Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 114260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 571(@200wpm)___ 457(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 571(@200wpm)___ 457(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
I knew this was coming. I’m prepared.
I nod.
“Violet, you told me when you came here, your father was an assassin. How did you find that out?
“I was only four when I first went into foster care, so I don’t remember much about the first few couples that had me. I was thrown around like so much baggage, really, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized someone fabricated a story around me. By the time I was ten, it was well accepted that my parents were killed in a car accident during a rainstorm. I didn’t argue with what people thought they knew. By then, I knew there was a reason for the lies and discrepancies.”
“Understood. I’m not surprised you were clever even as a child.”
I shrug. “I tried. Sometimes I succeeded and other times I didn’t. I was terrible in school…”
“Let me guess. Not because you weren’t academically gifted, but you had a hard time doing as you were told.”
I smile at the sardonic lilt in his voice. “How’d you know?”
He pinches my bare ass. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, baby.”
I smile. “So anyway… I was finally taken in by a minister and his wife.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my tone. “They made no pretense about liking me but had no qualms about taking me into their home. Their kids were sheltered and judgmental, and the years I spent with them were the most miserable of my life.”
Cain’s quiet while I tell him this. I stare at his screen, at the old police reports, and imagine I can see the police station, the officer who’s likely retired by now, filling out all the details and leaving so many blanks. “Tell me what they did to you.”
I can’t stop the shudder that runs through me, that runs through him, at the memories he pulls from me with those few little words. The memories I’ve tried so hard to keep hidden.
“No.”
Again, his arm tightens around me. No one says “no” to Cain, so when I do, it always seems to throw him for a loop.
“Violet.” Another warning tone, but the gentle caress of his thumbs across my thighs softens the rebuke. “I want to know.”
And just like that, I’m ten years old again, locked in the dark closet where they punished me. I didn’t have to do anything wrong to make them put me there. It was who I was they were trying to cleanse from me. It was the wife who beat me, when her husband wasn’t home. I wasn’t the only one—she beat all her children, quoting scripture as she did. None dared to cross her, and even the littlest one would flinch when her mother turned her way. But I bore the worst of it.
“Look at my back and tell me what you want to know,” I say. “That bitch told me she’d scourge the devil out of me and God, did she try.” I flinch at the memory.
I feel Cain’s fingers along my back. I don’t see them, but I never forget they’re there.
“Their names.”
“Cain, no.”
I know him. I know what he’ll do. He’ll make it his mission in life to punish them for the harm they did me, over a decade before he ever met me. His justice is swift and merciless. I’ve stared into his eyes after he’s killed, and I know when he feels it’s justified, there’s no remorse. My grim reaper in the flesh.
“I’ll find them, Violet. You know I will. I just wanted your buy-in before I do.”
I blow out a breath. Now that he knows, I can’t stop him.
He strokes my back until I relax, until I’m slumped against him.
“Now, baby. Tell me the rest, and we’ll get started.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Violet
It’s late into the night when we’ve compiled everything we know between the two of us.
It’s admittedly not much to go on.
I’ve known since childhood that my father was an assassin because I overheard the minister’s wife talking to her husband. They knew, somehow, and used the knowledge as justification for the way they treated me.
We scoured everything we could together; he’d made some progress before we even talked.
We have the names of the people who fostered me, all of them, including the ones who had me for the longest time.
As an orphan in the system, someone could’ve adopted me, and it was a question I struggled with for most of my childhood.
Why not? Why not me? Why were other kids in foster care adopted into homes, but never me?
I didn’t want to be part of the families that took care of me, not until I was a much older teen and found myself in the care of a family that treated me like a human being. But by then I was independent and headstrong and wanted nothing to do with ties to anyone.