Page 55 of Spike (Iron Thunder MC 5)
He sighed and rubbed his hands on his knees while he settled into the couch.
“They weren’t actually going to harm us, sweetheart. They were hired to give the appearance of an attack, that is all.”
I heard the words but they didn’t actually sink in. I didn’t know what to make of what he was saying.
“Give the appearance of an attack? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“My popularity has been dwindling. If you ask Jim, he will tell you all about it. I’m up for re-election but my advisors were sure that I wouldn’t get it unless I got the public sympathy somehow, in the next few weeks.”
“So you staged an attack on the house?”
Daddy stared back at me.
“Nothing would have happened to you, Sabrina. They would have held you for a few hours, just long enough for the tabloids to get wind of the attack and you would have been back in your room, asleep in bed by now. It was all supposed to be a small, harmless stunt.”
My hand rose up to my mouth. There was a lump in my throat. Spike was right. He was right about everything. How was I ever supposed to trust my father after this?
“And you were willing to put my safety at risk for your popularity? To retain your power and position?”
“I would never have let anything happen to you, Sabrina.”
“Why did you even bother hiring Spike? Why did you get him involved in this?”
“It was supposed to be a part of the ruse. The story would seem more sensational if you had a bodyguard…if something happened to your bodyguard.”
I felt my knees buckle. I needed to grip the back of a chair to keep standing.
“Your plan was to hurt Spike? So he was hired to be nothing but a casualty in your twisted plan? What about the brick through my window? That was staged too? Everything to make the story look more authentic? So that when they interviewed me in the media, I would give them the real story of what happened to me?”
Daddy was watching me closely as I spoke.
“I know I made a mistake. I should have involved you in the plan from the start.”
“You think that was your mistake?”
“I should have trusted you, sweetheart. I should have known you would do a great job at this. We want the same things, don’t we? You get to live this life, have all these nice things because I do what I do. You realize that, don’t you?”
My nostrils were flared with rage. I wanted to break something. I wanted my father to feel as hurt as I did.
“You are my father; you are supposed to keep me safe. Protect me. You should want me to have a happy and wholesome life.”
Daddy chuckled then. It was an evil chuckle.
“Wholesome? So what you’ve been doing with that brute. Spike. You call that wholesome?”
“You knew…you knew we’d been involved!”
“I have my eyes and ears everywhere, honey. I am the mayor of this town!”
“I have feelings for him. I actually have feelings for him. He is the only one who cares about me.”
“He is on my payroll. He was performing a service. Giving you what you wanted because he was being paid to do so,” Daddy snarled.
I gulped, forced the lump down my throat. For a second, I believed him. What if he was right? What if Spike felt nothing? What if he was a part of Daddy’s master plan too?
But my feelings…what I felt…they were real. And I wasn’t going to close this chapter till I had confronted him too. For the first time in my life, I had no intention of stopping until I had gone to the bottom of it. I wanted all the answers.
I turned from him and walked to the door.
“Sabrina! Don’t you dare leave this house! We have work to do. We have to come up with a different plan, and this time I want you involved. We will do it on your terms.”
I didn’t want to turn to look at him because I didn’t want him to see me crying. It felt as if I had lost everything in one night. Whatever shred of hope was keeping this relationship between Daddy and me going was broken now. And I had probably lost Spike too.
Maybe I’d been wrong about him all along.
I went out of the room and could hear my father’s voice thundering behind me, calling for me. Jim was out in the hallway and ran past me to go into the room. He gave me one of his caustic looks as he passed by and I rolled my eyes at him.
Fuck him. Fuck everybody.
I was going to go to Spike just to give him one last chance. After that, I was gone. This time, I wasn’t looking back.
