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 out. 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
