Larissa Ione - 02 Immortal Rider by Larissa Ione

Author:Larissa Ione
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Arik did not want to talk about himself. Limos was much more interesting, but when she rubbed her palm in a slow circle over his chest, he fell into a lulling sort of trance and forgot why he didn’t want to talk.

Limos cleared her throat. “Can I ask you something?”

If that wasn’t a prelude to a question that was going to be hard to answer, he didn’t know what was. “You can ask, but I can’t guarantee I’ll answer or that you’ll like what I say.”

She nodded, cleared her throat again. “Runa said you wouldn’t like yourself if you knew what you’d done to her, and Shade said your father was abusive, that you used to protect Runa and your mother.”

“So?” He knew he was being defensive, but this was one of the very few subjects he didn’t like to talk about.

“So… tell me.”

He eyed her sideways. “That’s not a question.”

“You sound like Ares,” she grumbled. “Okay, let’s try this. Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“Did you kill them?” She asked with such matter-of-fact innocence, as if killing your parents was a normal thing to do. What different worlds they’d grown up in.

“Suicide and cancer took them.”

Limos resumed the circling of her palm over his chest. The sensation was amazingly intimate. “How did you protect your mother and sister? I mean, you were a child, right?”

Seriously, he did not want to talk about this. But Limos worked him like a master interrogator, except she got him to talk with pleasure instead of pain. As her fingers traced a tingly path from one nipple to the other, he cracked like a thin-shelled egg.

“I ran interference,” he said, gruffly. “When my old man was beating on one of them, I pissed him off so much that he turned on me.” Oh, but that wasn’t all. By the time he hit his teens, he’d learned to bargain. I’ll get booze for you, if you stop hitting mom. I’ll score you some weed if you’ll lay off Runa. I’ll fetch that prostitute off Third and Division if you’ll stop making mom scream at night.

Eventually, he’d learned the art of threats, too. If you make mom or Runa bleed again, I’ll go to the cops. And finally, after three days of no food in the house because their dad had spent all the money on booze, Arik had hit rock bottom too. Go to AA and clean up right now, or I swear, I’ll make you feel everything you’ve done to us.

That had led to a physical altercation between the two of them that had ended in Arik’s broken arm and his father’s missing teeth. And nothing changed. Not until Arik went to the “weird guy” in school, the one who always wore black, sketched skulls and pentagrams on his notebook covers, and said he worshipped the devil.

Runa always believed that it was their mother who had given their father the ultimatum that made him get sober and become a model father, but no, it was

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