by Eva Ashwood
Alan.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say, even though I know he’s not. Rage boils up in me in hot waves, making my body go numb. “He chooses his company over his own daughter, his own flesh and blood?”
This man shares DNA with me. I was just a child, and my father knowingly and willingly chose his business over me. He’s not my fucking father—no more than Brody or any of my other foster dads were.
Brody and my father both used me and abused my trust.
And I hate them both.
Declan’s arm settles around my waist, pulling me closer as if he can sense the agitation of my emotions. “It’s unforgivable. People will do fucked up things to keep their world of comfort, their money and power.”
But sell out their own daughter?
“I want to see him,” I say suddenly, surprised by the firmness in my own voice. “I want to confront him. I want to know what the hell kind of bargain he made with Alan that started this fucking mess.”
The guys hesitate, but I know it’s not because they don’t think we should do it. It’s because they want to protect me. They want to keep me safe.
But the only way to do that is to confront things head on.
“I don’t run.” Drawing a deep breath, I lift my chin. “I fight. And I’m not running from Alan or my father or anything else. I’m fighting this until Alan’s in jail or I’m fucking dead.”
We don’t wait for a new day. We don’t sit on the information we got from Reagan, debating potential actions and strategies. Instead, minutes after our discussion in the kitchen, we’re piling into Gray’s car and speeding down the highway to my parents’ house.
I glance at the map on Gray’s phone, biting my bottom lip. It’s only about thirty minutes away from Hawthorne.
All this time, they’ve been less than a half an hour away. Not knowing I’m here, not even knowing if I’m still alive.
How could they be content with just that? If I meant anything to them, how could they be content just giving up? Did they ever actually try to look for me? Use the power they restored when they got their business back to bribe Alan into helping find me?
My stomach clenches as a new thought occurs to me. Maybe they did know where I was. Maybe they knew I returned to Hawthorne, and they just didn’t want anything to do with me.
Fuck. I hate all of this.
The GPS on Gray’s phone tells us that our destination is just a few minutes away, and I should be nervous, but I’m not. Instead, what would’ve been nervousness is replaced by a type of adrenaline that no amount of drugs, sex, or painting could ever give me. Not quite anger, not quite fear, it’s a mix of feelings I’ve never felt before.
It feels… good.
It makes me feel unstoppable.
No matter what happens, no matter what new heartaches my future may hold, I’m not stopping until this is done.
There’s no security gate partway up the drive like the Montgomerys have, so nothing stops us from rolling right up to the house. I’m glad we didn’t have to buzz someone to be let onto the property, since I want to take Charles and Maria by surprise. I don’t want to give them time to prepare some bullshit excuse or flee.
I’m not really sure if they’d do either of those things. In fact, I have no idea what their reaction to seeing me will be. I’m not sure if my fighting spirit comes from either of them, or if it’s just something I’ve had to pick up throughout life to stay alive, to survive the shit I’ve been through.
None of us say a word as Gray parks the car and we get out. He shoots me a look, asking a silent question. Are you okay?
I shove my hands into my hoodie and nod. I’m not sure “okay” is the right word for it, but I still feel that buzz of adrenaline in my veins, and I’m absolutely sure I want to do this.
As we walk up to the door, I try to look for anything that I might recognize, but just like all the other houses in this area, this one holds no memories for me. Maybe I had a childhood in this home, maybe I didn’t, but that’s not the point.
The point is confronting the parents who abandoned me for their own selfish ends.
And I already thought the world was a shitty place. Turns out, it can always get worse. More fucked up.
I huff a laugh at the dark thought. I was told that my mother was likely a drug addict, and although it sucked to think that she was the reason for my dizzy spells and faulty memory, I never really hated her for it. I figured she had gotten fucked by life just like I had, caught up in the same cycle of destruction that claims so many lives of people without the resources to pull themselves out.
I almost wish that version of my mother was the real one.
When we knock on the door, a middle-aged woman who looks like the housekeeper opens it, but the guys aren’t fucking around. They shove past her, barging into the stately hallway with me following close behind.
“Where are Charles and Maria Davenport?” Gray demands, his voice hard.
The maid stutters, her mouth opening and closing like a fish gulping for water.
“The… Mr. Davenport is…” She gestures toward the stairs, but before she can continue, footsteps sound on the polished marble.
A man appears at the top of the stairs, his dark blonde hair streaked with gray. “Annette, what’s going on here?” he says, looking at us. “Who are these people?”
But when his gaze lands on me, his eyes flash with recognition before he can hide it and pretend he doesn’t know me. He fucking knows who I am. My heart begins to race, all the nerves that weren’t there a second ago rushing through me like a violent storm.
Yup. I’m your long-lost daughter, asshole. Surprise.
“Annette, leave us,” he barks.
“Sir—”
“Leave.”
She scurries off, her head ducked low, and I wonder for a second if my dad is like Alan, a rich monster who thinks he can push people around just because he’s had more luck in life, just because he has a few more zeroes at the end of his bank account.
As the maid disappears deeper into the house, I glance up at my father. He stands at the top of the wide staircase, his brows drawing together as his gaze settles on me.
For a long moment, we just stare at each other. My focus on him is so complete that I can practically see the gears turning in his head as he tries to decide how to handle my sudden reappearance.
“Hey, Dad. Did you miss me?” I drawl, letting poison seep into every syllable.
He blinks, his jaw tightening. My words seem to have shocked a reaction out of him, breaking him out of his stasis. He squares his shoulders, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. You know exactly who I am,” I shoot back fiercely. “And I know what you did to me, you bastard.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to lea—”
He tries to speak again, but I won’t let him.
“You fucking abandoned me,” I snarl. “You sold me in exchange for Alan Montgomery’s help when your business almost went under.”
My father jerks back as if I physically hit him. He stands frozen for a moment as if in shock, his eyes widening slightly. It’s as if hearing the words spill from my lips in such harsh, blunt terms brings it all back to him. Maybe he’s tried to forget, just like I did for so long. Maybe he’s fought long and hard to bury it all—the guilt, the shame, the betrayal—and now I’m tearing it up with my bare hands, letting it lay out exposed for the whole fucking world to see.
“Did you enjoy it? Did you enjoy seeing your business flourish while you knew your daughter was locked away with a fucking monster? Or did you just shut it all out?” My voice is strained, hoarse from the emotions that tear through every word. “Did you just pretend I didn’t exist anymore? How the fuck did you manage to forget about your own daughter?”
Daughter.
God, I hate that word.
“Charles? What’s going on?” A feminine voice calls out from the other room, tinged
with worry. A few seconds later, a beautifully petite woman steps into the foyer, and my breath catches in my throat. The resemblance is unmistakable.
It’s my mom.
My heart twists in my chest. Something instinctual makes me want to run to this woman I never knew growing up, the woman who carried me in her own womb for nine months, the woman who easily gave me up, but my feet are planted to the floor. I don’t fucking know her, no more than I know the man standing in front of me.
When her husband doesn’t answer, Maria looks over at the rest of us. Her gaze meets mine, and it takes her less time than it took Charles to recognize my features. She jerks backward, her face dissolving into shock. Her mouth falls open, a faint tremor going through her entire body.
“Sabrina…” She whispers the word, her voice shaking. “Sabrina…”
When she says my name—the name they gave me, not the person I am now—she breaks. But her expression isn’t full of panic, anger, and guilt like her husband’s is.
Instead, shocked joy blooms across her face.
Tears stream down her cheeks as she rushes toward me with open arms.
21
I stiffen, my body reacting as if she’s running toward me with a knife or a loaded gun.
The look on her face makes my heart twist, but this isn’t meant to be some loving reunion. I’m not coming back home for the first time since leaving for college. No. I’m seeing my mother and my father for the first time since they traded me away like a piece of property.
Maria tries to hug me, but I back up without thinking, and the Sinners close ranks to stand in front of me. Their faces are hard, their postures tense and ready for a fight. Maria stumbles to a halt, looking at the three men with confusion and a touch of fear. She tears her gaze from me to look over at Charles.
“What’s going on?” she demands. Her tone is desperate, almost panicked now. No one answers her question, and she shifts her focus back to me. “Is it really you?” she whispers. “Please, God, let it be you. My baby. You came back.”
My throat is dry. I can’t talk. I manage a nod, but I can’t say anything, not when I take in the tears streaming down her pale face, streaking her perfectly applied mascara. Her lips tremble as she blinks at me, and she looks both hopeful and scared, as if she’s afraid someone is going to wake her up from a dream.
She looks so fucking relieved to see me that it makes my heart crack.
It’s like… like she loved me. Loves me.
I can take my father’s disdain, his belligerent shock, because I can respond to that in the way I was prepared to—with the wrath and anger that’s been boiling inside me for years.
But this? Maria’s reaction? It’s nothing like what I was expecting. After all, if a parent cares so little about their fucking kid that they’re willing to trade them as collateral, surely they wouldn’t shed a single tear over that child.
“I thought you were gone,” Maria whispers hoarsely. “We never knew if you ran away, or if someone abducted you. But we searched for you, baby. We hired so many detectives. I wanted so badly to find you. I… I tried to hold out hope, but they said the leads all dried up. That there was no hope. That you’d never come back.”
She breaks into a heaving sob, and I realize with a flash of horror that she… she doesn’t know.
Either she’s a fucking Oscar-worthy actress, or she genuinely doesn't know what my father did. I glare at him over my mother’s shoulder, but he looks just as cold, just as distant as he did when we first barged in. I’m not sure why that hurts, but it does.
“Mom.” My mouth stumbles over the word, and it sounds strange and awkward. “That’s not what happened. I never ran away. And I wasn’t abducted either. I was taken—no, I was given away. I was given away by the man standing behind you.”
Charles moves as I speak, his footsteps ringing on the stairs as he descends them quickly. His face is twisted into a grimace, and his eyes flashing with anger.
“What… what are you talking about?” Maria shakes her head, looking lost.
“Maria, don’t listen to her,” Charles commands, his voice hard.
Ignoring his words, I point at my father as he takes the last step and reaches the ground floor. “He traded me as collateral in exchange for help from Alan Montgomery. His business was failing, and he needed a miracle. So he fucking bought one. And the price he paid was me.”
When I finish speaking, I watch in silence a few seconds as Maria begins to register what I’m saying. I watch the emotions on her face shift from confusion to horror as she puts the events together on her own timeline—the business collapsing, the debts that needed to be paid, the disappearance of her own daughter, and finally, the business making a miraculous recovery.
Rage simmers in me, barely contained or controlled. I thought my parents were both in on this sick arrangement, but it somehow makes me more angry to know that my father lied to my mother about it. He managed to convince her that I was kidnapped or that I ran away. He probably faked an entire fucking search for me, telling her he’d hired the best detectives he could get and knowing all the while that they’d never find anything.
Fucking bastard.
The rage in me seems to have infected my mother too, because she whips around violently, facing my father.
“You…” Her whole body vibrates with anger as she raises her voice. “Tell me this isn’t true, Charles. Tell me she’s fucking lying.”
He flinches at her choice of language, so vulgar for such a beautiful, polished woman. “Maria. Stay calm—”
Her voice cuts across his like a knife, sharp and biting. “Tell me you didn’t sell our daughter to save our business.”
Charles hesitates. It’s just a small pause, but it says more than words ever could.
Her face crumples, pain morphing into anger and back again, as if she’s being torn apart from the inside out by her emotions.
“No.” She makes a keening, broken sound. Her head shakes back and forth. “No. No, you couldn’t have. You didn’t… you wouldn’t. Not our baby girl. Our sweet Sabrina.”
“Listen to me, Maria.” He stays rigid and controlled, his tone calm and almost reassuring, as though if he can just get her to listen, she’ll understand that he did the right thing. As though he can explain it all away and make it better. “Everything I did, I did for you and Sabrina, for the sake of our family. Yes, I did make a deal with Alan Montgomery. It was the only way I could keep us from going under. But I had a plan. I was paying off the debt I owed him, and we would’ve gotten Sabrina back if she hadn’t run away.”
He gives me a cold glare, as if this is all my fucking fault. My hands curl into fists, the urge to punch him building inside me until it’s almost impossible to hold back.
But I never get the chance.
“You bastard!” Maria screams, lunging at him.
In less than a second, rage seems to consume her. She does exactly what I wanted to, beating her fists against Charles’s chest, scratching at him like a feral animal. He raises his hands, stumbling backward as he tries to shake her off. But he can’t. She moves with him, and even though she’s small, she’s fucking vicious.
I shouldn’t feel darkly satisfied as I watch her attack her husband, but I do.
Maybe I did get my temper from her, after all.
“Maria.” Charles finally catches her wrists, halting her attack. He tries to look down at her imperiously, but the effect is a little weakened by the trail of blood running down his cheek and his mussed up hair. “Stop this. You need to stop. This isn’t going to help anything. It won’t do any good.”
“Good?” she shrieks, struggling against his hold as she glares at him with flashing eyes. “Don’t talk to me about good, you… you…” Her body deflates a little, and a sob falls from her lips. “How could you do it, Charles? How could you sell our daughter in a business deal? You never told me. I would never have agreed to that! How could you think that’s what I wanted?”
“That�
�s precisely why I didn’t tell you,” he growls, his eyes narrowing as he releases her wrists and steps back, out of range of her fingernails. “Because I knew you wouldn’t be able to see the bigger picture. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement, Maria. It was never—”
“I don't care!” Tears stream down her cheeks as she lunges toward him again. “I don't care if it was supposed to be temporary. How could you do it?”
“It doesn’t matter now. It’s done.” I raise my voice to cut over their argument, my tone laced with bitterness. It gets my mother’s attention enough to make her stop fighting, and my father just stares at me. I meet his gaze head on. “You can’t undo what you did, and I’m not here to ask you to try. I’m not here to fix what isn’t fixable. I’m not here to absolve you.”
“Then what do you want?” Charles asks, his voice hard.
“I want your help,” I tell him bluntly. “You might be the only person I know who can help us take Alan Montgomery down and put this all to rest—once and for all.”
“No.” His answer is immediate, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he speaks.
I cock an eyebrow. “No?”
“You don’t realize the power he holds, Sabrina,” he says, talking to me as if I’m a child who can’t possibly understand. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do to Alan Montgomery, but it won’t work. There’s a reason he’s the man people go to when they’re desperate. He wields more power than anyone else in Hawthorne. He could destroy me. He could destroy you.”
Believe me, asshole, I know.
I’m about to give him examples of all the ways I’ve seen Alan flex his power, but my mother interjects before I can even open my mouth.
“You’ll do it, Charles. You’ll help her.”
His face contorts with irritation as he turns to his wife. “Maria, you don’t understand—”
“Oh, I understand plenty.”