Page 20 of The Retaliation You Deliver

“You’re too understanding.”

“Trust me, I’m not letting him slip back into my life as if nothing happened, but I get it.”

“Your uncle… he hurt you too, didn’t he?” she asks, although from the concern on her face, I think she already knows the answer.

I nod. “Just not in the way he did Leon.”

“It doesn’t make it right, or better, or even easier to deal with.”

“I guess,” I mutter, not wanting to confess that over the years I’ve felt weirdly lucky that my uncle never touched me like he did Leon.

“Were there others?”

“I assume so, but Leon was the only one I ever saw. I was banished from that house not long after that incident.”

“You never told anyone?”

I shake my head ashamed that I was never brave enough to say anything.

“Christ,” she mutters, taking another giant mouthful of wine. “I knew he was hiding something awful, but I never thought it was something like this.”

We fall silent, both of us sipping on our drinks lost in thought.

It doesn’t take long for the alcohol to start to have an effect on me and by the time I sip the last drop into my mouth, my head is starting to spin.

Letty must sense it because she looks up at me.

“Ready to tell me what he did yet?”

“Umm…”

* * *

When I wake the next morning, it’s with my second ever hangover.

Rolling over, I groan into my pillow as my head pounds, my brain feeling like it’s suddenly too big for my head.

“Damn you, Leon Dunn,” I moan.

Before I found the courage to tell Letty the truth, she refilled my glass and before I knew it everything was pouring from my lips. To my relief she never once judged me, even when I confessed to wanting Leon to do what he did, that I was more than willing to take the punishment he was dishing out.

I understood when she opened up and confessed to having similar experiences with Kane at the beginning of their relationship.

Listening to her talk about how toxic the two of them were made me feel better about what happened, about how I felt when he was so lost in his anger, his darkness. It fed something twisted inside of me that I didn’t even know existed. But it seems I might not be the only one to have felt that way.

My cell pings dragging me from my hazy memories of the night before and I blindly reach out to grab it from my nightstand.

Letty: How are you feeling? ?

“Ugh.” It’s the smiley face that does me in because it means that she probably feels completely fine whereas I’m once again dying.

This is all his fault. All of it.

If he never picked up Charlie that night then we might never have collided.

Is that what you’d rather have happened? To never have met him?

With another groan, I throw back the covers and make my way to the bathroom on unsteady legs.