She was stunned into speechlessness. It was as though all of the air in her lungs had gone off on her and Annalise found herself struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of the man who stood before her - her father - threatening her.
That was something she had expected from Alfredo, not Benjamin. Benjamin was her father, the man who had spent the last twenty years old of his life searching for her.
He would hurt her?
Her heart flailed with both fear and disappointment, he didn't mean that of course. All the pain she had experienced with the Armillos, the pain they'd inflicted on her, Annalise had thought it was because of who she was to them. She hadn't expected them to love her so she had consoled herself that her biological parents would and even when the Armillos painted them as the worst two people in the world, her heart had still picked up at the thoughts of them and she had allowed herself slink into a fantasy where they completely doted on her.
