Page 7

Max

Two weeks after Craig’s murder.

The first time I realised the world wasn’t fair, I was twelve.

It wasn’t some dramatic, earth-shattering moment.

It was a quiet, suffocating realisation – like slowly drowning while everyone around you kept breathing just fine.

Twelve years old, that’s when my mother left, she had packed up in the middle of the night and never looked back.

My father had never spoken of her again after that night, but I remembered.

I remembered the sound of her heels, the way they would click against the floor, the scent of that perfume, that even now made my stomach churn.

I remember the way she would look at me, the way it was like she couldn’t help the way her lip would curl in disgust whenever she saw me.

I was nothing but an inconvenience to her.

But my dad? He was everything to me, and maybe that’s why she hated me so much, because we were inseparable.

He had raised me alone after she left, and despite the pain of losing her, he never once made me feel unloved.

He was so strong, quiet, but the fiercest man I’d ever known when it came to protecting what was his.

I knew he had his secrets – things he never spoke about, the things I wasn’t supposed to understand.

But I saw the bruises marring his knuckles some nights, the way he would come home late, quieter than usual with a vacant look behind his eyes.

I never asked, because deep down I already knew.

Justice, to him, wasn’t always found in a courtroom and perhaps that’s where I had learned it, and maybe that’s why I never hesitated when the time came to take matters into my own hands.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Not until him.

The First man who ever laid his hands on me, the first man who broke me, twisted me into something else.

He thought he could destroy me, turn me into his perfect little simpering masterpiece, and at first, he succeeded.

But in the end, all he had done was place me onto the path my father followed, and turning out to be like my father was nowhere near the worst thing I could turn into.

I could have been like my mother instead, a worthless woman who cared about nothing more than herself.

At least following in my father’s footsteps I was doing something with my life, helping other people, even if nobody but me and Tony knew about it.

I thrashed, drenched in sweat, panting, my voice hoarse from screaming.

Quickly sitting up, I looked around at my surroundings.

Dresser, closet, tv, bed - my bed, I was safe.

I sank back into my pillows, scraping back the hair that had managed to escape from my bun, exhaling a long breath.

Staring up at the ceiling, calming my breathing down, I tried to recall what the nightmare was about.

I’d had a nightmare every night this week, they were getting more frequent, and I knew why.

It was days away from the anniversary of my ex-boyfriend, Shane’s, death, the day everything went to shit.

Shane was my first, and last boyfriend.

We dated for a few months in college, but eventually went our separate ways, then by chance, we bumped into each other on the night of my 23rd birthday.

I had gone out with a few girlfriends and ran into him at our local bar, Mitzies.

We had spent the night catching up and ended it back at my apartment, fucking for hours before collapsing into exhaustion.

I had missed him; he was the only guy I had ever really been interested in.

After that night, he pretty much never left my apartment, he stopped by his old place after a week to pick up his things, and moved himself in. That should have been my first red flag. But of course, a hot guy with a big dick makes red flags turn a rosy shade of pink. Oh, how fucking blind I was to his bullshit. He wasn’t so bad at first - a little controlling, but I saw it as him just showing me that he cared. He would constantly check my phone, and would block any male that would come up, either on social media or in my contacts. He said he was just really worried because his last girlfriend cheated on him, and because I was a people-pleasing dumb ass back then, and wanted to be the perfect girlfriend, I just let him control who I was allowed in my life. But it didn’t stop there. Over the course of five years, the control turned into possessiveness and the possessiveness turned into anger. The anger turned into bruises, cuts and a lot of blood, even breaking my wrist one time, desperate to get to my phone because he was convinced that I was cheating on him. It took me too long to admit to myself that I was in danger and longer to work up the courage to tell my dad. But when I finally did, he didn’t hesitate, because was the one person I knew would never let me down, and he didn’t.

He tried to kill him for me.

He waited for Shane outside his usual bar, standing by his car with a look that I had only seen in the darkest of his moments.

But Shane saw him coming.

The two got into a fight, brutal and unrelenting, but Shane managed to get away.

He punched my dad and knocked him to the ground, but instead of carrying on the fight, he ran, jumping onto his motorbike and sped off into the night.

I only by chance saw what happened as I’d been on my way to meet Shane myself, still not having the courage to leave him, despite admitting to myself and my dad that he was an abuser.

I ran over to my dad, the look of shock on his face at seeing me there to meet Shane not having chance to fully settle before something else took over.

Cold, hard rage.

I had begged him to leave it, said he wasn’t worth it, promising that I would leave him and never look back, but I knew I was wasting my time, because Shane had hurt his little girl.

I saw then truly who my father was, before even finding out what he did in that basement, that he was a cold and ruthless man behind his mask of warmth.

Something in my heart swelled at that, my dad, the antihero, willing to hurt the man who had put bruises all over my body.

He pushed to his feet, with a swift kiss to my forehead before pushing me to the side and jumping into his own car.

My dad had followed Shane with unrelenting determination, desperate to catch and kill the man who had broken his daughter in too many ways to count.

What happened that night haunted me every single day.

In the heat of the chase, Shane ran a red light at an intersection, just as an eighteen-wheeler came barreling through.

The impact threw him from his bike and killed him instantly.

My dad had lost control of his car, trying to swerve out of the way.

Bystanders had said his car span out and crashed into the divider at full speed, head on.

He survived the initial crash, and was placed in a coma for a week, but there was no brain activity.

I had to be the one to make the decision to turn off his life support, I had to be the one to make the decision to end my father’s life, all because of that fucking piece of shit.

All because I was too pathetic to leave after the first time he had hurt me.

If I had left, my father would still be here.

The sound of the machine shutting off replayed in my ears for a long time after that night, and it still now haunted me in my sleep.

The news articles said it was a freak accident caused by a drunken idiot on a motorbike, and I was so glad that Shane was getting the blame.

But I knew the truth, I knew that my had father died trying to make the world right for me, that he died trying to take justice into his own hands, just like he always had.

And maybe, just maybe, that was the moment I realised I would do the same.

Because if the world wouldn’t give us justice, then I would carve it out myself.