Clad
Slap.
Slap.
"F-Father, I didn't—"
I did not even finish my words when, he turned around and the third slap cracked across my face before the sentence could crawl out.
It wasn't pain I felt—it was the absence of it. My cheek was numb, flesh throbbing under skin that had gone cold. Still, I shut up.
"Didn't what?" he growled, his voice low, venomous. His breath was hot against my face, stinking of expensive whiskey and rotten authority. "Didn't snoop through my business connections? Didn't *yearn* for what was never yours to begin with?"
He towered over me, eyes blazing like twin furnaces, his disgust melting what was left of my resolve. The fire in those eyes wasn't just anger—it was humiliation, decades old, reignited like dry tinder.
