Dad hummed. “Once.” He swallowed so hard, I heard it. “I needed to do that once.”
“When?” I asked, the question tasting like another bad decision.
“I never met your mother in England,” he started, and I felt every violent piece of me suddenly grow quiet. “She was stolen from a drug runner who owed one of our members an extreme sum of money. My father flew us here, where most of the heinous shit is done”—he paused—“was done, and told me my test had arrived.”
I’d met my grandfather exactly twice when I was a kid, and both times, he’d been an insufferable royal prick. He died from an accidental overdose when I was seven.
Dad shifted, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. “I was petrified, damn near pissed my pants.” He exhaled a humorous breath. “I snorted two lines of my father’s coke on the plane and emptied the minibar in the limousine on the way to The Ribbon. I was…”
He cleared his throat, and I could no longer feel the blood in my lips due to biting them too hard.
“They, ah, they filmed it so people could watch without being in the room. She was already there, half-drugged but aware of what was about to happen. They told her she’d be free to go after, and her boyfriend’s debt would be wiped. Still, she shook so hard her teeth clacked. She cried, yet I still…”
He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to.
“I tried to find her after, to apologize. Hell, I even handed myself into our local police station back home. But they were already informed the event had been consensual.” He said the word as though it were a joke.
And it was.
“I’d thought I knew how far our influence ran, but it was that afternoon, face-to-face with the law, that I realized just how little I really knew. That we were, that we are, the law. I was sent home with a pat on the fucking back,” he spat the words. “As though I’d told a good old joke.”
“Dad,” I tried to interrupt, my vision so very clear when I so desperately wished the ceiling was still dancing.
He didn’t let me. “Four months later, I was brought to a meeting. She was pregnant. She was now a liability. So I said I’d take care of it, and I married her. But Lizzie, even after being plucked from the dregs of London and thrown into wealth, she wasn’t happy. I tried to change that, and in doing so, I grew to love her, and she grew to like me. She forgave me, she’d said. But I knew she couldn’t love me when she could never shake the fear of Nightingale and what they’d had me do to her. Of what they could do to anyone.”
Quiet swept in on a freezing mist.
I wasn’t sure what to say. He’d raped my mother. I was a product of an initiation.
A thing she should despise, yet she never had.
The blank stares, the forced serene smiles, and the flinching every time my father so much as hinted at the organization… it all became irreparably obvious.
People were right to fear what they did not know.
But those who’d experienced the horrors of the unknown for themselves and still could not look it in the eye were never going to find the balance between night and day.
Fern did that.
Fern did what I never thought anyone or anything else could do.
She chased shadows to dance in the sun, and she dragged me with her, exposing me to a balance I never thought imaginable.
Love.
Dad was watching me as I choked on the silent acknowledgment. “I know you might think me a monster, and that’s okay. For the rest of my life, I will carry the shame of what I did to her.”
“As do we all,” I reminded him.
“Since then, I fought to ensure anything like that was consensual. That there could be no disputing it. Since then, everything is kept within Nightingale, no outsiders, and everyone is tested, every precaution taken.”
Swallowing, I nodded. “You’re no monster.” I grinned when his expression laxed into surprise. “But you’re an obnoxious prick, and I’m sorry she didn’t love you back.”
Laughter, rough and unused, burst out of him. “You had to have gotten it from somewhere.”
“Let’s hope Henry takes after Mom.”
It felt weird to say that, to call her that, but kind of good, too. The type of foreign that meant you missed something.
“When are they releasing her?”
“She doesn’t want to leave,” Dad said, sounding resigned. “She’s made friends, and I guess she… well, she feels safe there, Jude.” He sighed. “And after years of being afraid, even in her own home, I have no fucking idea how to take her away from that.”
“So you don’t,” I said, unsure and guilt-wracked, but knowing it was right. “So we leave her there.” I licked my lips. “I’ll go see her. I’ll make more of an effort, and hopefully, with time, she’ll find herself ready.”
Dad frowned at me. “You’ll see her?”
“Well, not tomorrow.” Or the next day. “I’ll be busy with some asshole named hangover.”
He huffed, rising from the bed. “Drink the water, and don’t go anywhere else tonight.”
I wanted to see Fern, but I knew going home like this and trying to reason with her wasn’t a sound idea.
“Dad?” I called, and he turned back in the doorway, half shrouded in shadows. “I need a favor.”
Dad drove me home the next day.
The car ride had been silent as I rummaged through every dark place inside my mind, trying to organize it all into some type of order so I could explain.
I stood before our front door, not sure I was ready. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready, but for her, I’d suit up and do it anyway.
Florence Welch blared from the Bluetooth speakers in the living room. Fern was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, and…
Setting shit on fire.
“What the fuck?” Every planned speech I’d fumbled around with vanished.
“Oh, hi,” she said, radiating nothing but calm as she plucked another piece of paper from the cardboard box on the counter and held the lighter to its corner.
It wasn’t just a piece of paper, though. It was a picture of me sleeping.
Leaning against the doorway, I slid my hands inside my pockets. I was still wearing the same jeans as the night before, but I’d showered and changed my shirt. I’d made sure to leave a couple behind, as well as briefs, when I’d moved out.
I’d make a mental note to take more clothes there for whenever I stayed over, but I didn’t want to have to.
This was our home. As new and tense and strange as it all was, it had become a home all the same, and Fern was the reason for that.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said, my heart swelling my throat. “Not just for last night, but for every cruel, moronic thing I’ve ever said and done.”
Fern watched the crumbling remains in the kitchen sink. “That’s nice.”
I stared. Her hair was up with rogue tendrils brushing over her neck and shoulders. She was wearing a tank that read, I’d rather be dreaming, and what I knew had to be tiny as hell sleep shorts, judging by the glimpses of her thighs.
She wasn’t going to hear me. Wherever she’d gone, it was no place that was ready for apologies.