Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 88262 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88262 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
My blood went cold. “How young?”
“Twenty,” Draven said. “Told us he was twenty-two.”
A flood of relief filled me, hearing that at least this “kid” was an adult.
Draven paced over and opened the front doors of the armoire cabinet on one end of the room and pulled out yet another whiskey bottle, going back over to replenish his glass.
“Devvy Franklin was in my house, drinking at age 20, and getting into a fight that he couldn’t win. Ended up bleeding, broken, bruised, and then later on when he found himself in a hospital bed getting his stomach pumped for alcohol poisoning, he was told he had a minor concussion, too.”
“Fuck.”
“Devvy Franklin also happened to be the son and heir of Franklin Cooperative,” Draven said. “I’m not going to get into it right now, but let’s just say… my father has always hated me, but now he wishes I didn’t exist. I jeopardized the biggest business deal of his career.”
“Who gives a damn about a business deal when a kid could have died?”
“My point exactly,” Draven said. “My dad isn’t exactly a warm-hearted type. To say the least. Never was to me, never was to anyone else other than my brother.”
“So now you’re ostracized?”
He watched me. “I have dirt on him, too.”
Draven told me a story about finding his father’s second cell phone—a burner phone—on his desk. Apparently, his dad was Randall Lyons, a prominent figure in their home and also a massively hypocritical person. He’d go to church, preaching love and loyalty to family, but then he’d cheat on his wife relentlessly, also dabbling in hard drugs.
His father lived a secret double-life, and Draven had discovered it. It was the only leverage he had against his dad, but he also didn’t want to reveal it to the public.
He wanted to do it “the right way,” whatever that meant.
It didn’t seem like Draven was trying to protect his father’s secret.
It seemed like he was just trying to protect himself.
“So you don’t want to just show the world the screenshots and photos you found of him?” I asked.
“If my father comes down, he comes down like a bowling pin. So many other people will be hurt.”
“And you want to protect certain other people?”
Draven nodded. “There are some people I deeply want to protect.”
I furrowed my brow.
So there was something more.
Something behind Draven’s voice when he talked about his father. He hated him, without a doubt. Finally, he was telling me something—but I knew there was more, and I knew this wasn’t the right time to push him on it.
There had been more that happened with his father.
“Your dad… wasn’t good to you, growing up?”
Fuck.
Put those words back in.
I’d already asked too much, but now, when I looked at Draven, I saw that the liquor was getting to his blood.
He was going to tell me more.
He puffed out a bitter laugh. “I got hit more than I got hugged when I was growing up, if that’s what you mean. He… acted like it was his right, as a father, to put me in my place. One time when I was four, I ran into his office crying from a scraped knee, and he shoved me down on the floor. I was interrupting a business call. Very important stuff.”
I suddenly felt like I had a lead weight in my stomach.
No.
Draven seemed… impervious. Like nothing, or no one, could fuck with him.
But once upon a time, this man had been a child, and he’d suffered abuse at the hand of someone who should have loved him.
“Didn’t your mom do anything about it? How did she tolerate that?”
“Too checked out to care,” Draven said, swirling the liquid in his glass and looking down at it. “Sometimes, when I was older—teenage years—she’d just transfer another few thousand dollars into my spending account whenever Dad fucked with me. Dad did it sometimes, too. Money was their answer to everything.”
“That’s sickening.”
His expression went dark.
“I told you, Max. You don’t want to know about my life.”
I went over to sit down at the edge of the mattress. My head was spinning hearing Draven’s story, and it filled my chest with a bitter feeling.
I kept quiet, and he took the lead.
“The moment I got my own house and full access to my share of the family money, I lived my life mostly as if the rest of them didn’t exist.”
He pushed at the handles on the back doors, throwing them open. Wind blew in from the night air outside, and the sound of birds chatter came in. Outside, the night was humid, right on the edge of a far-off storm.
Draven had been making changes in the backyard, too. Little solar lights dotted the edge of the cobbled patio outside the doors. They glowed in the night air out there along with some dangling lights coming down from the canopy of a tall tree, gently swaying every time the wind blew.