31. Renee

There”s no such thing as the calm before the storm. There”s just a lull in the storm that”s always raging.

The quiet that comes before Deacon gets home is just that. A deceptive silence that comes crashing to a halt.

Literally.

Deacon bursts through my door, hours after my father left me. The photography magazine I was reading gets ripped out of my hands, and my heart goes right along with it.

”Deacon, what the?—”

I recoil. A pungent coil of alcohol assaults my nose. A sharper, sweatier, unmistakably human stench comes right on its heels. He”s been drinking and fucking.

Gross. Imagine consenting to Deacon Carrington putting his shrimp dick in you. There isn’t enough money in the world.

Joke”s on me, though, because if my father gets his way, I’m gonna have to do it for free.

”Deacon, are you alright?”

”You… Renee…” He slurs his words, jabbing his finger in my direction. ”You slut.”

So much for being cordial.

I fold my arms and keep my distance from him. He”s proven that his temper is more volatile these days, so I don’t want to venture too close. ”You”re drunk. You should go to your side of the property and sober up.”

”Don”t tell me what to do!” Deacon”s nostrils flare, sloppy and disgusting. ”In my own house… My house. You do what I tell you. You”re my fiancée. Scott gave you bad habits. I’m gonna have to housetrain you again.”

Deacon cackles, unhinged. I don”t know what insults me more: the fact that he thinks he owns me, or the fact he thinks Weston has anything to do with the kind of person that I am.

”Weston didn”t give me anything. He was the one that showed up to dinner. On his own. I didn”t invite him?—”

”Doesn’t matter. Damage is done.” Deacon shambles toward me, a drunken zombie of a man. I retreat, but there isn’t far to go before I’m bumping into furniture and walls. ”Weston not being there wouldn”t have stopped you from talking about that silly little social media job. You just love to embarrass me, don”t you? Common people do social media. Common women with common husbands. You having a job—” He spits the word in a fury of saliva and alcohol. ”—says I am common. My future wife doing lowbrow peasant work. Like I”m some poor fucking sap.”

”It”s not my fault you have a fragile ego. It is kind of pathetic, though.”

The words are out of my mouth well before I can curb them. I”m supposed to be giving him the sweet, simpering fiancée treatment, after all. I should be the bigger person.

But I don”t want to be.

Why should I when Deacon clearly doesn”t respect a single damn thing about me?!

As my indignation boils, filling me with pride for standing up for myself, Deacon goes deathly quiet.

Calm before the storm, indeed.

The silence is broken when Deacon gives a massive snarl, turns, and flips up my glass coffee table. It rotates once in the air, then lands again glass-down, and promptly shatters into a trillion jagged pieces.

”You need to leave?—”

”You”re going to stop telling me what to do!” Deacon shrieks at me. He crunches through the broken glass, going to the shelving behind the couch. I watch, rooted to the spot, as he throws the books, pictures, knickknacks, onto the floor.

Things that are mine.

Things that should have been safe in this tiny little slice of Deacon”s domain that is the only oasis I have left.

And watching him hurl them at our feet is like a sickly, way-too-on-the-nose metaphor for what he’s doing to me: taking little pieces of my soul and destroying them.

Broken.

Disregarded.

Abused.

”All of this is mine!” Each word is punctuated by him throwing yet another one of my possessions onto the ground. ”It”s my house, it belongs to me, and you”re my fucking fiancée, so you belong to me, too! You. Do. What. I. Say!”

Torn pages fly in his rage. Picture frame glass sprinkles my floor like a deadly snow.

And I just stand there, letting him.

Then he turns his sights on my camera.

I keep it displayed on a middle shelf. My shining glory. It”s what sets me apart from my family. I didn”t need their money or their clout to make it as a photographer, and I hadn”t needed it to get that camera, either. It is wholly, without reservation, a piece of me. The last piece of me, in so many ways.

Yet I can do nothing when his fat fingers wrap like tentacles around its lens.

Well, that’s not quite true—I could do something. I could scream. I could beg. No! Stop! Anything but that!

But the words stick, lodged in my throat, and I watch him kill me instead.

Every detail of my camera”s demise will be etched forever into my mind. Like I’m taking mental snapshots.

Deacon”s arm, raising up. Shaking, enraged.

The twitch of his fingers as the grip tightens. A faint, plastic cracking sound.

They’re so delicate, cameras. Hearts are, too. They both go crack when you squeeze hard enough.

Then his arm takes a downward arc. My camera flies free.

Smashes. Bounces. Smashes again.

But it”s not enough.

It”s never enough.

Because even when it’s finally stopped careening across the floor, that same foot that smashed my coffee table descends like a comet into my camera and reduces the last pieces of it into plastic dust.

Deacon turns his drunken sneer to me, his face darkening. ”You”re a fucking liability, you know that?”

”And you”re a mean, sloppy drunk with a domestic violence charge waiting to happen,” I whisper. ”Get. Out.”

I’m so sure he”s not going to listen. That, rather than do the thing best for the both of us, he”s going to come after me next and it won”t just be machinery and books smashed on my living room floor—it’ll be my blood.

He doesn”t touch me, though.

Scoffing, Deacon kicks the remains of my camera out of his way. Then he stumbles away from me and the ground zero he”s left me in. The door swings open and shut.

I don”t realize I need air until my body forces me to suck in a deep breath all at once. There”s an insistent, burning sting and it takes everything—everything—in me to not have a full-on breakdown.

Don”t let that nepo-baby bastard control you like this.

But what choice do I have when I”m the one that put myself into this inescapable pit of snakes? Who”s going to save me?

Not my father, that’s for damn sure. And certainly not my mother. They”re all too happy to leave me to rot in this place, just as long as it”s giving the world the impression of the perfect WASP family with no skeletons in their closet.

It”s not them I wish could come bursting through my door.

It”s Weston Scott.

His name in my mind is enough to break the dam that”s been holding back my tears. Who”s the better father for my child: the violent fiend who”ll sooner put me in a grave than love me…

Or the man who never wanted to be a dad in the first place?