Pride
Entering her parents‘ home, with Cruz holding her hand, Presley felt incredibly nervous. She’d asked them. along with Marsha to meet here to talk. Marsha’s car was in the yard, already arriving ahead of her and she knew it was because the woman wanted to know if there was an update on Odin.
She followed the quiet sounds of chatter into the living room, Cruz’s presence a wordless support for the confrontation she knew was about to happen. The only way she could move forward with her life, and having her parents in it, especially her father, was for them to understand she wasn’t letting them give Odin a clear berth any longer to do the s**t he’d been doing since her birth.
“There she is,” Scarlett was up on her feet the minute she caught movernent in the doorway and moved to hug Presley. She squeezed her tight. “I missed you. I used to see you several times a week and it feels like I’ve only seen you a couple of times in the last month or so.” She cupped Presley’s cheeks, “you look tired, sweetie. I know you’re a big bad CEO now, but you still need to rest and take care of yourself. Cruz are you taking care of my girl?”
“I am, Scarlett. She’s my everything. She’s simply had an extraordinarily long day. Once we’re done here, I’ll take her home and pampèr her and put her to bed.”
“You better!” Scarlett teased him. “If you don’t, you’ll have me to answer to.”
“Yes ma’am.” He chuckled as he followed Presley deeper into the room.
Presley found herself bitterly wondering where this overprotective mother was all her life. It felt, in this
moment, as if every protective moment her mother ever demonstrated evaporated in the light of all the times
she let Odin hurt her.
She let Marsha give her a hug and then her father squeezed her tight. Her relationship with him felt irrevocably changed since the breakfast they’d shared in Nice where he’d told her to suck it up and be Liborio’s baby machine. She was hoping in some way she could get past the way he’d given up when her
friends and Cruz continued to fight.
“How are you feeling, Dad?” she asked as she stepped out of his embrace. “Mom said you visited the cardiologist this week.”
“Better,” he nodded. “We tweaked my medication two weeks back and it seems to have done the trick.”
“That’s good.” She smiled benignly and moved to sit down on the sofa, pulling Cruz alongside her.
Marsha jumped right in as she took a seat in a plush chair, “have you heard about Odin?”
“I saw him.” She nodded and noted how Marsha and her father both leaned forward excitedly at the news.
“You saw him?” Gavin cleared his throat. “Where is he? We’ll visit him too.”
“No.” She shook her head. “He’s not seeing anyone.”
“Presley, you’re not seriously going to bar us from seeing your brother. You can’t keep him locked up like a prisoner. I understand he hurt your feelings.”
“Hurt my feelings?” she cut her father off coldly. “He didn’t hurt my feelings, Dad. He traded me to a monster to pay off a debt and laughed at it. You were all there in the room, in the hotel, when he told us gleefully how he knew Liborio murdered his last two lovers, accused me of ruining his life and expressed how happy he
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was to sell me off. You,” she pointed at Marsha, aald you were cutting him off because of his be you were changing the locks on your doors. You,” she glared at her father, “were so distraught with hi behavior you needed to visit the nurse at the resort. The next morning, Mom Bluntly asked you if I were supposed to lay on my back with my legs in the air and get f****d by a mob boss and you said you and told me to get it done so we could all move on with our lives. You told me it was because I’m too soff and too. sweet and I wouldn’t let Liborio kill you so I may as well just get it done and over with.”
Her father looked away sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” she retorted coldly. “I love you Dad. I love you so much but time after time after time you continue to think of Odin and what is best for him. You said when we were at the breakfast you’d take a bullet for me and die if you needed to but I also know, you would do the same for Odin because he is your son and you thought by making me rent out my v****a and my womb to a crazy man it would protect Odin. It wasn’t about me being soft, but it was you trying to protect both of your children in the only way you could come up with.”
“He’s my son.”
“Yes he is. I am your daughter. From the day twas born, he has plotted and planned to cause me harm and you’ve all turned a blind eye.” She looked at her mother, “you’re a child psychologist. People bring their kids to you for help and yet you let the little sociopath run amuck in your own home out of fear you’d upset your husband. You didn’t define clear boundaries with your husband. You didn’t establish rules to keep your daughter safe. When Odin, Cruz and Anderson did things to hurt me, you would defer to Dad to deal with the situation because you felt it was overstepping as the stepmother to Odin, but I was your daughter, Mom. Me. I was your child. You let the monster who is his son,” she didn’t look away from her mother’s tears, “hurt me. Most mamas are mama bears and would fight tooth and nail to protect their young. Not you. You let them
your
husband?” hurt me over and over and over and for what? Fear you’d lose
“Presley, enough.” Her father growled angrily.
“No. It’s not enough. You and Marsha f****d up. You both knew he needed help. You both knew he was sick. Marsha was so scared, so terrified a clinician would tell her the truth, tell her how her precious baby boy was so damaged and so f****d up in the head, she’d be forced to face her own failures as a mother. You were more worried about the world knowing you were a lesbian and your son being ashamed of you than you were in getting him help.”
“I thought I was protecting him.”
“You were protecting yourself, Marsha. You didn’t want the world to know you were the cause your marriage failed, and it was easier to let Odin blame his anger and his rage on Mom and me than to be accountable and now he’s a thirty–two–year–old misogynistic bastard who sold his own sister. You created the monster he is.” “Enough!” her father slapped the arm of the chair he was in.
“No. Dad it’s not enough. You were the worst one. A daddy is supposed to protect his daughter. A daddy is supposed to make sure his little girl is safe, protected and taken care of and you failed. You let them hurt me repeatedly and even now, you refuse to take accountability for it. You act like I’m supposed to
n the other
cheek each time he hurts me. You consistently put others, including your business ahead of me. You told Cruz where I was when Jurgen Hawley threatened your business and you convinced yourself it was because you thought Cruz and I were needing to clear the air, but the truth is, it was just one more example of how you consistently throw me under the bus to protect you or Odin.”
< Pride
“You are my daughter, and I love you.”
“I don’t doubt you love me, Dad.” She blinked her own tears away as Cruz squeezed her hand, “but you love Odin more. You knew he hated me. You knew he would do anything to get rid of me, to be rid of me and you still forced me to be in his presence. Instead of keeping me away from him, you forced me into his orbit. You could have paid out his trust fund. You have the liquidity in your assets he could have simply paid him out of your own pocket to protect me and forgone the monthly brunches. Instead, you would make us sit together and let him come at me and mom under the guise of family. You sacrificed us because you didn’t want to admit you failed him as a father. You didn’t get him the help he needed, and he turned into a horrible human
being.”
She watched as her father wiped tears from the corner of his eyes and looked away.
“I want you all to get help. You all need help. You need to sort out why it is you thought it was okay to sacrifice my health and wellbeing for the sake of a son who was mentally deranged. Do you know,” she sniffed, “he told me today he doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t angry. He said he hated me because! would wake up happy and he would wake up angry and it was unfair. You could have helped him with this! You should have seen he needed help with his anger and his rage and his feelings of not feeling like he belonged anywhere and instead it was me you threw into therapy to deal with the trauma of his abuse. He abused me, Dad,” she met her father’s startled gaze. “He abused me and the three of you let it happen and instead of making him accountable, you let it continue but taught me ways to deal with my pain from it.” “I’m sorry,” the words from her mother were whispered. “It’s my fault. I should have taken you away from here.
“You should have.” Presley didn’t soften her words. “You didn’t protect me, Mom. None of you did. You taught me to deal with trauma instead of making the trauma stop. I will tell you this right now, I’ll never let any of you alone with my children in the future if you can’t figure out why you thought it was acceptable to sacrifice one child for another. I can’t risk their wellbeing.”
Her father exhaled a shaky breath, “I’ll do it. Whatever you want. I’ll go to therapy and get it sorted.” “Me too,” Marsha whispered. “I’ll do it.”
“Odin is alive. He’s not exactly well. He’s mentally impaired. I found out recently he has hated me to the point he even slept with my boyfriend in college and the only reason he stopped was because my boyfriend wanted the three of us to be a poly couple and it felt too weird for Odin to have the same d**k in him which was in me.” She watched her father’s face as his eyes widen. “Do you know what this means, Dad? It means he recognized I was his sister. He knew I was his sister. He couldn’t deny I was his sister. Yet, he still tormented the f**k out of me. He needs psychological help and he’s going to get it. I’m sending him somewhere medical and psych team will be working with him round the clock to get him the help he needs.”
“We can’t see him before he goes?” Marsha asked desperately.
“No. He’ll be permitted calls at different stages in his recovery.”
“What if he refuses?” Gavin asked quietly.
“He doesn’t get a choice, Dad. Your inability to act like the head of this family and protect everyone in it means someone else needs to step in and be the head of this family. That person is me. The only way I can make sure I am safe, is by removing your ability to let me be harmed.” She rose from her seat. “Cruz and I are getting married in just over five months. You need to sort out, Dad, whether or not you want to walk me dowr
Pride.
the aisle as my father or attend as merely a guest. One of those decisions is going to require work
She looked at Cruz and took a breath. “I’m ready to go.”
He kissed her forehead. “I’m proud of you, Ladybird.”
As he led her out of the house, she realized she was proud of her too.
Tatienne Richard
This story is meant to have 2 more chapters and will be done. Stay tuned!
