Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 79261 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79261 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 396(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
“Darlin’, I—”
“I’m a woman in a man’s world, and I have absolutely no voice. I do what I’m told, or I’m tortured. There’s no in-between with him. No gray area. He’s always right, and if you argue that, he’ll cut off your tongue. I’ve seen him do it. Come to think of it… there isn’t much I haven’t seen my father do. Including fucking his whores. He gets off on the kink of it. Sometimes he watches me too…”
“Jesus Christ…”
I was winded.
Hurting.
Trying to remain strong for her to confess this to me.
“Papi loves to watch his good girl take it in every hole, Jameson.”
I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat.
“In fact,” she stated in a sharp tone. “I’m certain the only reason he wanted me was to sell me off to whatever benefited him the most. He knew he could use me as a tool for his businesses, and my mom was powerless to stop him. She didn’t have anyone. All she had was him. All we ever had was him.”
She backed away, and I stepped toward her, afraid she would take off on me. She was a loose cannon at this point, and I had no idea where this could turn. I barely knew how to keep it together with everything she shared openly.
She lifted her hand, stopping me. Completely unfazed with my gun still aimed at her forehead.
“The first time he let someone touch me, I was eleven, and I didn’t understand what I was doing, only that I had to do it or else. He didn’t give a shit about the shame or the confusion that caused me. There was no talk about it. He dressed me in a babydoll dress with pigtails, and I knew the second my mother wasn’t with us that something bad would happen. Maybe it was my intuition trying to protect me. We drove to a house I’d never seen, and I followed him inside.”
“Sloan…”
“I was just left in a room with a man I didn’t know, asking me if I wanted some candy. Just like that, my innocence was ripped away from me. On the ride home, he threw some money on my lap and told me to buy myself whatever I wanted. That it was his gift to me for being his good girl.”
I swallowed hard.
“You understand how confusing that was for me, right? Wanting to please him so he’d be nice to me and maybe nice to my brothers and mom too.”
With the coldest, detached voice I could muster, I strained, “And your mother?”
“She found out about it a few days later and went to confront him about it. He was on a call that he was making me sit on in his office. He wanted me to hear him try to sell my virginity for kilos of cocaine since my virginity was literally worth millions of dollars.”
What a sick fuck.
“I remember sitting there, and suddenly, I turned, and my mom stood by his double wooden doors that were usually closed. She turned as white as a ghost, and her body shook like a leaf. It looked like she’d aged twenty years overnight, and it’s the last way I remember her…”
My free hand fisted at my side.
“I was so scared that I immediately ran to her, throwing my arms around her legs as hard as I could, never wanting to let her go.”
Big.
Huge.
Fat tears fell down her cheeks.
“My brothers must have caught on because they came running, too. I remember begging. Just begging over and over again for I don’t know what. She threatened to leave him, yelling and calling him an animal, a monster, a sorry excuse of a man and father. It was the first time I’d ever heard her say anything like that. It was as if it was all pent up inside her, and she just exploded.”
I pictured it playing out in front of me. Everything she went through, trying to keep my own emotions at bay.
“All he did was walk toward her and laugh in her face. I’ll never forget that laugh for the rest of my life. It was such an evil villain laugh,” she choked out, barely hanging on by a thread. “Something in me snapped, and I screamed, ‘I love you, mami,’ and the next thing I knew, he lifted his gun and simply said, ‘I’ll kill you before you leave me.’ I was screaming bloody murder into her legs as he pulled the trigger. Her body fell backward, collapsing on the floor from the bullet between her eyes, and it took me with her.”
“Jesus… baby…”
“He let us mourn her. He let us cry onto her dead body as blood and brains gushed out of her, and then his men came in and took her away.” She shrugged again, wiping all the tears from her eyes, smearing her eye makeup across her face. “We never saw her again. There was no funeral. He simply buried her out back like a dog.”