Avery (The Phoenix Club Girl Diaries #3) - Addison Jane Page 0,24
fighting to keep it from cracking open as I said three little words I knew were about to bring a whole new level of destruction to my family.
Shit was about to happen.
I was about to make a choice.
“My dad snitched.” Glitch’s rain of curse words felt like blows to my stomach. I heard his pain, his panic, and I knew there was one thing that I could do for both. One thing I owed them. “I’m going to try to buy you some time.”
His loud roar of orders came to a sudden pause, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Marcus,” he said very quietly, very seriously. “You do what you think you have to do. Whatever is in your gut. I will have your back.”
That was my green light.
I hung up, sweat pouring down the sides of my face as I stepped back, finally allowing my aim to fall, my father rolling his eyes and falling back into his old armchair again. “What’s done is done,” he murmured, reaching for a cigarette.
My hands shook as I jabbed some more numbers into the keypad and pressed it to my ear once again. “What is your emergency?”
“I’m about to commit a murder.” My father paused, the smoke hanging limply from his lips. “The man is a police informant, and if you don’t want him dead and all your witness statements and proof to die with him, I suggest you send every available officer in the area.”
“Sir, just think ab—”
I quickly rattled off the address of the house. “Every available officer, or he dies.”
It was a lie.
My finger was already curling around the trigger.
Hitting the end call button, I looked down at my father’s disappointed gaze.
One I’d seen so many times over the past seventeen years that it finally didn’t hurt. He may have been my blood, but my real family was at the club. And I was about to prove to them just how much I believed that.
And prove to myself that I was not my fucking father.
“Jesus,” Avery whispered under her breath, her mouth hanging open.
She reached across the small picnic table we were sitting at, her fingertips brushing lightly across the back of my clenched fists. “I knew he had a problem, but I thought it always came back to drinking,” I tried to explain, my leg jumping under the table. “I blamed the alcohol for the reason I’d raised my sister on my own. And for the times he beat me for just speaking. Or the couple of times he almost killed me when I made him look bad by asking our president, Glitch, for help because we had no food in the house…”
“And the whole time, he had this addiction you weren’t even aware of,” Avery finished for me when I paused, fighting to say those exact words. And not just that, but a few seconds later, I watched the final pieces of the puzzle fall together. “It’s why you’re scared of what will happen with Holly.”
Gritting my teeth, I nodded. “I know firsthand what people with addictions will do to feed their habits.” It was why I was so fiercely against addicts. I goddamn hated them because addicts couldn’t give a shit about anyone other than themselves as far as I was concerned.
My mother wouldn’t give them up even though she knew I’d be born in pain.
My father couldn’t give them up even though he knew his entire fucking family could have gone down because of him.
A dull ache began to throb in my chest, and I rubbed at it with my palm. “I don’t want to see you caught up in that fucking web.”
Avery licked at her lips, pressing them together and wiggling her nose. It was kind of fucking cute watching as these thoughts processed through her pretty little head. Maybe she was getting it. Perhaps she was seeing the reason I was the way I am, because if it were in my ability to keep the people I loved safe, you could sure as hell bet I was going to do whatever I fucking needed to in order to do that.
Whether it made people angry or not.
“It’s why you don’t drink, too, right?”
Letting out a gentle hum under my breath, I nodded. “It’s why I don’t do a lot of things. Drink, smoke, take painkillers.”
“Even painkillers?” she asked in awe, her mouth falling open. “What happens when you have a headache or you hurt yourself?”