Invincible (A Kingpin Love Affair Book 3) (25 page)

His face said he felt the same way about the way things played out as I did. “Afraid so. I rushed home as soon as she gave me the ultimatum fully intent on fixing everything I had managed to screw up between your mother and me. What I found was an empty house with nothing but my belongings left in it. The place looked as if it had been vacant for days.” He stopped talking and reached across the table for my hand. I recoiled against my chair. I didn’t know if I should believe him or not.

The little girl inside of me, who couldn’t even remember her father, wanted to believe him, but the woman I had grown into kept screaming at me that this was all a load of shit. He had to be fucking with me. Right? But if he were, why did I still feel this connection? My mind was going into overload trying to process everything that left his lips. However, my heart was opening, willing every part of me to accept this.
Accept him.

“I looked for you all over the place. Used whatever connections I could at work. At the time, I wasn’t nearly as high up in the ranks as I am now, so they weren’t the best connections, but they helped me any way they could. Every search always came back the same, and I got so tired of the pain I felt every time they told me they had nothing. I gave up looking for you and that is my biggest regret. I should’ve never given up. I should’ve kept looking, but it was just… I figured, eventually, she would tell you and you would be able to find me.” He sounded disconnected from the world. I wanted to reach out, extend my hand to him, and show the compassion and comfort he deeply deserved, but at the same time, I didn’t know if I should. Every man who I had loved, at some point in time, had given up on me, and he was basically telling me he was one of them.

“How—how do I know this is true?” I narrowed my eyes at him only to earn a smile in return. This last twenty-four hours had proven to me how strong I really was, but even the strongest of people sometimes break and I was breaking. My heart was experiencing every emotion times ten while this entire conversation suffocated me.

“Stop glaring at me, child. Turn around and lift your shirt.” I looked at him like he had grown a second head. I was not turning around, and I most definitely was not lifting my shirt up.

“How about no.” I glared even more.

“Just do it, Tegan. I’ll know if it is you or not by the birthmark on your back. Not that I don’t know it’s you already, but if I have to prove it, I will.” My mouth opened to say something, and then closed only to open again. I felt and looked like a fish out of water.
He knew about my birthmark.
That meant… I shook my head in disbelief.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t holding out hope because I was. I was holding out, waiting for him to say something that would click. Something that would trigger anything inside of me to confirm that maybe, just maybe, he being my father wasn’t as far-fetched or ludicrous as I had initially thought.

He was my father.
The very man who I assumed had fallen off the face of the Earth was sitting right in front of me, in flesh and blood.

This same man had saved my life right when I needed him. Not only that, but he was connected to Devon just as I was. He was the boss to the one man I loved more than life. My Father’s past and my own almost lined up exactly. He had endured a similar fate as I losing my mom.

“I just…” I stumbled over my words again. The door opened behind my father, but I didn’t even notice the person walking in. My mind was trying to work around the shit storm that had been placed in front of me. My life wasn’t just an out of this world mess; it was borderline insane and it had its own universe.

“I know it’s hard to believe. Hell, I can hardly wrap my mind around it, but I feel it and that makes it enough for me to believe it.” He smiled deeply, the joyous look taking ages off his appearance. “I thought you would’ve been,” he scratched his head, “I don’t know… off at college by now, or at least have a husband and some kids of your own running around. Finding you in the middle of an undercover sting operation was the last place I could have ever imagined running into you.” His face said it all. He wasn’t happy to have been rescuing his daughter from a gangster.

“I am…” My mouth felt dry and my eyes began to water.

I had lost so much.

My mother. Jamie. School.

In the same instance, I had gained so much.

Devon. My father. And, hopefully, a new life.

“I was going to school. I mean… I was just having a hard time, and then everything happened, and I needed money so I just took a leave absence,” I corrected myself.

“When are you planning to go back and where the hell is your mother? Shouldn’t she still be taking care of you? At the very least, watching over you to help keep you out of trouble? I mean, I ain’t got much experience with being a parent, but I’m positive the work doesn’t end when you turn eighteen.”

He hadn’t a clue what being a parent was, but he still understood. He knew the love and effort that went into it. I knew that much just from talking to him. I loved my mother for the singular reason she gave me life, but that was as far as it ever went. She wasn’t supportive of me or of anything that I had done. Once I started dating Jamie, she reminded me of it every day. Eventually, it became too much for both of us.

“She’s gone. I don’t know where she is, and I haven’t seen her in over a year. She kicked me out when we got into a really bad argument. We weren’t able to fix our problems so there was no need to keep in touch.” His eyes grew as wide as saucers as his fist landed hard against the table. It was evident he was mad about my mom being a less than stellar parent.

“You mean to tell me, she just left you without a care in the world as to what you would do with yourself?” He gritted out as his jaw ticked.

“She did, but it’s okay. I’m okay without her, and I have been. She didn’t do anything but make my life that much harder to get through. If you ask me, it was for the better.” Apparently, my admission didn’t soothe him as I had hoped it would because he still looked as if he wanted to Hulk-slam someone through the floor.

I understood his anger though. He had lost his right to be a father to me, and the one parent I did have slacked at it. That sort of thing makes you wish you could go back in time and redo the past, make everything right, not just for yourself but for your child also.

He loved me, and when I look into the eyes that replicated mine, I could see if he had been given the chance to raise me, he would’ve cared for me far greater than my mother ever had.

“Just… try to calm down. It’s over. The past is the past, and there isn’t anything we can do about it now. The only thing we can do is to move forward and live in the present… maybe get to know each other.” I tried to reassure him and let him know that no matter how weird this was, I did want him in my life, but from the look on his face, I could tell what my mother had done to both of us was pushing him into a very dark place.

“I’m sorry, and I hope one day you can forgive me for my part in all of this. Getting to know each other would be one of the best things to happen to me in years, but right now, I need—I need fucking air. I have to clear my mind,” he said as he pushed the chair he sat in away from the table. It scraped across the floor loudly and then the door slammed in my face just like my life had that night Jamie left. It all came crashing down all at once, and I was barely staying afloat in the madness.

“Well, this is interesting.” Alzerro’s voice flowed into my mind, breaking my train of thought. I hadn’t realized it was he who had entered the room earlier during my conversation with Frank. I turned my attention to him. His face was smug, but there was also something else there. A caring, nurturing nature maybe. It didn’t seem like something he would often show or even a trait he would have. He reminded me of a man who was far from a law abiding citizen.

“You learn something new every day.” I didn’t want to talk about this with someone I hardly knew. I didn’t even want to acknowledge it at this point. I was overdue for a glass of wine and a good book. Only then could I pull myself from my disarrayed life for a moment.

“I would agree with that.” Of course, he would. His single sentences and lurking eyes were annoying the hell out of me.
What did he want?

“What do you want? I know you aren’t in here to actually discuss what you happened to hear.” Even if he was, I wasn’t going to talk about it any further.

“Do you know who I am?” He didn’t really ask. It was more of you-don’t-know-who-I-am kind of thing.

“An FBI agent? Or are you the man who likes to throw women onto desks and threaten them with knives? Wait… I got it. You’re Devon’s best friend, his partner, and from what he has told me, you are somebody’s husband and dad. By the sounds of it, you got the entire white picket fence and two point five kids thing going for you. Living the American dream much?” I didn’t want to be a judgmental bitch, but I felt the claws coming out. After what he had done to me back at the Casino, he deserved whatever I could give him.

“You have no idea who I really am. No idea what I have done to others. I was once a monster and I could take someone out with a snap of my fingers. I’m no longer that person and I haven’t been for a very long time. That ‘somebody’ who allowed me to be their husband was once in a position a lot like yours. She stormed into my life hell bent on doing what she wanted to. She fucked with my head and made me realize just how wrong I had been living my life. Because of me, she lost a lot of people she cared about, but through it all, she never gave up on me. I was the last fucker on Earth to think I deserved her love, but somehow, she made me feel worthy of it. Her love held us together like glue, and when that wasn’t enough, I held us together.”

He pushed off the wall, crossing the room, his footsteps echoing against the floor. I kept my mouth shut not wanting to say anything that would set him off.

“I know you’re hurting right now. I know you’re mad and you probably can’t see through the fucked up mess your life has become, but you have to know there is always a calm after the storm. You just made it through yours—the calm is coming.”

My lips twitched, wanting to smile. This big, bad man was talking to me as if he were my therapist. Without even knowing me, he had me figured out. How could that be? Was I that easy to read?

“I don’t know how I feel. Everything I have felt in the past twenty-four hours is spiraling around inside of me and I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my shit. I’ve already lost so much and I put myself into a situation I should have never been in the first place. So, yea, I’m hurting, but I’m also frustrated, irritated, and mad. I’m mad at my mother, at every man I have ever known, and I feel like my life is one big bruise that will never heal.” I had just confessed all the things that were running through my mind. I had unleashed a river, and the dam that protected all the madness was on the verge of collapsing.

“I have been here, right where you are. I know what it feels like to walk around mad with so much anger brewing inside of you that you can’t see which way is up or down. You only see red and, eventually, you will drown in your own self-pity. My wife, Bree went through the same thing. I watched her walk down a dark road just like the one you are on, just like the one I was on. I won’t let you stay there in that place you are in, and I definitely will not let you leave here—at least not like this.”

Panic seized me. They couldn’t keep me here. For what? Because I was angry? I was allowed to be angry if I wanted to be angry.

“What do you mean you will not let me leave here? I am not staying here. I have no reason to.” I was on the defense, and I refused to be bullied into something. I wouldn’t stay. I couldn’t. Not after everything that had happened. And especially not knowing what the future held.

“Your very reason to stay here is just in the room across the hall. He’s beating himself up over all of this, which he should be, with all the shit he did wrong, but that’s not the point. The point is—he risked a lot of fucking shit for you. His job, his reputation, his life. Hell, my life.”

Was this man on drugs? I knew the obligations Devon had. I knew that what he risked was everything, but it wasn’t just for me. He didn’t come here just for me.

“Does that mean anything to you?” His voice had an angry undertone to it, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. I didn’t care. This man had no idea what Devon and I had gone through in the past and that a future between us was obsolete.

“It means more than you will ever know, but it doesn’t change shit. He told me we couldn’t be together. You can’t make someone stay when all they want to do is leave. I know that more than anyone, and I’m not willing to put myself through that misery all over again.” I dug my nails into my hands to stop myself from crying. Thinking about Devon leaving again hurt more than anything.

It was like a recovering alcoholic being put in front of an endless supply of booze. Devon was my one endless addiction and when tempted with a taste of him, you had better believe I was taking a sip.

“He’s a male. We have a tendency to think we know what’s best when in reality we don’t. He wants you. He loves you, and I refuse to let you leave without fixing this.” I could see the fierceness in Zerro’s eyes. The need to not give up. He was begging me with those honey orbs not to give up on his friend. He cared for Devon just as much as I did. He wanted to see him happy. There was even a little piece of him that wanted to see both of us happy.

“I want to but it’s not what he wants. I need him to want this. To want me. To want us,” I said as my heart threatened to shatter with every word.

Zerro’s hands flew into the air dramatically. “Who cares what he wants. What he wants is you—even if he thinks he’s doing something fucking poetic by giving you up, which, by the way—he isn’t. None of it matters. Nothing he wants matters because if it did… If it did, you wouldn’t be here. In the big scheme of things, you’re the one thing he cares about. The one person. You’re his reason for breathing. Every time I saw him look at you, I knew. He looks at you the way I look at my wife. Remember, only a man who has been there knows.”