Here is something I have never told anyone.
Not Kassie. Not Lira. Not Tristan. Nobody in this world, and nobody in the last one.
I was not a good boy.
I know you've probably worked that out by now.
My father was a man the whole city loved. He was an attorney, the kind who wins, and he wanted to be mayor, and everybody who met him said he'd make a fine one. He had a handshake people talked about afterwards.
At home, he was something else.
He ran our house like a courtroom where he was the judge, the jury and the law, and the rest of us were always guilty of something. My brother learned to keep his head down. Everyone else learned to go quiet the moment his key turned in the front door.
I never learned.
When he shouted, I shouted back. When he hit me, I didn't cry. I went away and thought about it, and then I made it cost him. A slashed tyre on the morning of a hearing. A window. A client's file that went missing the night before court. He could never prove it was me.
