Page 57 of The Devil Takes

From the moment my mother had died, actually.

My stomach churned as I recalled her face, tearing through the painful fog of time as I forced myself to remember the broken blood vessels she sported—the way she carried herself like a wounded animal, the exact same way I did. Her eyes ringed black. Lips split. The way she tucked me into bed with tears clumping her lashes and bruises smudged around her wrists.

No.

He hadn’t hurt me because I was an omega.

He’d hurt me because he couldn’t hurt her.

I was reeling the entire ride back to the greenhouse. Redhead, whatever her name was, looked concerned. She tried to get me to talk, but I couldn’t find the words to speak. My thoughts were all jumbled up, just tangles upon tangles, as she pulled to a stop in the employee parking lot and I immediately burst out of the vehicle.

Half an hour later—sickness be damned—I was on my way to my hometown for the first time in almost a year.

Everything was shaky, my world turned upside down. But anger fueled me as I glared down the shaggy fields on either side of the road, intimidating scarecrows and farm houses, the sputter of my heart louder than the engines.

All this time.

All this time, I’d thought this was my fault.

That by shocking my dad by presenting omega, I’d committed the ultimate sin. Unforgivable in his eyes. I’d slapped Band-Aid after Band-Aid on our interactions, let my love for him blind me from the truth.

The truth was, I hadn’t done anything to deserve the way he treated me. There was nothing I could’ve done to stop it.

I’d always told myself I knew that.

But it wasn’t until I realized the powerlessness of the situation that it really hit me that it was true. I’d been born an omega. Why he’d hidden that information from me, I’d never understand. Why had it taken me twenty-one fucking years to realize that he was a sad fucking man, lying to get me to excuse his behavior because he wanted to me to believe it was my fault? He’d fucking known from the second the doctors had shown him the paperwork what I was.

His excuses were just that, excuses. To cover up the fact that he was an abusive prick who thought violence was the only way to release the hate that festered like mold around his heart.

He’d made me a target, and I’d let him.

Usually, when I was angry at him, I thought of the way he laughed, the way he sat silently in his recliner, beer in hand, a smile on his lips as he watched my brothers and I beat each other’s asses driving fictional cars into each other. But this time the memories didn’t soothe me. His humor seemed dark now. His smile fake.

Beneath it all was a monster I had never let myself confront.

The truth was, I had no power to change him. He was, and had always been, the kind of person who used his fists to make a point. No matter what I did, no matter how I’d presented, there would’ve been nothing I could do to change that. I’d always been destined to be his punching bag. I could get good grades, a good job. I could hide who I was my entire fucking life, wither and fade away, hug the wall to avoid his notice—but it was pointless.

Maybe I should’ve realized this before.

Maybe I really was as stupid as he said I was.

But I acknowledged during that whirlwind of a drive that all along I’d been hoping and praying that there was a plausible explanation behind his madness. That there was a purpose to his anger. Because I loved him, I wanted to believe that he wasn’t a bad man. That it wasn’t his fault I was just…bad.

But I knew that wasn’t true now.

My car crunched along the gravel as I pulled into the driveway, ignoring the curious looks I received from the trailer next to ours. I’d spent most of high school living here. We’d lost the house just like Dad had lost his jobs, so this had become my home as much as it was my prison. After Mom died, I shared a bed with Marv and spent afternoons inhaling dry cereal and staying out of my dad’s way.

A shadow in my own home.

Surviving on scraps of love because it was all I’d ever had.

Hard to know you’re eating shit if you’ve never eaten anything else.

I stared at the missing shingles skipping like a checkerboard across the battered trailer roof. Dad’s truck was missing. And my mother’s flowers I’d religiously replanted along the bottom of the foundation when I was seventeen had long since withered, just brittle husks ringing the white siding like a graveyard of everything good I’d ever done here.

I sat in my car for a while, unable to bring myself to move.

Because I knew the second I did, nothing was going to be the same.