Cut and Run by Lara Adrián Page B

home,” Ethan said sharply. “You don’t even know the meaning.”
    “Yet here you are.”
    Ethan wheeled on him. To his shock, the old man shrank back, cowering from him. “Don’t think for a second I’d be here unless I had no other place to go. If it was just me, I’d sleep on the street before I asked you for a fucking thing.”
    But he had to think about Tori, about her comfort and safety. He wouldn’t risk them sleeping unsecured in the van. And with a hired killer behind him somewhere, they couldn’t chance staying at a motel or other public place where they might be seen by the assassin or anyone else.
    They had to lie low, and hope the danger either passed them by, or gave Ethan the chance to eliminate it permanently.
    Right now, he needed to keep his head down and come up with a plan. A roadmap for where they should go, where they might be safe for a while.
    He glanced at his father, who had gone quiet, recoiled from Ethan’s fury. “I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t even want to be standing here talking with you right now. I’m just passing through. Like I said, we’ll be gone in the morning. Then you can carry on with your life and I’ll carry on with mine.”
    “Carry on, you say.” His thin mouth pressed flatter and he clucked his tongue. “Did you know I stopped drinking?” When Ethan didn’t respond, his father went on. “Naw, you couldn’t know that. You’ve been away for too long. Well, I did. Two and half years now, not a single drop.”
    Ethan blew out a sharp sigh. “Better late than never.”
    “Late is right.” The old man chuckled, and the wet, scraping sound of it echoed in the quiet barn. “Too fucking late for me. I’m not well, as you might’ve guessed. Cirrhosis. Terminal, so they tell me. I’ve had one foot in the grave for the past eight months.”
    “That’s too bad.” Ethan knew it sounded cold, unfeeling. But there wasn’t much emotion in him when he looked at the man who had terrorized him so often and driven his mother away.
    “You hold a grudge, just like she always did,” his father remarked tonelessly. “Well, I suppose it’s no use apologizing now. What’s done is done.”
    Ethan scoffed. The old man was true to form, he’d give him that. He might be dying. He might even be wrestling with some personal regrets. But damn if he was going to accept any blame for his past sins.
    And truly, Ethan had no need to hear it from him either. “Don’t worry. I’m not looking for sorry from you. I’m long past that.”
    His father stared at him. “Where you been all this time, anyway?”
    Ethan shrugged. “Around. Here and there.”
    “Been gone what, almost twenty years?”
    “Seventeen,” Ethan replied. “Didn’t expect you to be keeping track.”
    “I heard you joined the military,” his father pressed. “That true?”
    Jesus. Ethan started to bristle at all of the questions. “What do you care?”
    Those filmy gray eyes that used to instill so much dread in him when he was a kid now narrowed with a spark of animosity in them.
    This was the man Ethan recalled. Not the bent, apparently sober, dead man walking who’d assumed he could prod for answers and poke around for sympathy just because he’d gone a couple of years without a drink and a couple of decades without punching his kid.
    The old man crossed his withered, tattooed arms over his tattered undershirt. “I hope for your sake you did join the service. God knows, you needed the discipline. Needed someone to put you in your place.”
    “I thought that was your job,” Ethan muttered.
    “Your mother made you soft. She made you arrogant, all those books she put under your nose, letting you sit in front of that computer for hours. You were so smart, always acting like you were better than me, better than the life I provided for you.” He scowled at Ethan. “You and your mother, you never appreciated what I did.”
    Ethan met the accusing gaze leveled on him now with one of