Page 9 of The Retaliation You Deliver

I deserve every bit of this pain for what I did to him. But equally, he doesn’t deserve to get it from me either.

Jesus. We’re both as screwed up as each other.

I felt stupid when I admitted to him that I felt like we’d been brought together for a reason. Turns out I was right, but I never would have guessed the reason, or the fact that the reason we seemed to click so well probably has something to do with our mutual pain and hatred for the same man.

* * *

I expect the house to be trashed but I never could have prepared myself for the amount of devastation Leon left in his wake last night.

Everything on the shelving unit, from ornaments to picture frames are broken, shattered and destroyed as I make my way down two flights of stairs and toward the kitchen.

My uncle's liquor cabinet is missing its glass doors, bottles of vintage whisky are smashed all over the floor, the scent filling the entire main floor of the house.

Mary, his housekeeper, is going to love me for this.

Part of me wants to start tidying it all up, but a bigger part of me has wanted to see this place burned to the ground for years.

This house, the entire estate holds nothing but bad memories for me.

Turning my back on the mess, I make myself a coffee then head toward the other rooms we didn’t check last night.

I’m half expecting to find something disturbing behind each door, but with each one I open, all I find is boxes and random crap. Thankfully, there is no twisted sex den or evidence—at least visible evidence—of the kind of stuff that twisted prick was into.

A shudder rips through me once more at the image now burned right at the forefront of my mind from his office ten years ago.

I’d banished it from my head, that and everything else that man subjected me to over the years. But it’s like Leon opened Pandora’s box because all the memories are just spilling out around me.

The second I push open the final door, I discover the culprit of the alarm because a panicked bird flaps around by the widow.

“How the hell did you get in here?” I mutter, walking over and pushing the windows as wide as they’ll go to give him it’s freedom.

“You’ve got it easy,” I tell him. “You can fly away and forget this place ever held you hostage. I’ve never been that lucky.”

I stand there for a few minutes, looking out over the rolling countryside toward the outbuildings where his boys used to stay every summer.

Richard Fletcher’s summer camp was notorious, and only the very best or very wealthy got a spot.

But all that money and power, all it was hiding was dirty secrets and potentially years of abuse.

Parents willingly handed their boys over to my uncle believing they’d be safe here. That he’d been vetted, not only that, but he was a celebrity. A player most parents had grown up watching, a man many of the father’s looked up to.

What a joke.

The man is nothing but a child abuser.

I have many regrets. Not helping that little boy—Leon—will always be my biggest, but coming up a close second is that I never got any evidence of what was happening here.

I was only eight at the time. I didn’t really understand what was happening, what I saw that day, until a few years later, but by then, it was too late.

My uncle and I had no relationship left.

He might have been paying my tuition at school, for my holidays that ensured he never had to see me, but that was the extent of our relationship by that point. And that was more than fine by me. I’d come to terms with the fact I had no family long before he cut me off.

I always figured that I was better off alone, and that at some point, I’d get a chance to be able to make my own family.

Surely at some point I was going to find some friends who would accept me for who I was.

Turns out that was wishful thinking, because here I am, eighteen and a college freshman still without a family.