you were or what you were like, but I’d convinced myself you were dead.”
I can’t bring myself to look at Rocco, knowing the heaviness that he’d be loading himself with.
“Because if my dad were alive,” she continues. “He would’ve found me, he would’ve found us. He would’ve rescued us from the wretchedness we were caught in.”
“I tried,” Rocco whispers. “Every fucking day. Kendall was a ghost. You, you both were ghosts.”
“That’s where you disappeared to all those times?” Parker asks, the pain in his voice not dissimilar to his brother’s.
“You didn’t try hard enough.” Jesse ignores his uncle, eyes scanning his sister’s profile in concern.
That declaration hangs in the room like a grenade ready to explode. Destruction at the ready, mere milliseconds of panic as it flies through the air ready to blow the final pieces of Rocco’s heart to smithereens.
“He’d leave.” Parker steps forward, gesturing the siblings to sit, following suit after their asses reluctantly meet the couch once again. “For days on end. Sometimes weeks. He’d never tell me why, but I knew it was important. Important enough that he never stopped trying. It started seventeen years ago, I’m assuming while your mom was still pregnant, and it hasn’t stopped.”
He lets that sink in. A cold, hard truth neither of them was expecting. “You can drag our name through the mud,” he offers vehemently. “It’s not like it doesn’t deserve it. The Shay name is fuckin’ poison, we know that better than anyone. You can claim we didn’t understand, but you’re wrong. We lived with Dempsey too. He killed our fuckin’ mom, took a gun to her head and shot her. We were left with him and our piss weak excuse for a father, who wasn’t much better. The only light we had left was our aunt, and he took her from us as well. You had it worse, there’s no doubt. We had our mom until our teenage years, you didn’t, not the way you should’ve. Not in the way I remember Kendall. But you can’t fuckin’ say my brother didn’t look for you.”
Jesse and Blake look to one another, a look of uncertainty dancing between them.
“Whenever he came up empty-handed, which was every fucking time, he’d throw himself into a ring. He’d let some fucker beat him for failing you. I didn’t understand it. Now I do. Your dad looked for you; he searched high and fuckin’ low, he bled for you. He lived for you all these years. Whatever Marcus Dempsey told you, it was a fucking lie.”
“He’s right.” Codi’s voice echoes the soft click of the office door. “Marcus Dempsey was a monster.”
The twins stand as she steps into view.
“Your eyes,” Blake breathes.
“Are his,” Codi answers freely. “He and my mother had an affair and I was the result. A child born of hate and disloyalty. I was lucky that this man” —she steps toward our dad, grabbing his arm, hugging him— “took on the role of my dad and never looked back. I found out Marcus was my father the day he died.”
Jesse looks torn by the information being unloaded, his eyes looking at each of us, working to see deeper. Fighting to read lies in amongst the truths. “This is all too much to take in,” he murmurs, the original bite in his words lost to bewilderment. “Blake and I need time to think all this through. We came to thank Dominic for slaying a demon we couldn’t, and have found a family we were convinced we didn’t want.”
Quiet descends on the room, no one quite sure what to do or say.
“We have a dad.” Jesse looks at Rocco in an ambivalent rapture. Not quite sure the man before him is real. More a figment of his imagination, one he’d dreamed of as a child, but never let himself hope for as he matured by circumstance.
“It’s too much all at once,” he confesses, looking to his sister for support.
“Jesse looks like a cloned version of his uncle. I’m apparently the spitting image of my murdered grandmother. Our father looks as unhinged as Marcus promised he was, but also kind of sweet in the way he’d kill anyone that would hurt us, which is so confusing. Our uncle is also married to the daughter of the guy who forced us to grow up in purgatory all because he was all kinds of deranged. Too much, is the understatement of the farking century. We need to decompress.”