Breaking Steele (Sarah Steele Legal Thriller)

Chapter 25

“IT STARTED WHEN I turned twelve. My mother died and Hank lost it. He’s such a pig. I think he killed her, but that’s another story.”

So she was his … daughter?

“He gave me everything—I even had a frickin’ pony, just like in the movies. That was our life—parties, people always over, and then night after night of terror. He turned into a different person, mean and jumpy. He would get angry at the drop of a hat. I hated him, wanted to kill him, but I was scared.”

“Did you tell anyone?” Joshua asked.

“Yeah, my uncle Glen, but he did nothing. Said I was imagining things. That I was stressed because of my mother’s death. He said that if I told anyone my lies, I would lose everything. But a few nights after I told him what Hank was doing, he came into the room and … watched.”

“I’m so sorry, Heather.” I meant that with every fiber of my being.

Her eyes filled with tears and they spilled down her pale cheeks. I didn’t think she had seen kindness in a very long time and my heart broke for her. “I was Hannah back then. I made it to my eighteenth birthday and then I moved in with my boyfriend. I worked at Hank’s office every Saturday, filing papers. They paid me crap for wages. We did the best we could with the few pennies we had to rub together, but I had to pull from the money I’d saved for college. My guy left me a year later when the money ran out. Quitting work was the first thing I did after he left.”

“Did your dad look for you or try to find you?”

“No, that was the strange part. He just let me go, didn’t say a word. No police report, nothing. I was so sure he was going to bring me to his house again. I was going to run. I was too scared to talk to the cops. Hank would kill me—I knew he would. I started to imagine killing him, but even in my dreams, he was there with his stun gun.”

My heart jumped at the familiar weapon. So Heather had seen the end of one too.

“But I didn’t run—I was too chicken to face the unfamiliar. Glen told me he’d give me a stipend every month. I was using, and was in debt with some bad people. I needed the money and so I took it. And I was so scared that one day Hank would attack me again. But he traveled so much that I never saw him. Glen always went everywhere with him, but stayed in the shadows like a vampire. He’s so weird. And it was weird to see them together.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, it’s always weird to see identical people walking side by side.”

What the heck was she talking about?

Heather riffled through some magazines in a bookshelf and then took out a photo album. She flipped through the pages until she landed on what she wanted and handed it to me. My eyes widened in surprise. This case was getting stranger by the minute.

The picture was of a small family in front of a huge mansion. A young Heather stood in front of a squinty-eyed woman, who stood beside Hank, who stood beside a man who looked exactly the same as he did. Same shape of face, same build, same smile, same facial hair.

“Twins? Hank and Glen are twins?”