Feral by Brian Knight Page B

together, in his mind they could be doing nothing less.
    When she told him she’d choose the couch, he began to cry, the oldest trick in the book, but it worked for him.   He told her that he’d been so lonely without her mom, that he needed her; he couldn’t take being alone at night.   He said he would kill himself if she didn’t stay with him, because she was all he had left.
    As uncomfortable as it made her, she did sleep in his room.   She tried to ignore the new way he looked at her, and the way Jared looked at both of them.   She tried to ignore how her dad became increasingly cold toward Jared, and how he was often too warm toward her.
    Two weeks after she moved into his room she awoke in the dead of the night with his hands on her.   He had crawled into her small single bed, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t wake, or hoping that if she did she wouldn’t mind.   That was the moment he forced her to grow up before her time.   When she got out of bed and left him, grabbing clothes from her drawer at random before leaving, he didn’t follow.   Perhaps he still had enough shame left to stop himself, or perhaps he had fallen asleep before she had awakened.   She never knew, never asked.
    She had gone straight to Jared’s room and lain down with him, hoping her father was wrong about him.   Jared woke up, and they talked.   Then he had driven her out to Crazy Ernie’s Cellar.
    Jared stayed at home for another two years, but Shannon couldn’t.   She spent winters on the couch in her father’s house and stayed with friends whenever she could, but the rest of the year she spent most nights in the cellar.
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    T homas Pitcher had been a better boy than he ever was a man.
    He had known she was using his dead uncle’s cellar, and made it as comfortable as he could for her.   He never told his father, who would have undoubtedly kicked her out.   They started dating when she was sixteen, and she lost the virginity she had saved from her father to him in this very cellar.   They dated for several years before marrying.
    The changes in Thomas were almost too gradual to detect, a slow Jekyll and Hyde transformation, but to his credit he never cooled toward their daughter; he loved Alicia more than anything else in life.   He simply had too much of his father in him, and over the years they spent together he turned slowly from Thomas the Boy, who had once been her shining prince, to Thomas the Bastard.   It could have been the stress of living in his father’s extra-large shadow, both literally and figuratively, which turned him bad.
    Over the years, Simon Pitcher had acquired much of the property in and surrounding Normal Hills through various means, some scrupulous, others not.   While he only owned a few of the larger businesses, the grocery store, a small motel, the truck stop, and the mill across the river, he collected rent from every other business on Main Street.   He held the deeds on much of Normal Hills’ residential property too.
    Few people actually knew how much he owned, and Shannon was one of them.   Shortly after joining the family, Simon hired her on as bookkeeper.   He kept meticulous records, so that part of her job was easy, but it also fell on her to clean up his other capitol ventures.
    Of course, people suspected him of being less than ethical.   No one got as rich as he was from property alone, not in Normal Hills anyway, and over the last couple of years the lumber market had been poor enough that he was considering closing the mill down.   The rumors of his vast drug empire were greatly exaggerated though.   He was only a middleman, trafficking in bootleg liquor, marijuana, and black market cigars and cigarettes for some back east associates.   He refused to deal with the hard stuff like crack and meth; they were simply too risky.
    The men fought often concerning matters of the family