The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 536

Callum’s POV

I’d expected a moment of hesitation, some part of him weighing what he was actually about to do—whether fighting his own son for the right to sell him was worth it.

There wasn’t one.

My father’s fist caught me in the jaw before I’d even fully raised my hands, and I stumbled back into the railing hard enough to feel it in my spine. It was like he’d been waiting for it all his life. As if all the other beatings I’d endured since I was old enough to make fists were nothing compared to everything he’d dreamed of.

“That’s it?” he said, stepping back, arms spread wide. “That’s the fight you dragged me up here for?”

I spat blood onto the gallery floor and rushed at him. I caught him across the cheek, making him stagger for a moment before he came at me again, this time aiming for my ribs. Two jabs, one on each side, the first one too fast to block, but I managed to get the second one.

He was heavier than me, always had been, but I was faster, and for a while that evened things out more than either of us expected.

I knew this rhythm. My body knew it before my mind often did. The specific weight of his knuckles. The way he liked to go for the ribs because bruises there were easy to hide under a shirt, and the way he’d switch to the face once he stopped caring whether anyone saw.

I had learned that lesson a hundred times over as a kid, locked in my room afterwards, listening to him tell my mother that I deserved it.

Not that she ever cared whether I did or not. To her, it was no more concerning than the weather. If she’d been even vaguely interested in it, she would have participated.

“Everything I’ve done,” he said, breathing hard, blocking a punch, “I’ve done for this family.”

“You’ve done everything for yourself.” I ducked under his next swing and caught him with an uppercut that snapped his head back. “You just tell yourself it’s the same thing.”

He didn’t answer that. We kept climbing instead, up past the gallery windows, along a buttress toward the bell tower. My arms burned. Somewhere below us, faint through the stone, I could hear the crowd still murmuring, still waiting, completely unaware that a war was happening thirty feet above their heads.

I thought about the library. I didn’t know why, except that it had been the one place in that house that ever felt like mine. Nobody looked for me there. My father never once set foot in it in all the years I lived under his roof, like books were beneath him, and I used to spend whole afternoons on the floor between the shelves for no reason except that the silence there was different from the silence in the rest of the house. Safer.