“A Taser. Oh man, I’ve always wanted to do that!”
“Oh my god, they’re fucking illegal in Australia, you idiot!”
“So what? I just saved our lives. Besides, what were we supposed to do without a Taser? Beat him up Charlie’s Angels style? I can’t do that. I don’t know high kicks.”
Sam finally tore her hands from his and pressed her fingers to her temples. “What about calling the fucking police?”
“We did that and, hello, Scott’s dad was still going to burn us all to death?”
The sound of his name brought Scott to his feet. He walked over to his father and knelt on his back before pressing two fingers to the side of his neck. He could feel the flicker beneath meaty flesh.
“He’s alive,” he said, but neither sister acknowledged him.
“He could have set you on fire,” Sam said, striding toward her sister and trying to take the Taser from her. “He could have killed you!”
“But he didn’t, did he? Instead, he got Tased and fell down like a little bitch. God, why are you freaking out? I just redeemed myself for letting Nicole save me and the pups before.”
“That’s insane. You are insane!”
Scott listened without hearing. He wasn’t feeling a great deal and he wondered if this was shock, this jamming of all your emotional faculties. Still kneeling on his unconscious father’s back, he closed his eyes and saw the lighter flicking open, the tiny flame licking at the air.
“What the hell are you guys doing?” Nicole was standing at the back gate, soot darkening both her cheeks.
“Oh hey!” Tabby said, still chipper. “Everything’s all good now, I iced Scott’s dad with the Taser I bought in Savannah.”
“What? Why?”
“Um, revenge,” Tabby said patiently. “And safety. The two best reasons ever.”
“What the fuck?”
Even in his numb state, Scott could attest curse words sounded strange coming from Nicole’s mouth. He cleared his throat. “The cops will be here soon. Tabby should get out of here and hide the Taser before they show up.”
“Good point!” Tabby said brightly. “Come on, Nix, Sam, let’s get out of here.”
“Wait a second,” Sam met his gaze. “What are you going to say happened?”
“The truth,” Scott said. “That my father petrol-bombed your house because he’s had a longstanding vendetta against your family. I’m sure there’s plenty of evidence around and if there isn’t, I can tell them about the Polaroids he stole from your house when you were seventeen.”
Nicole gasped. “That was him?”
“It was.” Scott knew he sounded brassy and posh, cheery almost, but he couldn’t stop it. “I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot of things my father’s done to your family over the years, all things the police can discuss with him once he’s arrested.”
“Sure.” Nicole looked queasy. “Come on, Tabby, let’s get out of here. We’ll need to add an ambulance to make sure Scott’s dad’s okay.”
“Maybe we should stay and make sure Scott’s dad doesn’t need another zap?”
“No,” Sam said. “Get out of here. Check on the puppies.”
Tabby and Nicole headed for the side gate, leaving him and Sam alone with his father’s unconscious body. Sam frowned at his father’s incapacitated form. “I didn’t know Tasers knocked people out.”
“I think he hit his head when he fell,” Scott said in his brassy, posho voice. “He’ll be fine. We shouldn’t move him, at any rate. We’ll just wait for the police to arrive. Sorry about all this, by the way, Samantha. I’m truly, very sorry.”
Sam gave him an odd look. “That’s okay…so you, um, thought something like this might happen, huh? Back at the office?”
“I must have,” Scott heard himself say. “Not that I thought…but we can talk about this later. You should probably go look after your sisters. Make sure they’re okay.”
Sam frowned. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No,” Scott said honestly. That would require knowing what he was doing and he had no idea what he was doing. He felt numb, like a dentist had shot his whole body through with Novocain. Sam looked at him, and though he could see the disappointment and confusion in her eyes, he had no idea what to say. His father had done this. By the sounds of things, he’d done everything. Beyond an apology, what did he have to offer this beautiful, clever, unfairly victimized woman?
“This whole situation really is a clusterfuck, isn’t it?” Sam said, mirroring his thoughts.
“It is. It makes you wonder what might have happened if my family had never moved here. If we’d gone somewhere else or just stayed in London.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Sam’s face. “Is that what you wished had happened? That we’d never met?”
“No, but you have to admit it would have stopped a lot of hurt. This is all my fault. I knew he was going round the twist. I should have called the police, or my aunt or someone. Instead, I just let him burn down your shed and almost your house.” Scott gave a loud, plummy laugh and Sam looked shocked. “Scott, I don’t blame you.”
“You should. I couldn’t protect you when I was a kid or a teenager, and now I can’t protect you as a man. I didn’t tackle my dad, I didn’t hit him. In the end, the only reason he didn’t burn your house down is because your s-s-sister had a t-t-t-t—FUCK!”
Scott rubbed his hand across his mouth, full of molten, white-hot fury. The stutter. The fucking stutter. What was wrong with him?
“Are you okay?” Sam asked, her expression fearful.
“I’m. Fine,” he said, enunciating his words very clearly. “I never stuttered once while I was in England, I have no idea why the hell I keep doing it now.”
His father groaned, struggling a little beneath his knee.
Sam jumped back with a shriek. “He’s awake!”
“He is,” Scott took his father’s hands and bundled them behind his back. “I’ll tie him up with his belt but maybe you should go see if the police are here?”
But Sam was already moving toward the gate, her black hair catching the morning sun as she walked. Scott watched her go, a bead of regret penetrating his numbness. He’d fucked up today and Sam knew it. It was all over between them. She wouldn’t tell him right away, she wasn’t that cruel, but it was undoubtedly over, and he ought to be glad. He and his family had hurt Samantha and her loved ones enough.
Scott returned his attention to his father, sliding his belt from his pants and binding his wrists together, refusing to think of Sam or feel anything at all.
Chapter 20
In the hours that followed the fire, Sam sat on her bed with her ice cream phone and dialed every number in the battered red address book her father kept. She called his great aunts and old school friends and—embarrassingly—an old lover from the 80s but no one had any idea where he was.
“You don’t understand,” Sam said with increasing desperation. “We had a fire at the shop today. I need to talk to him.”
The response to this was always some version of ‘sorry, I can’t help you. Also, maybe go have a lie down, yeah? You sound a bit crazy.’
Sam felt a bit crazy. Whenever she stopped for even a second, she saw the burnt-out shed and Greg Sanderson’s blank gaze as he flicked his lighter open. Those eyes that were the exact shape and color as Scott’s.
When the police arrived, Scott stayed with his father, accompanying him to St Michaels Hospital where he’d been taken for a psychological assessment. That was understandable, but Sam had the feeling he wanted to get away from her. She knew he was blaming himself for what happened and that made her ache for him. He’d never had a say in being born to a horrible, abusive father and no one could have guessed he would try to get revenge by burning their house down, nearly killing her sisters and six puppies in the process.
Fucking Greg.
It was hard not to hate him for what he’d done and hope wherever he was, he was suffering. But, thinking that way made
her feel small and alone. Whatever his crimes, he wasn’t right in the head and she didn’t want to loathe him. She wanted to talk to her dad. He would show her the big picture, give her the strength to endure all this ugliness.
She’d been alone for most of the afternoon. After Scott left in the ambulance, there was a haze of police demands and metallic smoke. Tabby vanished with the dogs, Noah arrived, heard Gil ran away and promptly left to ‘have a word with him.’
The fire brigade declared the shop structurally sound, but the police urged them to cancel all their tattooing appointments for the next three days while they investigated the crime, which would net them a loss of almost seven thousand bucks.
As she and Nicole debated how they were going to rebook so many clients, Aaron, the cheating fucklord, barged through the door. Upon hearing about the fire, he’d caught the first plane to Melbourne, though he didn’t seem interested in comforting Nicole so much as giving her shit for leaving Adelaide—as her presence was the reason Greg Sanderson flipped his lid and tried to burn down their building.
Sam, slightly relieved to have someone to direct her anger at, told Aaron the firebombing was bad enough without having to see him, and to take an extremely long walk into the sea. Nicole was irritated by this and promptly left to have an ‘emergency talk’ with Aaron, because apparently their relationship was worth prioritizing right now.
So she was as she’d been a month ago—alone. No Scott, no Tabby, no Nix and no Dad. No shed or back door, either, so worse than she’d been a month ago. And it looked like things were going to stay that way. Nicole would move back to Adelaide and resume her subjugation. Tabby would wander off into the ether the way she always did. Her dad was still nowhere to be found and she and Scott weren’t going to come back from this dad-arson-childhood-revelation thing. He hadn’t even called and it had been hours since she’d left him a voicemail.
Sam did something stupid. She opened her laptop and searched Google for Silver Daughters Ink. She’d gotten a few visits and calls from trash journalists wanting an insider perspective on the arson story. Sam had refused an interview, but they’d reported it, anyway. The police hadn’t given them any solid information, so the stories were mostly filled, but the cameramen had gotten a few pictures of her moving around the shop. She looked fucking awful—which was probably a revenge move on the journalists’ behalf. Her mood only got worse when she read comments.
“Wouldn’t f**k this tattood botch with your dads dyck.”
“Women with tattoos are emotionally damaged. They’re more implusive and statisticaly way more likely to have STDS. This is a FACT.
“God what a cunt.”
Most of them were about whether the commenter would or would not fuck her and how women with tattoos were gross sluts, but there were a few crackpot theories about why the studio had been burned down. The most popular was that they were a front for a sex trafficking ring. That theory had been expanded on Twitter where there was a #daughtergate hashtag trending with over a thousand contributions. Just the kind of publicity she needed a day out from the Fadeout Festival.
Sam slammed her laptop shut and wondered if Scott’s boss, Dragon McJizzcrackers, had watched the news. That would liven up any Christmas parties she’d be attending in the future, or more likely inspire Scott to dump her even sooner.
She lay back and stared at the Starry Night design she and her dad had painted on the ceiling when she was twelve. God she missed him. Sam rolled over and picked up the framed photo she kept by her bed. Her dad was sitting in a wicker chair in the same courtyard Scott’s dad had almost turned into a puppy inferno. Edgar DaSilva was grinning at the camera, Tabby on his shoulders, Nicole on his knee and herself sitting cross-legged at his feet, tilting her chin at the camera as though challenging it to a fight. Behind them was Scott Sanderson’s fence, and she smiled at the memory of the pretty blonde boy in his neat, grown-up clothes.
“I miss you,” Sam told the memory. Then she wondered what that even meant. She prodded her feelings until she came up with an answer—I feel your absence like a physical pain and I wish you’d come back. It wasn’t a perfect explanation, but it was close. She ached all over for Scott, for a time when things felt like they made sense, even if they didn’t. This was all so complicated and lonely. Her thoughts strayed back to Scott, how handsome he’d looked smiling at her in his office kitchen. She wanted to go back to that moment and bury her face in his chest. Let him carry her like a storybook knight, pretend like none of this other stuff had even happened—but it had, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Her crying was tapering off when she heard someone come home, slamming the front door and rattling keys.
“Helloooo?” Tabby called. “Where are you, beloved sister?”
“In my room,” Sam called, knuckling the tear trickling down her cheek. “Don’t come—”
Tabby burst into the room. She was holding two puppies and the other four were yipping at her ankles. Their mother followed with a look of canine indulgence, as though Tabby was just another of her brood.
“What are you doing? You were meant to be taking them to a kennel!”
“I know, but I didn’t, and before you get mad at me, I can tell you need cheering up and there’s nothing more cheery than puppas.”
Tabby jumped on the bed, placing the puppies on Sam’s legs and bending over to heft the rest of them onto the duvet.
“Tabby, they’ll get hair everywhere! And they’ll piss on me!”
“They won’t! They just had a wee downstairs. Just cuddle them close, they’ll help with your anguish!”
Sam looked down at the chubby black and gold puppies and had to admit she felt better. She picked up the little girl Scott liked, the one with the quirked eyebrow. The puppy nuzzled her cheek and she laughed out loud.
“That’s it,” Tabby said, tucking herself into Sam’s side. “Cuddle it out.”
She hoisted a particularly chubby puppy into the air. “You’re all such good doggies, aren’t you? You deserve to live long and prosperous lives, don’t you?”
Sam, who suspected she was being buttered up for a seven-dog adoption, decided to change the subject. “Where have you been?”
“Vets, and then I went and saw an old mate of mine. We watched the news thingy’s about the shop. They were shithouse. Those capitalist dogs don’t have any facts and they took shitty photos of you, too. They should have used the ones we have on Insta.”
“I don’t care about the pictures, I care about us being called a front for sex trafficking.”
“Oh yeah, don’t worry about all that shit.”
Sam looked across at her. “What do you mean?”
“I called a friend of mine. He knows some people and some things and let’s just say those tweets got buried under a bazillion bot tweets about you being in Fadeout Festival and some singer called Samantha Diaza. We’re back to relative online obscurity.”
Sam’s relief was cut with a little sadness. What was she going to do without Tabby around helping her with everything? “You’re a useful woman to know.”
“Yeah,” Tabby nestled two puppies on her belly. “Remember when I Tased a guy?”
Sam laughed. “How could I forget? You should still get rid of that, by the way, I don’t think the cops believed you when you said you pushed Scott’s dad over. You’re like two feet shorter and one hundred kilos lighter than him.”
“Ah, what are the pigs gonna do? Arrest me? Besides, I saved our lives. And the shop.”
“I don’t know about the shop seeing as we’re gonna lose a lot of money and fuck a lot of people over with the rescheduling.”
“We’ll be fine! It’s Fadeout tomorrow, and once you win, heaps of people will want to go on your wait list.”
Sam couldn’t dredge up the enthusiasm to smile. “If I win, or even place.”
“You will. Anyway, don’t worry about the money. I’ve got clients lined up for days. We’ll get SDI back in the black in no time.�
�
“Until you vanish, at which point, I’ll be left with six puppies, one dog, several conspiracy-laden social media accounts and a wait list that’s ten miles long.”
Tabby frowned. “What’s gotten into you? Like, you’ve never been the most optimistic person in the world, but you seem down.”
Sam would have laughed if she wasn’t so fucking drained. “Are you forgetting the thing where the father of the guy I’m sleeping with, who was also my childhood neighbor and nemesis, tried to burn our house down?”
“No, but like…there seems to be more going on with you right now. Like you’re super salty about me leaving even though I haven’t said anything about leaving.”
“But you will,” Sam shot back. “One minute you’re here tattooing full time, the next you’ll be in India learning hatha yoga until Delhi-belly sends you home again.”
“Hey, I was almost certain I wanted to be a yoga teacher until the turmeric fucked me over! And don’t take your trauma of being in love with the son of an arsonist out on me, okay?”
“What?” Sam spluttered. “Don’t be an idiot, I’m not in love with Scott.”
“You are, but it’s fine. Scottison’s in love with you, too. Also, his dad’s going to the nutshack, so he won’t be an issue. Just call your man and you two can get back inside each other, metaphorically-speaking. Also literally.”
The extent of Sam’s outrage was so large, she couldn’t speak. She just shoved her sister in the shoulder.
“Oi,” Tabby said peaceably. “No violence in front of the pups. They’ve witnessed enough bullshit today.”
“The pups have…? I cannot believe…” Sam shook her head. “You’re so irresponsible!”
“Oh, whatever,” Tabby said comfortably. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you need to lighten the fuck up. You’re a sexy young tattooist with a posh boyfriend and a business that only slightly got burned down. You should be getting hyped for Fadeout tomorrow, not sitting around weeping and trying to call dad.”
“How do you know I was trying to call dad?”
So Wild Page 30