Page 57 of Rake

“Her brother, then,” my father says, taking a deep breath. “Find a way to punish her, or I will, Finn, and you know it’ll be worse than anything even your sordid brain can come up with.”

I could kill my father right now for talking so cavalierly about hurting Sasha and Benjamin. For not seeing them as people, like he doesn’t see me as a person. But I won’t. He deserves suffering that death would end too quickly. I’ll figure something else out.

“Fine,” I say. “Anything else?”

“It won’t be as easy this time, boy. I told her what you did.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fortunate that you couldn’t be bothered to walk her out this morning once you’d used her. I ran into your latest conquest on the way into work. Let her know you’d had her grabbed and delivered to you like a piece of meat.”

She should’ve learned that from me.

Fuck.

Shame burns through me. It slicks my throat like so much bile, and I need to get the hell out of here before my father figures out I have any kind of feelings for Sasha. Before I vomit all over his desk.

“Better that she knows,” I say, pulling my legs in and standing up. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I’m sure you will.”

My father’s eyes follow me as I leave his office, that snide smile still on his face. I pass by a metal barrel filled with sand on the way to the parking garage and kick the absolute shit out of it. The thing is completely destroyed, spilling sand on the sidewalk when I’m done.

At least no one will slip there.

I’m still fucking furious when I get to my car. I want to tear my father’s head from his body. God, what must Sasha be thinking right now? She must hate me. I don’t want her to hate me and that scares the shit out of me. A cold chill runs up my spine as I imagine how angry, how violated she must feel. Because of what I did. What my father did to her was abominable, but what I did was worse. I acted on selfish bad faith and convinced this woman who’d been terrorized by my family to be vulnerable with me. And I couldn’t resist sleeping with her even after I knew what it would do to her if she found out what kind of a person I am.

I don’t want to be that person.

My father doesn’t expect me to succeed in taking care of his problem with Sasha. He doesn’t want me to—otherwise he wouldn’t have told her what I did and make the job even harder. He wants me to fail. At this point, I don’t think he’ll actually cut me off, because he enjoys keeping me in line so he can humiliate me at every turn.

And I keep playing along, doing petty little things to spite him until I can pull the rug out from under him for good. But is my revenge worth the pain I caused Sasha? Is it worth giving this innocent woman more fodder for her nightmares?

I lean against the leather seats and close my eyes. I was glad Sasha was gone when I woke up this morning. I didn’t want to have to deal with her feelings.

But the reality is that I didn’t want to deal with my own feelings. And now I wonder how she must have felt when she ran into my father, fresh from my bed. From her first time sharing herself in that way with someone.

And that person turns out to be a different kind of monster.

Fuck.

Now what? I’m glad I kept any emotion out of my reaction to my father’s orders. I didn’t want him to know that harming Sasha or her brother would bother me in any way. He wanted to hurt her for humiliating him, but it’d be extra sweet if he knew it’d get to me, too.

How do I fix this?

I need to talk to Sasha.

But how? She won’t want to see me, and it’s not like I can have P.J. muscle her back into my life.

Not that I would do something like that again.

And why would she believe anything I had to say? That fantasy of being with her, her honey gold hair spilling over my lap as I read to her, flashes across my mind and adds to my guilt.

A man like me has no right to dream of a future with someone like Sasha. Even the small, romantic moments we had are tainted by my impure motives. I don’t think I’ll be able to go back to the Athenaeum. I’d be destroyed remembering how she kissed me in that reading room with a sweetness I’d never earned.

I drive back to my apartment far too fast. It’s lucky I don’t get pulled over. Taking the stairs two at a time, I head to my office to think. There has to be an answer to this puzzle.

I get a terrible idea and call Siobhan.

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