“I have classes today.”
“Cancel them.”
Bitterness uncoils in my gut in response to his selfish demands, but after all these years, I expect nothing less from him. This is the man who groomed me from a young age to be exactly the image he wanted. He sent me to all the best prep schools. Jammed my schedule so full of extracurriculars and AP courses that I never had a spare minute to think for myself. Under his dictatorship, he called the shots, and I came to him like Pavlov’s dog, salivating eagerly for my next command. But I’m not the same person I was then. My days of doing his bidding ended the night he ruined both of our lives.
“I’m leaving.” I reach for my briefcase, and he slams his hand down on top of it, holding it hostage.
“Goddammit, Sebastian. I need to speak with you. If you leave now, I’ll be here when you get back. Either way, you can’t avoid me any longer. Take a seat like a man and get it over with.”
Our eyes clash, and for the first time, his betray a weakness I hadn’t noticed until now. He’s still the same hard-ass man who raised me. The man who designed my entire life and accepted no alternatives. But beneath that, there is a frailty I’ve never seen in him before. As I study him, it occurs to me that it isn’t just in his eyes.
My father is tall, like me, but his usually muscular frame has diminished considerably since I last saw him. His previously well-tailored suit now hangs loose on his body, and the hands that were always hard as bricks seem weaker than before. Is it the natural evolution of time, or simply misery?
At sixty years old, it can’t be merely his age responsible for the rapid decline. The last I saw him, I’d resolved to hate him until he died, and I anticipated he would live forever just to spite me. But now, it seems the opposite is true. There is no room in my heart for sympathy, not when it comes to him. He might be blood, but I owe him nothing. Not even my time. However, knowing my father as I do, I take his words as a promise. If I leave now, he will still be here when I come back. If I don’t deal with it now, it will only prolong the headache.
With a sigh, I retrieve my phone and email the administration, alerting them to my absence today. It will be the only absence I’ve ever taken in my three years at Loyola Academy. I fetch the bottle of Japanese twelve-year whisky I keep in the cupboard, pouring us both two fingers.
“What do you want?” I take a seat across from my father and squeeze the life out of my glass.
Harrison Carter drains the whisky I poured him and then shoves it aside, his lip curling in obvious disapproval.
“It’s time for you to quit this nonsense.” He folds his hands together and examines me. “You’ve made your point. Come back to New York and take your place at the company. I have an office set up for you. An assistant, car service, a penthouse on hold ten minutes from the building. It’s all yours.”
“It’s all mine regardless.” I scoff. “Or did you forget that I’m the majority shareholder?”
The barb that was once effective at riling my father seems to fall short of even ruffling his feathers now. When my mother died, she left her family’s legacy to both of us with the majority to me, specifically. It was her way of trying to bring us closer, but all it ever managed to do was drive us further apart. My father still believes he’s in control while I’ve waited patiently for the day I can pull the rug out from under him. If or when I ever take my place at the Carter Holdings empire, it will be when my father no longer has a seat there.
“Sebastian.” Harrison sighs. “What’s it going to take? Do you want me to confess my sins? Is that it? Do you want to hear the words from my mouth? Will that make you feel better?”
“No.” I shoot up from the table and knock my chair over in the process. “I already know what you did. I don’t need to hear you say it. This was a mistake. You need to leave.”
“It isn’t logical,” he replies, ignoring my request. “I understand that now. But I was goddamned furious with you. I spent years investing in you for you to turn around and throw it all away. Telling me you’d rather kick a ball around on a field than work where you were needed. It was a slap in the face. It was disrespectful. I was blinded by my rage, and I couldn’t accept it.”
“You couldn’t accept that I was done being your puppet,” I bite out. “You couldn’t accept that I had a mind of my own, and a path that might not be yours.”
“I’ll give you that.” He bows his head. “I never meant for anyone to get seriously hurt.”
“But they did.” I turn my back to him and slam my glass down on the counter. “In your desperation to end my soccer career, you ended my sister’s life. Your own fucking flesh and blood. Don’t try to deny it.”
“I won’t deny it,” he echoes softly. “I hired those men to rob you and fuck up your knee. Katie wasn’t supposed to be there. That was never supposed to happen.”
His admission comes as no surprise. I’ve known for years the truth about that night, even if I couldn’t prove it. I’d begged Katie to come out with the team. I wanted her to help me celebrate my decision to play soccer professionally. I was finally breaking free from our father’s hold, and she was so happy for me she couldn’t say no. And now, because of my request, she’s gone.
Whenever I close my eyes, flashes of her death come back to me in vivid detail. They are the only fragments I remember, but they never leave my mind. We left the bar, drunk and happy. We weren’t paying attention, and I should have been paying fucking attention. Katie screamed when three men cornered us. They demanded my wallet, and I handed it over, but they didn’t leave. Instead, they shattered my knee with steel batons and beat me into unconsciousness while my sister fought to get to me.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
The gunshots still echo through my nightmares. I can still see her body crumpled on the ground beside me, her hair matted with blood and her face unrecognizable. It’s always too late to save her when I wake up, and the pain never goes away. I just want it to fucking go away.
My pulse thrashes in my ears as I turn back to my father, and before I can stop myself, I knock him out of his chair with a solid punch to the jaw. He topples onto the floor, and I follow, each of us wrestling for dominance as we work out our anger the only way we know how.
“Fuck you!” I scream at him. “Fuck you for what you did to her! You should be rotting in a prison cell.”
“Goddammit, Sebastian.” He shoves me off and staggers to his feet, brushing away the blood on his lip. “Can’t you see that I already am? And so are you. We are both rotting in prisons of our own making. The day Katie died, I died too. If you don’t think for one second that I’m paying for my choices, I’m paying for them every time I look in the mirror. Just like you.”
I rise to my feet and meet my father’s blank gaze. The man has never been philosophical. He has never apologized for anything that happened that night. I wouldn’t accept it if he did because he’s right. This is the prison I’ve made for myself. As long as I continue to wake up with a pulse, I will punish myself for her death.
“It’s too late for me,” he says. “I’m dying, son. My body is riddled with cancer. At best, I have six months left, but realistically, I could go next week.”