I sat stiffly at the metal table trying to ignore the other people around me meeting with inmates. The crying and fevered whispers made my skin itchy and had tension coiling tightly around the base of my neck. There was no happiness in this place, no light. It was no wonder Benny had been willing to do anything in order to make sure he never walked inside these walls again. And I totally understood why Bax had gravitated toward someone as bright and clean as Dovie. She was the opposite of everything that made this place what it was.
It took a while for my dad to show. The look on his face as he was led toward me, hands cuffed together at his waist and ankles shackled, made it clear he wasn’t exactly thrilled with my surprise stop in. His hair was longer than the last time I visited him and the lines around his eyes and mouth appeared deeper. He was turning into a stranger who used to look exactly like me, but every day those similarities seemed to slip away, both physically and emotionally.
He lifted his chin at someone across the room and waited impatiently while the prison guard situated him on the opposite side of the table. There was no missing the click as his feet were locked in place to the ground. There was no running from your fate in the Point, and if your fate led you here, it felt like all hope was lost.
“What are you doing here, Snowden? You didn’t mention in your last message that you were coming for a visit.” His voice was flat and empty. The same way my insides had felt until Noe brought an earthquake with her into my life. All of my fault lines were rubbing up against each other now, breaking off the brittle, breakable parts and shaking them loose.
“I wasn’t planning on coming to see you but there’s been a lot of stuff happening in my life lately, and I realized I needed to have an honest conversation with you, Dad.” I folded my hands on the table in front of me and willed him to look me in the eye.
His graying eyebrows pitched low over the top of his nose, and his mouth settled into a hard line. “Can’t do much with honesty or conversation in this place, Son.”
He was resigned to a life spent behind bars and didn’t realize the key to his freedom was sitting right in front of him.
“Dad,” I blew out a breath and lowered my head so I was staring at the top of the table. “You don’t belong in here. You lost so much and I . . .” I trailed off when he suddenly leaned forward on the table, hands curled into fists so hard his knuckles turned white.
“Snowden.” My name was sharp and hard, the same way he said it when I was growing up and not performing up to his high standards. It wasn’t enough to be advanced and special, no, I had to be superhuman and remarkable. “I had a family, a wife I loved more than anything. I had a nice house and a good job. You and your sister were good kids, better than I ever deserved.” His voice dropped lower and one of his fists hit the table with a thump. “I wanted something more than I wanted any of that. I gave it all up for revenge.”
I blinked at him and leaned back a little on the very uncomfortable bench. People called him crazy, said he was off and not all there. I always thought he was eccentric, the product of a mind that other people didn’t understand. I was the same way. But staring at him now, looking at his wild eyes and flushed face, I wondered if maybe there was more truth to the claims than I wanted to admit.
“Dad, I wanted revenge, too. That’s how I ended up in the wrong hands.” They exploited my weakness, my love for my family.
My dad shook his shaggy head and scowled at me. “No, Son, you wanted answers. You wanted proof and a reason why. I wanted everyone to pay. I wanted them to suffer and burn, the way they caused your mother to suffer in that explosion.”
I bit back a gasp and leaned even farther back from the stranger who was once my father. “Dad?” His other fist hit the table and I caught one of the guard’s moving closer out of the corner of my eye. My dad was getting all worked up and it hadn’t gone unnoticed. “What are you saying?”
He shook his head at me and sat back on his side of the table. “I loved your mother, Snowden. Loved her more than anything. She deserved better than what happened to her. I don’t regret anything. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
Was my dad admitting to selling government secrets to the enemy? Was he really a traitor? Did he really not care about what kind of damage he might have done to millions of innocent people?
“The DoD offered to get you out, Dad. They told me if I stayed, if I got my shit together after Savina’s death, they would spring you. They said they would clear your name.” I sounded as bewildered as I felt.
“They lied. They always lie.” He sounded so certain and I couldn’t disagree with him. They promised to keep my sister alive, and here I was, alone and lost without her.
“I could go back. Push them to let you out.” It’s what I should have done when they first put the offer on the table but I was too scared, too turned around, to do the right thing.
“If you go back, they’ll use you to kill, Son. They’ll take whatever is in that brain of yours and make it into something deadly. They won’t care what the cost is to you. They’ll bleed you dry and dump the empty husk like trash. They killed your mother to get to you, Son.”
Did they? I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was all cloudy and convoluted in my mind. The silken strands of that intricately woven web were twisting around reality and this broken man’s beliefs. I had lost my sister, but he had lost everything. It was enough to send anyone over the edge of sanity.
“They might come for me anyway.” Goddard was all over the news, and so was the fact that someone had hacked into the city’s database and his computer. The black suits that came for me once would be back if they knew I was doing more than running background checks on Nassir’s clients and working girls. Like the man said, I was firing on all cylinders again and that was hard to hide.
“Let them come. You’re older, wiser, and a hell of a lot harder than you were as a teenager. They taught you to fight, so fight. They knew your weakness, Snowden. They exploited it. Don’t let them do that again.” His voice was hard and there was no getting around the warning.
Immediately, I thought about Noe. Was she a weakness? I didn’t think straight around her. She confused me and distracted me, but she also woke me up. I was sleepwalking through my days, going through the motions of living my life, but then she crashed into it and sent everything spinning. She kickstarted something inside of me and I couldn’t imagine going back to being numb. She had me feeling things I’d never felt before. Things I couldn’t name because they were so foreign. She forced me to be strong.
“I don’t want this to be where you spend the rest of your life, Dad. You’re all I have left.” He shook his head before I was done with the sentence.
“No. You don’t have me. You have a life out there, time to make something work for yourself, time to make a difference. I got what I wanted, Snowden. I got my revenge. I made the enemy just as strong as those bastards are. Knowledge is power and I armed the other side with as much as I could. I made the fight fair.” He banged his hands at the table and motioned to the guard who came over to tell him to keep it down. We both got to our feet, him watching me with cold eyes, me watching him with a new realization. “The only thing I know how to do is punish. If you need me to hurt someone, to make them pay, that’s all I got for you, Son. Next time you come for a visit, you let me know ahead of time.” It was like a knife in the center of my chest. He needed to prepare himself to see me, because while I was still holding onto him, he had let me go long before.
“I’ll see you soon, Dad.”
He didn’t even turn around to look at me as he was guided out of the common room.
My dad was a bad man, a sociopath, and a betrayer. The good guys wanted to turn me into a killer. The heroes hardly ever won. The only people in my life who had bothered to try and make it better were the criminals and the felons. I owed the villains everything. They took me the way I was with no questions asked.
He was right. I knew how to fight and I finally had something . . . someone I was willing to fight for.
Noe
Nassir’s attorney was young and looked just as good in his expensive suit as the man footing the bill did. He was blond, stylish, incredibly fit, and very focused. He actually reminded me a little bit of Race. He was how the other man might have turned out if he hadn’t run across Shane Baxter all those years ago, if his life on the Hill had never been exposed for the sham and lie that it was. It was clear Nassir was his most recognizable client and his biggest meal ticket. It was also obvious that he couldn’t afford to lose when he was representing a man who was as ruthless and brutal as Nassir was. The lawyer took one look at Julia’s protruding belly and declared that she needed to get a paternity test done ASAP. The irrefutable proof of what Goddard had done to her was growing inside of her, the key to putting the man away for the rest of his life. He told her the District Attorney’s office would ultimately be the one prosecuting the case, but he would represent her and make sure they didn’t screw anything up, considering it was still unknown how far Goddard’s reach extended.