Tell Jack the big news. He’ll likely be happy to hear it.” He arched his brows. “What is it, Tess? Cat got your tongue?”
He turned to me with a shark-like smile. “Tess has always been so tight-lipped with her secrets. But what she isn’t telling you is that my darling little Lila isn’t mine at all.” He sneered at Tess. “Isn’t that right, Tess?”
Thirteen
Lila
Isn’t that right, Tess?
The words were muffled, but they still rang inside my chest like a gunshot.
The air rushed from my lungs as I sank down to the hardwood floor outside my father’s office.
The silence somehow echoed louder than my father’s words.
It was the sound of voices down the hall that had broken through my self-pity sobfest. I’d exhausted myself with tears and had been lying there in silence for too long, unable to rouse myself to play the part I’d been given.
I couldn’t even bring myself to finish texting Jack or ask Maria for an ice pack to try and stop whatever bruise was surely forming on my cheekbone.
I’d just lain there. Miserable and lonely, until I’d heard voices.
I shouldn’t be out here. If Daddy found me…
I swallowed thickly. Daddy. He was Daddy. He was my daddy.
...my darling little Lila isn’t mine at all.
The sarcastic way he’d said ‘my darling little Lila.’ That had clawed at my insides first, and it took a full second for the rest to register.
Not his.
Not… his?
I could hear my own breathing and shut my mouth to quiet it. Closing my eyes, I counted, drawing in a slow breath and holding it before letting it out again. I did that until my head stopped spinning, but my blood seemed to be curdling in my veins, making my limbs tremble and my heart lurch at a bizarre tempo.
I waited… for what? I didn’t know. For something. For someone. I supposed I was waiting for Tess to speak, to tell him he was all wrong.
I was waiting for Jack to come bounding out here to find me.
But we all seemed to have frozen in the face of my father’s cold, emotionless voice.
“What is it, Tess?” His tone took on that taunting edge that I knew so well. The tone that I so rarely heard him use with Tess.
I used to hate Tess for the fact that he never talked to her like this. And then, I’d pitied her for it because I’d thought it meant she was too meek. Too much of a brownnoser.
But now, our whole history shifted behind my closed eyelids. He rarely talked to her like this because she was his daughter. He loved her in a way he’d never loved me. And not because she was a kiss-up, not because she was the daughter of a wife he’d actually cared about…
But because she was his. She was of his blood, a part of his DNA.
And me?
Who the hell did I belong to?
“Don’t you want to tell your new friend how you learned of my little secret?” He tsked, and I tensed out in the hallway.
This tone. I knew it so well. Part of me wanted to leap in there and take the heat off Tess. She wasn’t used to it like I was.
She didn’t know how to back it down. How to de-escalate his rising anger.
Like you do? My throbbing cheek seemed to taunt me.
I couldn’t have moved if I tried. I wanted to protect Tess, but what he was saying, the meaning behind it…
She knew.
She’d known.
And she hadn’t told me.
“You went to so much trouble,” my father continued. No, Tess’s father. “And all to find out what I could have told you years ago if I’d known how much you cared.”
His amusement made me shudder. A chill crept through my bones.
“Of course Lila’s not mine. I would have thought it was obvious by now. She’s never had our smarts, now has she, Tess?”
Tess was silent. I wished I could see her face.
“Oh, she’s had her uses, but I’m afraid I’ve grown tired of her mistakes. She turned out to be too much like her mother after all.”
I had no doubt he was eyeing Jack with a sneer as he said that. I was a useless whore just like my mother. How many times had he told me that?
Useless. I squeezed my eyes tight against the word that had been scraping away at the back of my brain.
“She doesn’t know.” Jack’s voice was low and hard to decipher, but I knew him so well that I could perfectly imagine