Page 70 of Love is Angry

“What?”

“She doesn’t need you to fix it for her, dummy. She just needs you to be there for her. She needs a friend who knows her deep dark secret and doesn’t judge her for it. And Dad, well—he'll get his karma.”

I narrow my eyes at her suspiciously. “How?”

“The universe works in mysterious ways,” she says in a hokey voice.

“So should I start calling you miss universe?” I ask her dryly.

“Who says I’ll have anything to do with it? I’m a perfect angel, you know this. Devoted daughter, junior campaign manager, the whole bit.”

“That’s kind of why I wanted to talk to you,” I tell her. “Why are you doing that? If you know who and what and how he is, why are you helping him get elected?”

She gives me a pained look. “Because if I don’t, some other young, pretty, female, aspiring political major will get the job—complete with all the late nights at the campaign office and private meetings with the candidate. I’m his daughter—plus I’m in a wheelchair and I always have Steve around. That’s three things other girls don’t have.”

My stomach turns. “You’re throwing yourself on the grenade. What are you going to do once he’s in office? Be his intern? His secretary? You can’t insulate him from everyone, and trying to do it this way is just going to keep giving him more power to hurt more people.”

“Only if I do a good job,” she tells me with a weak smile. “Oh, nobody can tell. I’m doing as well as anyone expects a spoiled disabled teenager to do.”

“Ouch,” I say sympathetically. “The overachiever is throwing the match. That’s gotta sting.”

“Like a thousand billion ant bites,” she agrees ruefully. “But it’s okay. The experience alone will be enough to get me in on someone else’s campaign in the future. Maybe my own campaign eventually.”

I guess that’s something, but it doesn’t make up for what she’s having to do to get there. Somebody needs to take the bastard down. I know if she’d been able to come up with a plan to do it, she would have done it already—but now she’s trapped, serving his agenda. My father is a fucking monster, and he’s gotten away with it so far. But he and I are cut from the same cloth, aren’t we? If there’s anyone who can best him, it should be me.

I don’t sleep well. It’s hard to rest easy when my mind is roiling with the heavy weight of sacrifices made for my father by the women who are important to me. The unfairness of it all stokes my temper, and the sun rises on my foul mood. He requested a breakfast meeting, so I clean up and head downstairs. He’s already in the solarium, at the table he uses for official business when he wants to keep things friendly. Interesting—I guess I’ll just have to see where this goes.

I stop at the coffee cart before heading to the table. I look at my father, stare past his aging façade to the beast beneath the polished surface. The narcissist who takes what he wants, when he wants it. I wonder how many other women have paid the price of being interesting to this man; how many never made it into mother’s little book?

Is evil passed down genetically? How much of that darkness lives in me?

“Why are you staring like that?” Dad asks.

I finish pouring my coffee and sit across the large round table from him. This is the closest I feel like I can get without making it too tempting to ram my fist into his mouth repeatedly. It’s notnormal to feel this kind of rage toward one’s own father, and fuck him for evoking it.

“Just a few thoughts going through my head,” I reply flatly. “Doing my best to process some things.”

“Anything I can help with?”

I give him a long, hard look. He casually sits back in his chair.

This is my first weekend home since the café debacle with Madison. He and I never had the talk I promised, but I see the passage of time has soothed his frayed nerves to the point where he’s friendly again. Either that or he’s buttering me up prior to telling me why he asked me here in the first place. After several moments of silence, he presses the issue.

“I know things, Rhue. Things that might help you get ahead of your schoolmates.”

“Really? Well, that’s interesting. Why don’t you tell me more?”

He smiles, ready to dive in. “I have direct access to the dean and every single professor and professor’s assistant currently employed by Cornell Uni—”

“Oh, wait, I just remembered,” I cut him off. “I don’t give a shit. Your advice is always one of three things: hit harder than the other guy, blackmail the other guy, or bribe the other guy. Newsflash, Julian—I don’t need mobster ass shortcuts. I’m smarter than that.”

His humor fades. He’s insulted. This isn’t the first time I’ve pissed him off, but it has gotten more and more personal as of late. I have to admit, his self-control is impressive. In the past, he would’ve flung his coffee mug at me. This time, however, he just glowers at me, speechless and fuming.

“You called me here for a reason,” I continue. I gesture at the solarium around us. “A business reason, apparently. Let’s get this meeting started and leave the warm and fuzzy father son crap out of it.”

He scowls. “With this mood you’re in, I think I’d rather take it up with your property manager.”

“Fine by me,” I tell him. I pull a card out of my wallet and slide it across the table to him. “There’s his number.”

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