Sumi’s throat tightened as she remembered how heartbroken and terrified Omira had been when she came home after Fain had supposedly left. For three days, she’d locked herself in the bathroom, and had refused to come out. Barely nine, Sumi had been scared that Omira would kill herself.

“Father… we have to do something to help her.”

“Let the tainted whore die. Better for all of us if she’s gone.”

She still didn’t know how their own father could be so callous and unfeeling. When Omira had finally emerged, he’d refused to even look at her. While he hadn’t thrown her out of their house, he’d treated her like a ghost. Never would speak to her or acknowledge her presence.

Omira had accepted it as best she could. But it was the reactions from other people who’d learned about her husband and her ongoing terror that Fain would hunt her down that had finally done her in.

Sumi had just turned eighteen when Omira had decided she couldn’t handle it anymore – that life, and the condemnation of others, wasn’t worth the struggle to get through it.

All Omira’s suicide had done was worsen their father’s alcoholism and his hatred of the only family he had left. He’d turned on Sumi like some bastard stepchild he wanted out of his sight.

“You’re a whore, just like your worthless mother and sister. You’ll find some cock to suck and then leave me, too. Just wait and see. You bitches are all the same.”

As he’d predicted in his drunken stupors, she’d moved in with the first man to invite her, during her first year in college. She’d have done anything to get away from her father’s insults.

Little had she known, it wouldn’t be long before she’d wish herself back to her father’s hell over that of her first boyfriend’s. And even that disaster hadn’t been nearly as bad as the one that would arrive with Avin.

Old enough to have known better, she’d somehow allowed that bastard to deceive her completely. And she still wasn’t sure how she’d missed the warning signs of his insanity before she’d allowed Avin to move in with her.

At least with her father, she’d been able to gauge what would send him off into a rage and avoid most. Avin’s triggers could be as simple as asking if it was raining outside. They were so arbitrary and capricious…

She’d make a stew and it would be too salty. Then she’d make it again and it wasn’t salty enough. Don’t wear heels and tower over me! Why aren’t you wearing heels? Huh? You’ve wasted money on a closet full of them, and yet you never wear them!

“Closet full” by his definition was three pair. But that was another argument.