The Marriage (Darkest Lies Trilogy Book 3), Bethany-Kris [books for 8th graders txt] 📗

in the halls, or press the red button in any room. We turn off the cameras in private rooms for the sake of confidentiality during day-time visits.”

Mrs. Hughes beamed at them both, then left the room, shutting the door behind her.

It had been a very long time since Maxim and Karine were alone in a room together. They never had any need to be. Maxim didn’t think he ever had anything private to say to her, and as a younger girl and in her early teens, she’d become accustomed to his roar whenever she did disrupt his peace. It always sent her running scared, intimidated by the one man who should have kept her the safest.

“Karine ...” He said her name softer than she had ever heard his voice dip before. It was almost disconcerting.

She tried stepping away, but the back of her legs hit against the end of the bed, and she sat down with a thump, losing balance. And yet, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Already, she’d lost the will to keep her strong stance in the face of what awaited her.

Here he was.

And she didn’t know what to do.

“You’re really alive,” she murmured.

“Unfortunate news for some,” he admitted, shrugging.

“You shouldn’t be here ... how did you find—”

“This was a delicate thing, yes? Tricky,” Maximin interjected with a quick laugh. “The details aren’t very important, of course, and while I knew this meeting with you would be inevitable, I didn’t think it would have to happen so soon.”

Confused, Karine continued staring. Silent.

“It’s too bad I had to betray someone who didn’t deserve it to get here,” Maxim added under his breath, eyeing the security panel on the wall in her room that allowed her to speak to the front desk, if needed, or vice versa. “We have a lot to talk about, my daughter, and not a lot of time to do it. Forgive me for my lack of transparency.”

He hardly meant that.

She could tell.

Karine rubbed the back of her hand on her nose in an effort to hold in the tears bubbling inside her chest. “I didn’t think you ever had anything to say to me, Daddy.”

“I know I’ve done things to make you feel that way, yes.”

“I can remember you shouting at me when you were drunk, every time you’d see me peering around the corner, trying to get a glimpse of you because I hadn’t seen you in weeks. You’d yell so loud, Maxim. You couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

“Karine—”

“Admit it. You cared about Katina more than you cared about me. You wished it was me that was killed and not her. You have spent half of my life blaming me for what happened to her.”

Her voice was so shrill and low that it actually hurt her throat to speak. However, she managed to get each word out. She still did—they needed to be said.

Maxim breathed in deeply and shook his head. “I did not wish your death, Karine. You’ve got that wrong. I just didn’t know how to be a father to a dead child—I was already a broken man when they took her from me, too, no? I didn’t know what had been done to you or how that was going to affect the rest of your life. I was too busy drowning in my own hell. It was an easier place to be.”

Karine snapped her face away from him. “Because you’re a coward—you still don’t know what he did to me that day.”

Or every day after, for that matter.

Dima’s assaults had never really stopped. They haunted her from childhood through her teenage life, and then straight into adulthood as well. She’d been a toy that he used and abused for years, her fractured brain shelving away and categorizing each incident as something for someone else in her mind to deal with.

Never, ever for her.

They’d always made sure he didn’t hurt her, after all. It was one of the only things she was grateful for where Katina and Katee were concerned. Her brokenness had purpose—it did save her. In a way.

“I do know, actually,” Maxim replied, inflection dipping in his tone. “Masha told me everything.”

Most of the time, Karine forgot how much Masha actually knew about what happened that fateful day when her sister was killed.  Mostly because they never discussed it in real depth, and Masha had come along after it happened. Too many pills, a bit too much liquor, and she spilled the secrets in slurred words that she hadn’t even thought her caretaker truly heard one evening. She wanted to hide away from the world and never talk about it again. The shame that she kept close to her heart because she continued to be abused by a monster and never had the courage to say a thing about it.

Masha created the perfect safe-space for her where she could continue to live in a dulled state of mind, always at the ready to make any bad feelings disappear the only way she knew how where Karine was concerned.

Of course, she told her.

“I wish I knew about it sooner, Karine. I wish you had told me—”

“Why?”

“Because I would have done something about it. I never would have let Dima or Leonid continue with their position in our bratva. Hell, I could have buried them in the basement the same fucking night, what difference would it make?”

“You practically fed me to him.”

Dima, she meant.

Maybe her father didn’t realize it, but she was willing to give him a wake-up call.

“So many times you sent me away crying, just for being near you, and he’d be there waiting ... pinning me into corners, covering my mouth, so you couldn’t hear me just twenty feet away, but I could still hear you angry and raging. Once he hurt me so bad, just outside the door of your study, that I passed out. You had a maid clean up the blood. You never even asked where it came from, Daddy.”

“I didn’t know,” he