Page 2 of Delta Force Defender

She’d always known her father was a bad man.

Still, it was something else to find all those articles detailing the criminal acts he’d been accused of over the course of his long career. She thought sometimes that a good daughter would have been appalled, disbelieving.

But she’d looked at her father’s mug shot in an article from the front page of theBoston Globe, and she’d believed. She’d known. He was exactly as bad as they claimed he was, and probably worse, and that likely meant she was bad, too. Deep in her blood and bones, no matter what she did.

Every year they failed to catch him in the act, the bolder and more vicious he became. And the more she accepted that his DNA lived in her, too.

Because if Julia were as brave as she pretended she was when she was across town on a pretty campus where she could squint her eyes and imagine she was someone else’s daughter, she would have called the FBI herself.

But she wasn’t brave. She didn’t point the car in some other direction, drive for days, and disappear. Instead,she was obediently driving home to face her father’s rage. And the back of his hand. And whatever other treats he had in store for her.

Her throat might be dry with fear and her heart might be pounding, but she was still doing what he wanted. In the end, she always did.

All things considered, maybe Lindsay’s grim acceptance was the better path. Julia liked to put on a good show, but they were both going to end up in the same place.

Her stomach was killing her. Knots upon knots.

She eased her car to the curb and cut the headlights, then forced herself to get out into the cool night air. It was a force of habit to park a ways down the block. There were always flat-eyed men coming and going from the house, and it would go badly for her if she inconvenienced any of them. And Mickey was never satisfied with small displays of strength when bigger ones could cow more people and show off his cruelty to greater effect.

In his circles, the crueler he was—especially to his own family—the more people feared him. And fear was what made Mickey come alive.

She leaned against the closed car door and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It was cold enough that she wished she’d worn more than a T-shirt, but there was a part of her that liked the chill that ran along her arms. It would keep her awake. Aware.

You couldn’t really dodge one of Mickey’s blows, but there were ways of taking it, and falling, that lessened the damage.

She’d learned that lesson early.

She pulled up Lindsay’s number and texted her, announcing that she’d parked and was about to walk in to face the music.

Don’t come in,her sister texted back almost instantly.It’s weird in here.

A different sort of prickle worked its way down the back of Julia’s neck and started winding down her spine. Her hair felt as if it were standing on end in the breeze, except there wasn’t a breeze.

I’m coming out,Lindsay texted.

Julia found herself holding her breath, though she couldn’t have said why. The night felt thick and dark, suddenly, though she could see the streetlights with her own eyes. Something about that caught at her, and she moved away from the nearest pool of light to the shade of a big tree. She stood there, keeping still. She put her back to the trunk, hoping that if anyone were looking, they wouldn’t see her.

And she tried really hard to convince herself that she was just being paranoid.

But when her sister appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her arm, she bit her own tongue so hard to keep from screaming that she tasted copper.

“What are you doing?” she whispered fiercely at Lindsay. “You scared the—”

“You should go back to your dorm,” Lindsay said, and this time, there was something stark in her gaze. Too much knowledge, maybe. Something unflinching that made the knots inside Julia’s belly sharpen into spikes. “And stay there.”

And all the things they never talked about directly seemed to swell in the cool spring night. The truths that no one spoke, for fear of what it might unleash. Not just because they were afraid of Mickey and his friends, whom he often called his brothers but treated with far more respect than he gave the members of his actual family, but because acknowledging a thing made it real.

It had never occurred to Julia before this very moment how deeply and desperately she’d clung to the tattered shreds of her denial.

She and her sister stared at each other in the inkyblack shadows of the ominous night, and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was the dark that threatened her, or if it was the truth.

Whatever was coming, there was no escaping it. Had she always known that? Whether it was this night or another night or twenty years down a road that ended up with her seeing her mother’s tired, fearful face in the mirror, this life she’d been so determined to imagine as a path she could choose had only ever been a downward spiral. To one single destination.

Sooner or later, they were all going to hell. Or hell was coming for them. It didn’t matter which. She was going to burn either way.

Julia wanted to throw up.

But at the same time, a heady sort of giddiness swept over her, and it took her a second to realize what it was. Freedom, of a sort. Or relief, which amounted to the same thing.

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