself, that much was true. I couldn’t just fucking go off on Emily now, not when Lily hadn’t had much time to put distance between herself and this wretched place she’d once called home. But it was so fucking hard keeping my temper in check around there pretentious fucks who thought the worth of a human life was the price tag they put on it.
I made it out to the balcony off the dining room and lit up immediately, slumping against the wall. It was getting dark outside and I couldn’t help but think back to Lily and our bittersweet goodbye last night. I wondered where she was, if she was safe… If I’d done the right thing.
She’d never asked me, so I’d never told her how I got into this, but the situation made me really fucking consider my choices in life. The first job had been because I didn’t have enough cash to pay back my bookie, so he referred me to a guy who had ‘alternative means’ of obtaining income. After the first job, I was hooked, and never looked back.
It didn’t take long during that first job to discover I had a knack for breaking people and building them up again. And if there was anything sweeter than giving a woman her first real orgasm, I hadn’t seen it yet.
I’d thought myself better than the rest. I was cruel, sure, but I had a method. Rules that could be followed and learned, rewards that came with keeping to those rules. I was strict, but fair, and I thought the women I’d trained and broken had benefitted from that.
It wasn’t until far later than I started looking past the immediate gratification and thinking about what happened to them after they left me.
Chloe was the one that broke my spirit, learning what had become of her. No amount of rules and rewards could have saved her from what that fucking maniac did to her. And now, with Lily… a big part of me wished I’d never gotten into this business to begin with.
And another part of me wished I’d never grown a fucking conscience and still had her here with me.
“Sorry,” a soft voice said, kicking me out of my thoughts.
Julie slipped through the gap in the sliding door and stepped out on the balcony, closing the door carefully behind her. I frowned, but didn’t question her presence. Maybe Emily and Kent were too much for her as well.
“Could I ask for a smoke?”
“Sure,” I said, holding the pack out for her and then helping her light it.
Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold onto it and she was shivering. It wasn’t that cold outside.
“You alright?”
“I will be,” she said with an exhale of smoke. “I hope.”
Don’t we all. It was a sentiment I could definitely understand.
Twenty-Four
Lily
I managed to find a cab driving down the lonely road a mile away from Law's lodge. I'd walked the mile in my stupid pretty little flats, definitely not designed for walking, and my feet were covered in blisters. The ride was expensive too, making me regretfully hand over too much money. Money I couldn't afford to waste.
But I didn't care about anything other than revenge in that moment. All I wanted was to make sure my mom got what was coming to her, and the idea of calling her out on her shit replayed in my mind a thousand times as we drove toward our house. Law's truck was parked in the driveway.
I got out of the cab in a hurry, running up the property to the backdoor. I knew my mom liked to keep it open in case she nipped out for a cigarette, which she would never admit to. But it worked in my favor this time - the door was unlocked.
I stared at the house for a little while, all illuminated and pretty from the inside. What a story those walls would
tell if they could fucking speak.
And I was going back into that house of horrors, voluntarily.
I pushed open the back door and walked into the kitchen. I heard voices coming from the dining room, strained laughter and polite conversation. Perfect - it meant I'd be able to humiliate mom in front of more people. The bigger audience to watch her go down in flames, the better.
In my mind, it also equated to safety. She couldn’t do anything insane if there were people around, right?
I felt self-conscious for a moment, hesitating in the kitchen and wondering if I should really do it. Expose her for the fraud she really was and tell everyone what she was trying to do.
I battled with my inner demons, my mind demanding I shouldn't betray my mom. But in the end, the memory of my dad going down the stairs into the cellar prevailed. I strode into the dining room.
When my mother saw me, she clutched the glass of wine in her hand so tightly the stem snapped.
"A good thing that's white wine," I said coolly. "Otherwise it would be one hell of a stain to get out."
"Lily!" mom hissed. "What are you doing here?"
I looked at everyone in the room. A man and a woman, obviously a couple, were sitting across the table from my mom. The table was set for four people, yet one setting was left untouched. Law. I needed to make sure he was okay.
"Think you'd gotten rid of me?" I asked mom angrily. "Think you could sweep everything under the rug like you've done so many times before?"
She laughed nervously, waving her hand dismissively in my direction.
"Don't mind my daughter," she told her speechless guests. "She's just a little tired."
"Tired, tired of your shit – that’s right," I snarled at her.
The man on the other side of the table leered at me.
"Quite the little mouth on her," he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t this the one, Emily…?” he asked loosely, giving my mother an inquisitive look.
I chose to ignore his comments and turned to face my mother again.
Daddy's Girl Page 14
