His narrowed gaze slides back onto mine, the cluster of lines between his eyes deepening. “I think you remember things a little differently than how they were in reality. You were just a boy. I was simply disciplining you—”
“Bullshit!” I roar, taking a step in his direction. “Discipline doesn’t involve putting your seventeen-year-old son in a goddamned coma!”
Brooke slips in between us, pushing the palm of her hand against my chest. “Babe, you need to calm down. He’s here to support you.”
With the word “babe” falling from her lips, my insides coil. Who’s she fucking kidding, thinking she has any right to call me that? Belle’s right—where the hell was my head when I agreed to sleep with the psychotic bitch? Blood sears through my veins with the mere idea of Brooke’s hand on me.
Jaw clenched, I push her hand away. “How could you invite this piece of shit to come here after what he did to me? Have you forgotten how he split my head open and left me to die?” I part the hair on the back of my head to reveal the incision the surgeons made to relieve the pressure on my brain and bend so they can see it. “I’ll never forget lying helpless on the floor, watching as the man who raised me—the man I once looked up to—nearly beat me to death! I’ll never forget the feeling of having staples in my skull because of what my old man had done to me!”
“Keep your voice down!” my father commands in the kind of dark tone that never failed to shoot fear down my spine when I was younger. “You’ll make a fool of yourself!”
But now the sound only adds to the tremendous pressure of rage building up inside my chest. Squaring my shoulders, I laugh in a deep rumble, moving close enough that I can sense him quivering. The stench of booze oozes from his skin in sickening waves. “I’m already a fool for putting up with your abusive bullshit all those years! I should’ve called child services the very first time you left a bruise! God knows my own mother wasn’t willing to protect me! The only one who ever gave a shit whether or not I lived or died other than Grandma Caroline was Belle, and you did everything in your power to take her away from me!”
My father visibly flinches with the sound of Belle’s name.
“Enough, Roman!” Brooke demands, tugging on my arm to pull me back a step. “He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t interested in repairing your relationship!”
But she’s wrong. My old man’s hard, bitter gaze makes it clear he’s itching to throw his fist into my face like the good old days when I was weak and believed that he thought he had the ultimate control over my life.
I shake her off once more and shuffle back, palms of my hands held up. Together they’ve managed to stretch my tolerance as far as it can possibly go without snapping, and I don’t know how to stop myself from going completely over the edge of sanity when they’re involved.
“Fuck you both,” I snarl. “I don’t need this shit before I take the stage. You need to leave.”
They each stay firmly planted in place, staring idly back at me like they’ve forgotten the English language.
My father shakes his head. “Ungrateful little prick. I made arrangements to come all this way and you think you can just kick me out? Who do you think paid for all those voice lessons that got you here? I gave you the best of everything and this is how you choose to repay me?”
Eyes screwed shut, my hands ball into fists, ready to deliver the kind of retribution he has coming to him. He’ll never be a reasonable man. He’ll never be the kind of father who would commend me on my achievements, or apologize for all the times he was wrong. And God knows he was as wrong as a father could ever be to his son.
How can he still think I owe him a single goddamned thing? I open my eyes to flash him a cold smile. “If you’re a smart man, you’ll get the fuck out before I decide to repay you the way I’d like.”
Frantic thuds of my heart rock my body as I watch his mouth turn downward. He visibly shakes as he contemplates his next move. A big part of me secretly hopes he’ll give me an excuse to knock him on his ass. Adrenaline surges through my limbs with a force almost too much to withstand without combusting. I made this reunion far too easy on him. What’s keeping me from inflicting the kind of pain he showed me as a kid?
Finally, he huffs with a dark laugh and turns to slink from the room. Tension rushes from my body as I let out a long breath.
But Brooke lingers, her lips drawn back in a sneer. “You’re being unreasonable. He wouldn’t have flown here if he wasn’t sorry for everything he did.”