Page 33 of Two For the Show (Trapped On The Tightrope Duet #2)

Dexter

This is weird, texting your phone like you’re here. I have no idea where you are, and that’s fine, you know I don’t blame you for leaving, but yeah.

Still weird.

This is the only way I know how to talk about this. I struggle with face to face conversations sometimes.

Kids see their parents as Gods, you know? Larger-than-life presences that they can’t look away from.

I was no different. My father was incredible. He was kind and gentle, and he loved us fiercely. I always assumed that extended to my mother, because when she’d come home from work, he’d kiss her, they’d cuddle on the couch, and he always seemed to care a lot about what she thought.

I was a kid and didn’t have insight into their lives and relationship, of course, but from where I was sitting, they were everything I wanted to emulate.

Everyone knew me and Dario would present as Alphas, like Mom. I don’t know how, but from my earliest memory, we were told we would be Alphas, and we needed to be good ones.

We were a handful.

Having twins must have been hard. Dario and I were monsters at the best of times.

Two little boys running around and wrecking shit with no regard for their own survival would be enough to stress anyone out.

My dad dealt with postpartum depression after he had us, and that left mom to pick up a lot of the slack for the first three years of our lives.

She didn’t seem to resent him for that, though. We had a lot of fun with her, always singing and dancing and goofing off, and Dad was present when and where he could be.

Well, from what I could tell as a kid. Memories from that time are hazy. Apparently, trauma can make you block stuff out.

Obviously, this isn’t stuff my mom was able to tell us. This is from my dad’s mouth when I went and visited him in prison when I was sixteen. He’s apologetic about what happened, and I needed closure.

It was a really bad idea to go there, if I’m being honest. Just a colossal mistake.

But I digress.

That day didn’t feel any different than any other. We were in the first grade and had a really shitty day at school. We got thrown off the field trip, and Dad had to come pick us up from the botanical garden.

Dario will take the blame for it every time to protect me, but I was the one who ripped the flowers out of the ground. I wanted to take them home and give them to Mom.

Dad picked us up and brought us home, ranting about how we were out of control, disrespectful, and he had better things to do than sit at home with us.

It’s the first time I remember him losing his cool.

So, he called Mom and said she needed to come home from work to deal with us.

She did, because what else could she do? Her Omega was distressed, upset, and needed her. Any Alpha would have come home when called.

She was working at a law firm as a paralegal, and Dad was a handyman. He had more flexibility than her by default, but she was never going to let him suffer and be upset, you know?

I’d never seen Dad that mad before. By the time mom got home, he was screaming at her, at us, at the wall. It was scary, but any time Dario and I tried to leave the room to go hide in our beds, he’d shout and make us stay.

Mom got home, and Dad was inconsolable. Saying how we were disrespectful little shits, needed to be punished, and he couldn’t live like this anymore.

He told me when I was a teenager that he was going into heat and needed another Alpha, that only one Alpha couldn’t keep up with his needs, but that Mom refused to search for a packmate. He was terrified about being left alone while in heat.

Apparently, she had done it before.

He was mostly on suppressants because they didn’t have anyone to care for us for a few days when he went into heat, but he went off them suddenly to try to force her hand.

Do you know they don’t know for sure what causes Omega Storm?

Of course you know, you’re a doctor.

But I spent a ton of time researching it. Digging into it and trying to figure out what we could have done differently. If there was any way to prevent it from happening.

Everything I found said that there was no reason why Dad’s Storm should have been so bad. We weren’t threatened, and no one was in danger. But when he was ranting and raving at Mom about how he needed another Alpha and she was abusing him by not adding to the pack, she tried to take us away.

She told us it was time to pack our bags, that we were going on an adventure.

He started screaming about how she wasn’t going to take his kids from him, that they deserved to know that their mother wasn’t taking care of her Omega. That we were going to be Alphas one day, and we had a shitty role model in her.

Of course, Mom didn’t want us to listen to that, so she tried to leave with us.

He lost his fucking mind like something in him broke when she tried to usher us out the door.

When I visited him as a teenager, he said he truly believed that if she sent us away, he’d never see us again. I don’t believe that Mom would have done that. She just wanted us out of the way so he had time to calm down.

She started purring, walking slowly toward him with her hands out, speaking in low tones directly to his Omega nature.

It didn’t work.

He was losing it, screaming about how she was abusing him and taking his pups away, and that she was going to hurt us as soon as she got him out of the way.

That she had never wanted us, and she refused another Alpha as punishment for him being depressed after we were born.

That’s when she got her arms around him and pulled him to her chest. At this point, Dario and I were huddled together, hugging one another, trying to be as small and as quiet as possible.

I watched my dad’s posture change. He slumped against her, like the fight was leaving him.

She was taller than him, you know. He could rest his head on her chest comfortably. Me and Dario look a lot like him, but we’re tall like Mom.

Anyways.

Mom was purring and whispering soothing words as she led him to the couch.

But before they could sit down, he reached out, grabbed an award Mom had been given at work, and smashed it into the corner of her head.

He didn’t make a sound.

He drove it into her head several times, until she was motionless and surrounded by a puddle of blood.

Death seems like it should be loud. That the world should shake, the birds should fly out of trees, and screams should be never ending.

That’s not my experience.

She cried out from that first hit.

But not the others.

That first was enough to drop her to the ground, and he followed her.

I don’t understand how it got so bad.

One moment they were fighting, the next he was kneeling over her, splattered in her blood.

How did they get there?

Shouldn’t she have been able to calm him down?

He seemed like he was calming down.

Until he wasn’t.

The neighbors had heard the commotion and called the cops, and they came in moments after he dropped the award.

We didn’t even have the time to process what we saw before they placed him in handcuffs and hauled him away from her still body.

We had tan carpet.

The cops almost immediately labeled him an Omega in Storm because, apparently, he was in pre-heat. I guess Alphas can tell that kind of thing.

But why did he seem like he was calming down at first?

Was he even in Storm at all?

I have trouble thinking about that. If he weren’t in Storm, it would change everything. The way I view my childhood, the way I have lived my entire life.

It’s easier to say he was in Omega Storm.

Because I’m not sure I can handle it if he weren’t.

Thank you so much for trusting me with this.