Page 56 of Masked Sins
My father is sitting up in bed reading the newspaper, and when he notices me, he sets the paper down on top of his frail body, squinting.
He doesn’t recognize me.
I know it’s a symptom of brain cancer, so I hold my hands up. “Hi, Dad.”
“Orion?”
I nod once.
Growing up, my father was tall, handsome, and robust. He towered over all of us at six four, and his striking black hair and green eyes won him a lot of attention when I wasyoung. My brothers and I all share certain traits. Chase has his sense of humor, Miles shares his good looks, Liam shares his protectiveness, and Kai shares his mysterious, secretive side. And me?
I share his possessiveness and obsessive tendencies.
The strong man I knew as my father has been withering away for months, and the man before me looks almost nothing like him, save for the dark hair and the eye color. His face is swollen. The thick black hair he always wore long is thinner and cut short. His shoulders used to be massive, but now they’re narrow without their usual muscles he was so diligent about maintaining.
Tamping down the sick, sympathetic feeling of watching my father die, I clear my throat and stand straighter.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, taking a seat in one of the nearby chairs.
He shrugs. “Could be worse.” Training his critical eyes on me, he lets them wander over my leather jacket and black pants before giving me an approving nod. “You look well.”
I don’t respond. Instead, I look up at the television, which is playing Bloomberg and running over the financial market news of the day. Something about knowing he’s checked in even though he’s dying… I swallow. Even at the very end of his life, my father is apparently relentless in his pursuit of making money.
The idea makes me feel empty—and it makes me feel bad for him.
“Have you spoken to your brothers?”
I steady my breathing and turn back to face him. “No.”
Anger flashes over his expression. Even now in his seventies, even sick with terminal brain cancer, he still has a temper.
“And why not?” he practically spits.
“Because they don’t want to talk to you, Dad.”
There.I said it out loud—the thing I’ve been insinuating ever since Miles cut him off a couple of years ago. I’ve managed to brush him off every time we talk, but he deserves the truth.
“Then I’m ashamed to call them my children. I amdying. Doesn’t that count for something?” he growls.
I shrug. “Their reasons are valid.”
“Then tell me, why the hell doyoustill talk to me?”
I study his face—the scowl and the furrowed brows. The clenched fists at his sides. The flared nostrils. His anger completely distorts his face. A quick flash of a memory pierces through my brain. I’ve worked so hard to forget my life before I turned fourteen—telling myself it’s for the better. But the memory plays before my eyes like a sick movie I don’t consent to watching.
Kai, Chase, and I were sitting at the dining room table, and my mom was upstairs with one of her headaches—which I now know was her only way to get away from her verbally abusive husband. It was about a year before Mom left Dad. My dad is on his fourth drink, and he’s slurring as he asks eighteen-year-old Malakai about his first-semester college exams. Chase is sixteen. I remember that he was usually at Jackson Parker’s house, but tonight, he was home. And I was eleven or twelve.
By this time, Liam and Miles had moved out of Ravage Castle, but the three youngest brothers remained.
“I’m dropping out of college.”
Dad goes still, and his hand grips the crystal tumbler tightly. “And why the hell would you do that?”
Kai puts his napkin on the table. “God has been speaking to me lately, and He says we need to turn this family around. I want to help. I want to help you, us?—”
“No son of mine has an ounce of holy blood in their bodies,” he growls.
Dad’s face twists with hatred. He slams his fists on the dining table, making Chase and me jump in our seats. “But do you know what we do have? Money.”
