What Are You Afraid Of? (The Agency #2)(91)

No. She might not be able to predict what would set him off, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t prepared to accept that someone had found the letters that had been written to her own mother and simply copied them. He wanted to believe his mother had been special to his father. Whoever that might be.

“Okay,” she forced herself to mutter.

His narrow face hardened, but he accepted her pretense of agreement.

“The letters show they were in a relationship. There was no way he wouldn’t have realized that his lover was pregnant and that the baby was his.” He pivoted away, resuming his pacing. A manic tension hummed in the air around him. “He was deliberately denying my rightful inheritance.”

Carmen jerked, watching him pace toward the forklift at the end of the bay and back again. Had Griff been right in the first place? Was all this horror and blood about money?

“You want an inheritance?”

He waved a hand, annoyed by her inability to understand what he was saying.

“I want what was denied me,” he insisted, lifting his hand to point an accusing finger in her direction. “What you had.”

She furrowed her brow. “What did I have?”

“Parents who loved you.”

She shrugged. She couldn’t argue with that. Whatever had been going on between her parents, it had never lessened their affection for her. She’d spent her childhood confident in the belief that she was a treasured member of her family. Something she’d taken for granted until it had been snatched away from her.

Still, she’d seen how Ellen had been with her only son. She might have been a stern woman, but she’d been devoted to Ronnie. In fact, now that Carmen was older, she could look back and see that the woman had kept him close to her side. Almost as if she didn’t want him out of her sight.

“Your mother loved you,” she said.

Ronnie slashed his hand through the air. “I wanted the right to my true name,” he rasped. “Can you imagine what it feels like to be the one cleaning up dog shit from the yard, or taking out the trash, while the princess is flouncing around in her new dress with a bunch of her snotty friends?”

The animosity spilled out of him, like an infected wound that was suddenly lanced. Clearly, he’d been hoarding his resentment for years.

“If you want my share of the inheritance, I’m happy to give it to you,” she said. “You said that I should have three million dollars from my parents’ insurance policy. You can have it all.”

“I don’t want money, I want respect,” he snapped. “I want my father to look me in the eye and tell me that he’s proud of me.”

An unexpected regret sliced through her heart. She’d spent the past fourteen years refusing to think about her father. It was too painful to try to reconcile the man she’d loved with the man who could murder her own mother. It wasn’t until she’d been discussing the past with Griff that she realized she’d locked away the good memories along with the bad. Which wasn’t fair to her father. Or her.

“It’s too late for that,” she breathed.

An odd expression twisted his face. “It wouldn’t have been too late,” he said, reaching up to rub his forehead. Was he in pain? Or sick? Well, beyond the obvious sickness of being a crazed lunatic. “He just wouldn’t listen to me,” Ronnie continued, seeming to speak more to himself than her. “If he’d just admitted the truth, then I wouldn’t have had to punish him.”

Her mouth went dry. That didn’t sound good.

“Is that why you kidnapped me?” She pressed against the wall, prepared to try to scramble away. “To punish my father?”

Without warning he chuckled with genuine amusement. Like she’d just told a funny joke.

“You don’t know anything,” he mocked.

“I already told you that.”

“Stupid girl.”

Carmen braced herself. Ronnie was becoming increasingly agitated. It was obvious in the jerky motions of his body and the muscle twitching beside his eye. She sensed he was ready and eager to hit her again.

Perhaps worse.

“How did you punish my father?” she asked, hoping to keep him distracted.

He hunched his shoulders, looking oddly vulnerable before he was deliberately stiffening his spine.

“I shot him.”

The words left his mouth and for a second Carmen thought it was the sort of delusional boast that a man would make who wanted people to believe he wasn’t a spineless coward. He could say he’d hidden in the bushes and used his BB gun to take a potshot at the lord of the manor. It wasn’t like her father was around to deny the lie.

Then the world tilted, and she was plummeting through darkness. Images streaked past her. Silvery threads of memory. A young girl crawling out of her bed and slipping through the shadowed house in search of her parents. Of that same girl fleeing in terror at the deafening blast of a shotgun.

Then the images shifted. Now she was in the kitchen where two broken bodies were crumpled on the tiled floor. A teenage Ronnie was standing in the center of the room with a shotgun in his hand, his grinning face splattered with blood.

The image began to crack. And then it shattered. Returning her to the chilled warehouse and the brutal awareness that everything she believed about her past was a lie.

And alone with the monster who was responsible for destroying her life.