Burned (Devil's Blaze MC, #2)(54)

Torch’s voice is stressed and I can hear his worry… for me. That feeling hits my stomach again. Damn him!

“They won’t come after us,” I say.

“Trust me, they will.”

“Not without stealing a car,” I point out. “Even then, they’d have to change some tires.”

“What are you talking about?”

I flip open the console between us and show him my Bowie Knife I keep there. “That’s why it took me so long to pick you up. I slashed the front tires on their bikes and then slashed the four cars in the parking lot. Even managed to get the two on the side that I assume belong to the waitress and cook.”

“Fuck me like a whore in church on Sunday!” he exclaims, then observes me. “I think I underestimated you, Katydid.”

“Most people do,” I admit without bitterness. It’s just a fact of life. Torch shakes his head and looks out the window, growing silent. “What are you thinking about?”

“That if Skull hadn’t killed your father,” he answers, “I’d like to be the one to gut the *.”

My hands freeze on the steering wheel. “Skull killed my father?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t want to find something to like him for,” I grumble.

“Where’d you learn all this shit, Katie?”

I tense up at his question. I keep my vision on the road in front of us and tighten up my hands. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb, sweetness. We both know you’re smart as a tack.”

His words do a little more towards making my stomach feel weird and releasing that tight rein I have on letting Torch all the way in. It should scare me, but it’s starting to feel normal. I’m starting to wish my walls were down. I want to let Torch in. No one has ever thought of me as smart before, except maybe Bethie, but she loves me.

“My father… was like two different men,” I finally reveal. “When he and my mother were first together, he wanted to live a normal life. He tried to leave the family. Who knows? It might have worked out well.”

“Why didn’t it?”

“My mother was a money-grubbing whore, maybe? Can’t say for sure. I’m judging from the many sermons my father gave while making sure his daughter didn’t walk in her footsteps.”

“What do you mean?”

“When my father left the ‘family’ for her, things were fine until my mother discovered that without the family, she wouldn’t have summer homes in France, credit cards with no limits, no Mercedes, no maids or chauffeurs. In short, my mother hated everything about life in suburbia.”

Torch processes this. “She made your father go back in?”

“If only it were that simple,” I say with a sigh, wondering why some twisted part of me actually feels sorry for Redmond. I shouldn’t; he beat whatever f*cks I gave out of me long ago. “She decided, since Redmond wouldn’t keep her in diamonds, furs, and private planes, she’d find someone who would.”

“His twin,” Torch says right on cue.

“Yep. Old Uncle Edmond was knee-deep and climbing the ranks in the family that Redmond had turned his back on. Isabel latched onto him and never looked back, even when my father told her he was taking the oldest daughter with him.”

“But, you’re twins…”

“Oh, see, but the family has a system,” I point out. “Redmond came out first, so he had the position first. Edmond only got to be head of the family because Redmond didn’t want it.”

“So, by keeping you, Redmond was pretty much securing the next generation?”

“In his mind, yeah. Until he realized that having me would be a liability. Then, I was better off dead.”

“And… that’s why he said you died?”

“Yep. I went from being a liability to being a secret weapon.”

“If that’s true, then why did he push to get Beth back?”

By this time, I’m just driving down the road. I’m going on autopilot, lost in the memories and the pain. Torch thinks he’s getting the whole story. He’s getting the briefed-up, prettied-up version. He can’t know of the pain of knowing that your father hated you, that he saw you as stupid and useless because you had one leg longer than the other that caused you to limp. Finding out I suffered from dyslexia and ADHD together was the final straw. I was stupid and deformed. That’s when I was no longer a weapon, but a tool to get his good daughter back. That’s when he came up with the plan to use me to trap Beth.

“Let’s just say that a daughter with a bum leg—among other problems—was expendable. The heir to the throne, so to speak, had to be beyond reproach.”

“What a f*cking twisted…”

“Monster,” I finish for him, because that’s what my father really was. At his core, he was a complete monster.

“I’m sorry, sweetness.” Torch reaches to squeeze my hand.

I don’t know what I have going on with Torch. It has me constantly confused, but it feels… good. It feels right.

It feels safe. No wonder I want to keep him. Forever.