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Josh materialized at my side. “Take another step toward her, Nico. I dare you.” He held something dark in his hand, and my stomach dropped, thinking he was about to shoot my father, before I realized it was just a cell phone.

Josh tapped its screen, and all the lights in the house flickered. “One. More. Step.”

Dad stopped moving, jaw clenched in fury. A foot away, Mom was staring at him with her hands balled into fists. We needed to end this before a full-on brawl broke out.

“You know,” Dad said, “Italy is just a phone call away. It wouldn’t be that hard to make Tommy disappear for real.”

“Woah,” Aly said. “Did you just threaten to have Lauren’s father killed?”

Dad jerked, unused to an audience to his outbursts, forgetting we were all pretending that Tommy was just missing. “No,” he ground out, but his mutinous expression said otherwise.

“I’m done,” I told him. “And nothing you say or do will ever change my mind.”

He laughed, the sound ugly. “You won’t last a fucking week without me.”

“Yes, I will,” I told him. “And I know that’s got to hurt, but you brought this on yourself.”

He lunged. It happened so fast and was so unexpected that I didn’t get my arms up in time to block him.

For all the awful shit he’d said and done over the course of my lifetime, he’d never hit me, and it took me a moment to realize that his hands were around my neck, and he was squeezing , his expression a rictus of rage, black eyes burning with fury.

Time seemed to slow. I tried to drag in a breath and couldn’t, staring at him in disbelief, feeling like I was having an out-of -body experience.

My own fucking father was strangling me in front of my girlfriend and entire family.

I thought I’d known the worst of what he was capable of, but I’d never expected this.

With the last of my breath, I wheezed, “Dad.”

The word seemed to ricochet through him like a bullet. His fingers slackened on my neck. The fury bled from his eyes. I watched his lips part and horror creep into his expression like he finally realized what he was doing.

It was then that time righted itself. I saw several people rushing toward us, but Lauren got there first, electric blue flaring in my periphery.

Dad jerked and let me go, and I dragged in a breath full of the smell of his searing flesh as Lauren ground the taser into his neck, following him to the floor when he went down.

Nearby, Josh retched and spun away, Aly racing after him.

“Lauren,” I said, wrapping my hands around her shoulders and gently pulling her back. From the look on her face, she wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. My very own white knight in a sundress.

“ Nic, ” Mom said, and I turned to see her openly weeping for the first time in memory. Her eyes met mine, voice hoarse like she’d been the one who was choked. “I’m so sorry.”

I shook my head. “None of this is your fault.”

Alec stepped into view and spat at Dad’s still twitching form. “Fucking bastard.” He turned to Mom. “You’re coming to stay with me. Enough is enough.”

Mom shook her head. “I’m staying here. Someone has to make sure he’s all right.”

“So call an ambulance after you leave,” Greg said, joining us. “He did this to himself. You don’t have to keep trying to fix everything for him.”

Determination crept into Mom’s expression. “You don’t understand. He wasn’t always like this.”

“But he’s like this now,” Greg said. “He’s been like this for years. And he isn’t going to get any better if nothing changes.”

Mom darted her glance among me, Alec, and Greg.

“He was about to release me,” I said. Not because I was defending my father but because I couldn’t bear to see the look of abject misery on my mother’s face, like the last of her hope was fading away. “When I said ‘Dad’ he seemed to come back to himself and realize what he was doing.”

“You should still go to teach him a lesson,” a low voice said. We turned to see Stefan standing nearby, a bag slung over his shoulder. “We all should.”

With that, he left, and for some reason, I had a feeling that none of us were going to see him for a long, long time.

Mom met my eyes. “You go first. He could wake up, and if you’re still here, he might find a way to make everything worse than it already is.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yes. I’ll be fine.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks and shook her head. “I’ve dealt with worse shite than this before.”

“Go,” Alec said.

Not needing to be told again, I grabbed Lauren’s hand and led her out of the room, feeling her fingers tremble in my grip. Or maybe it was mine that were shaking.

“Are you okay?” Lauren asked as we neared the front door.

I paused just long enough to pull her into a hug. “Yeah, you?”

“I think so?”

A grin tugged at my lips. “Thanks for saving my ass. It was hot. Maybe I am into taser play.”

She shook her head, tugging me down for a quick, hard kiss. “What can I say? My savior kink took over.”

We walked outside and found Josh and Aly near the far bushes, Josh bent over at the waist, Aly rubbing his back.

“He okay?” I called.

“Yeah,” she said, heading our way. “He’s just dry-heaving now.”

I eyed Josh’s back, wondering what in the fuck had happened to him that the smell of burning flesh made him puke. And then I recalled who his father was and immediately decided I didn’t want to know.

“I can’t fucking believe that piece of shit,” Aly said, glaring back toward the house. She turned, clutching Lauren’s face, taking in her ruined dress. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lauren said.

Aly released her and rounded on me. “Come here.”

I opened my mouth to tell her I was fine, too—his hands had only been on me for a few seconds—but she was already moving, tipping my head back so she could check me over, suddenly all business.

“Does this hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“How about this?”

“No.”

She poked and prodded until I finally pulled away. “He didn’t really hurt me, I was just...”

Lauren threaded her fingers through mine. “Shocked?”

I looked down at her and nodded.

Aly gripped my shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be. If I’d done that alone, it would have been much worse.”

I filled her in on how Dad had been about to let me go, but her gaze drifted back to the house while I spoke, and she still looked mad enough that I was worried she might storm back inside.

Josh finally joined us then, popping a piece of gum into his mouth and then wrapping a preemptive arm around his fiancée’s waist.

Aly sighed, realizing her chance had passed. “Please tell me Moira isn’t staying.”

“She’s probably staying,” I said.

“Why has she put up with him for so long?” Aly asked.

I sighed. “He’s not always like this. You’ve seen that. He can be funny and charming, and most of that is reserved for Mom. She gets the best of him. Hell, I think she might be the only person he truly loves.”

Lauren made a small sound of distress and slipped her arms around me. “That’s so sad.”

I hugged her back. “And it’s true that he wasn’t always this bad.

He’s gotten much worse over the years. I think a lot of it comes down to fear and perception.

Me breaking away from him shows the people in our world that there’s weakness in his house, and there are plenty of others just like my dad looking to exploit that to their own advantage.

He’s terrified of being usurped, of becoming expendable, because he knows better than anyone what happens when you are. ”

Aly frowned. “Do you think he’s going to come after you?”

I shook my head. “No. Mom’s staying for more than herself.

She’s staying for all of us. She’s Dad’s last tether to his humanity, and I’m sure she’ll spend the next several days reminding him that if he does anything to really hurt me, this family will be broken beyond repair and he’ll be the architect of his own demise, left completely alone in the world. ”

Lauren frowned. “So, what? You think he’ll come back around? Try to make amends?”

I nodded. “Eventually. That split second before you tased him, I felt like I was looking at the old Dad. The one who taught me how to throw a baseball, the one who used to put Greg on his shoulders during parades so he could see over the crowd.”

Aly looked unconvinced. “Well, no matter what happens, I think we can all agree that we’re done with these dinners.”

“Oh, fuck, yeah,” I said.

Josh made a contemplative sound. “Maybe we start having our own family dinners instead.”

Aly beamed, looking to Lauren and me. “What do you think?”

“I like it,” Lauren said. “Nic?”

I grinned. “I’m in.”