Kill Switch by Penelope Douglas

tipped his chin down at me. “I just couldn’t resist having my
way with his pretty little bride.”
Having his way.
Like I knew he did in rooms of our house, late at night,
their cries carrying through the walls.
I stilled as realization hit of how I was conceived. “You
raped her.”
He laughed and then shrugged. “Whatever.”
I did the math in my head. She was young. Still. She was
Winter’s age when Rika was born. She would’ve been a
teenager when I was born. Eighteen? Nineteen?
My father continued, “When Schraeder came home to a
pregnant wife, there was no hiding what I’d done. He was
prepared to raise you as his own and leave town with his little
family, but I couldn’t have that. Real men don’t let other men
raise their sons.”
I glared at him. Like he raised me at all? Intimidating me,
smacking me around, and treating me like property?
“So the night you were born, I came and claimed what was
mine,” he stated. “She screamed and cried. And then spent the
next several years depressed and drunk. I really didn’t think
she’d take it so badly, but…things got a little better for her
when Rika came along.”
Rika’s mother was a mess for a lot of years. I grew up,
seeing a barely functioning, pill-popping, alcoholic on the rare
occasions she was in public.
It was all his fault. Not her losing her husband or anything
else. She’d been barely alive, and Rika barely had a mother.
But she was always nice, wasn’t she? Now that I thought
about it. Always docile and sweet.
“They ended up staying in Thunder Bay,” my father went
on. “Probably to be close to you.”
No wonder he didn’t bat an eyelash when he knew Natalya
was coming into my room and what she was doing to me. She