He gripped her shoulders, pulling her into his thrusts. He didn’t kiss her or look at her, but he held her in an unbreakable grip. Intense need rolled off of him like waves of thunder, rumbling to her core.
His hips slammed forward, harder and deeper. She’d be tender after, maybe even bruised, but his desperate possession awakened something inside of her she needed to face. This was Callan, and she wanted to experience the true him.
Gentle, savage, brave, shy, thoughtful, and sometimes harsh. She wanted every ounce of him—and craved belonging to him.
Callan’s prior life existed before them. Whatever went into that recipe had come before she knew him. His crimes were from a prior life, separate from the one they shared now and irrelevant to how deeply she loved him.
With one final thrust, he filled her and trembled. His breath rushed to her ear as he buried his face in her hair and held her to him.
“My Emery.”
Her heart swelled with a sense of belonging, her softer sides molding perfectly to all his jagged edges until they were one. “My Callan,” she whispered, dragging a loving hand down the back of his head.
She shivered as he pulled out, wishing they could stay like that forever. He closed his jeans and tossed her pants over his shoulder.
“What are you doing? I need them back.”
“Let me take care of my woman.” He folded the blanket over her legs and gathered her in his arms, carrying her toward the house. His strength never stopped surprising her. Even with his scarred legs, he had enough hardheaded determination to make up for any muscle mass he’d lost.
He carried her through the quiet house, Elspeth and Uma’s voice a distant vibration through the walls. When he put her back on her feet, they were in the master bath.
Water rushed from the modernized showerhead, and he stripped off her shirt and bra, then removed his own clothes. Pulling her under the spray, he washed her with attentive affection. Suds danced over her skin, and she watched his mesmerizing hands caress her.
She turned to face him, looping her arms around his neck. “I love you.”
He looked at her, his words unnecessary as raw adoration poured from his stare. He tucked a wet strand behind her ear and kissed her with desperate abandon.
He took her again, against the tile wall before leaving the shower. Her body was deliciously sore and her mind wrapped in gauzy softness.
“Now, I want a nap.” She rolled over his large bed, loving the scent of his skin on the sheets.
“So take one. We have hours until work.” He climbed in behind her, enhancing the tempting comfort of the bed as he tugged her into his body and held her tight. “Aye. A nap sounds perfect.”
Just as she started to doze off, her phone vibrated. She groaned, and Callan mumbled something that sounded like ignore it. She did, but then the phone beeped, alerting her of a voicemail.
She had to testify in four days, and that voicemail gnawed at her. What if it was Harold Wong, her advocate, with a change of plans? She’d written the letter he’d requested, knowing it wasn’t as poignant as he would have liked, but it was the best she could do.
Harold suggested she write something up because victims usually found the task cathartic. But his mention of so many others only made her feel like nothing more than a drop in an overflowing bucket.
It wasn’t cathartic. Not for her. And now, the implication that it should have helped, made her feel like she wasn’t appropriately filling the role of victim. Just another tick in the defective column of her life.
But she was the victim, and that letter made her feel like she was the one on trial. Harold had mentioned something that—if they went to trial—her letter could also double as an impact statement for the judge during sentencing.
Her lack of confidence in her persuasive writing skills should play no part in the conviction of her assailant. Others might feel validation, as if given a voice, but she wasn’t a writer, and the weight of the pen crippled her.
Why should she have to convince the world that sexual assault was an unthinkable, damaging crime? Wesley Blaine did horrible, horrifying things to her and he should rot in a prison cell until she no longer thought about it, until she no longer flinched when a man shared her aisle at the grocery store, or panicked at a traffic light, or woke up in a cold sweat.
A judge, or anyone else, shouldn’t need a statement from an already victimized victim on top of all the other reports to measure out a fair sentence. How was this even a common practice?
She knew why. Things like “impact statements” came from centuries of victims fighting for justice without being fairly protected. They were a way for sexually assaulted women, men, and children to be heard. Yet, the longer this nightmare went on, the more she felt ignored.
From beginning to end, this experience had gutted and gored her, objectified her, and withered her down to a statistic. She was no longer Emery Tanner. She was victim number four-hundred-thousand-X-Y-whatever of the year.
Her stomach hollowed. Four-hundred-thousand...
Feeling sick, she needed to check her phone. She climbed out of bed. As anticipated, it was her advocate. She pushed the command to listen to his message and brought the phone to her ear.
“Emery, it’s Harold Wong. I have some news. Blaine’s lawyer is now open to discuss a plea bargain, but we can’t move forward without your consent. I’m going to be completely honest. With your willingness to testify and worries about the cross-examination, it might not be a bad angle to take. With the police report and medical records, there’s enough evidence to assure he serves some time. We can offer your letter to the judge, as well.
“The defense will want the rape charges dropped first, but you’d still get him for assault and the other charges. Their motive’s going to be saving Blaine from future public shaming. Under the penal code, if he’s convicted of a sexual offense, he’d go on the registered sex offender list for life. That’s what his lawyer will want to avoid. That, and a lengthy sentencing.
“Give me a call as soon as you can. I’m at the office until four. But think about it. Admission of guilt takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation.”
The message ended, and she lowered the phone, blinking and not seeing anything in front of her.
How did someone claim innocence but entertain the idea of a plea bargain? Didn’t that automatically prove their guilt?
“Who was that?” Callan asked, still lying on the bed behind her.
She didn’t turn around. “Harold Wong. They want to negotiate a plea bargain.”
He was supposed to be her advocate. She felt like an infant tossed into a pool expected to instinctively swim. She felt like she was drowning in front of a frozen audience.
Callan’s silence made her turn. He’d heard her, and by the hard glare in his crystal blue eyes, he appeared displeased.
“What should I do?”
“What do ye want to do?”
She wanted to live a normal life. She wanted to stop feeling afraid. She wanted to feel connected to her body again—all the time not just sometimes. She wanted to make this go away, undo everything that happened. She wanted Wesley Blaine to know what he did was wrong and unacceptable and make it so he could never do it again—to anyone.
“I want it to be over.”
“What does yer advocate suggest?” His voice remained soft and unobtrusive as if spoken from behind a mask of calm the way he always spoke whenever she verged on a meltdown.
“He says this is a fast angle that will guarantee an outcome in our favor—to some degree.” But not all.
All signs pointed to her total destruction and only a partial repercussion. She felt increasingly devalued when she foolishly assumed her self-deprecating feelings couldn’t drop lower than they’d already plunged.
Her chest burned with acid as it fluxed into her throat. “They want to keep him off the predator list.” She knew what Megan’s Law was, a public list of registered sex offenders. But she never checked
it.
How irresponsible of her to have a security measure at her disposal, but not the instinct to see who lived on her street. And what if there was a blue dot or whatever they used to mark sexual offenders? She couldn’t afford a therapist, let alone a new house.
This was what he worried about? Being on a list that most of the world never read. This was his so-called public shame?
Her hand tightened around her phone. He knew nothing about shame.
He didn’t know what it was like to worry that her boyfriend might enter her from behind and trigger a waterfall of terror. He didn’t know how it felt to face everyone she worked with and have them look at her with pity, envisioning her having sex in the vilest manner possible. He didn’t know what it was like to fall into the arms of the man she loved wearing torn clothes, vomit in her hair, blood on her skin, and a monster’s semen dripping down her burning thighs.
He didn’t know a fucking thing about shame.
“I should have had you help me with the letter,” she whispered, heart heavy with regret. “You’re a good writer. You could have helped me make it stronger.”
His hand pressed into her back, stroking with silent support. “I’m sure what ye wrote was fine, Em’ry.”
She shook her head. “It’s not enough. I told the police what happened. They saw me. The doctors, the nurses, the psychologist at the clinic... They all saw what he did to me. Then I had to write it out because emotion doesn’t show on x-rays. It’s bad enough I have to keep reliving it in my head, but they wanted me to write it down, come up with the right word to describe what it feels like to have a stranger shove his way inside of you. Well, there isn’t a word for that!”
A sob jerked out of her, and his arms closed around her, his lips pressing to her hair as he whispered, “I know, love. Dinnae beat yourself up. You did everything right. It’s the system that’s wrong, not you.”
It didn’t matter what they negotiated, or if they turned down the plea and went to trial. She was already defeated. She lost the day she walked into that bathroom—maybe the day she was born female.
“Do you know that only thirty percent of sexual assault cases are reported?”
“I’d heard something like that.”
The heel of her palm crushed her lashes as she angrily wiped away her tears. “And did you know that out of every one thousand rapes less than five rapists are actually incarcerated. Less. Than. Five.” She sniffed. “They’re rapists.”
He didn’t reply, and she appreciated his silence. Any comment would have cheapened the truth. The statistics didn’t lie. The criminal justice system was failing, not just her, but hundreds of thousands every year.
She swallowed, her shoulders sagging under the immense expectation that she continue to rise after being so emotionally and physically beaten down.
“One in four,” she whispered, her head shaking as defeat weighed on her shoulders. She was just another number.
“One in four?”
“That’s how many girls are sexually assaulted before they even reach eighteen. And one out of every five women will get raped in their lifetime.” She choked on an unamused laugh, the sound raw and disgusted, devoid of any humor or hope. “We’re like those little paper dolls, a line of statistics too chopped apart to function and too fragile from the start. Scraps. That’s how they treat us when we’re torn apart. We’re just scraps that need to get swept under the rug and out of sight before the truth of our hurt gets noticed, and others realize how prevalent and systemic and absolutely fucked up this world is. Before they realize they could be next.”
“He will get what’s comin’ te him, Em’ry.”
She wanted to believe the hard rumble of his voice might somehow provoke an unbreakable promise, but these were the facts. Wesley Blaine would get a slap on the wrist compared to the life long sentence assigned to her.
Voice detached, she blinked through a fresh wall of tears. “There’s always some equivocal punishment, but never an equal one.”
She called Harold Wong and told him to tell them to negotiate a plea, do whatever he thought was best. She was done fighting a battle she’d never win. Tapped out, she had to ring the emotional bell.
Then she called out of work and changed into softer clothes and climbed back into Callan’s bed. Since the beginning, she’d tried not to wallow in self-pity. Yes, it sometimes got ahead of her, but she always forced herself to keep moving.
She was sick of forcing herself. Sick of trying to appear strong when everything inside of her felt weak and horribly flimsy. She wanted to be brittle and hard, so she could break rather than tear, but no matter what hit her next, she knew she’d have to just take it and keep moving.
The system was set to fail as easily as the poor weapons meant to arm little girls. Nothing more than fragile, little words. Two tiny letters. No. What a joke.
No, thank you.
No, not interested.
No more...
I said no.
No.
No!
No...
No, she didn’t want to do this anymore. But no one listened.
Purple stained the sky outside of Callan’s window next time she opened her eyes. She heard him whispering, on the phone with someone.
“I’ll be in tomorrow night.”
He bent over a trunk in the corner of the room. She shut her eyes, forcing down the cold dread of what tomorrow would bring.
This was her fight? A bargaining chip for a partial win? Even her rage was too browbeaten to rouse much of a response. Her pulse thrummed like a slow faucet drip. She just couldn’t care anymore.
“Love?” A feather-light touch drifted over her forehead. “Ye should eat somethin’.”
She groaned and frowned. “Not hungry.”
“You’ve slept all day, and havenae had anything since early this mornin’.”
She blinked, surprised to find the bedroom doused in shadows, the black windows devoid of stars. Ernie slept soundly, curled into her side. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“I called out. Dinnae feel like goin’.”
Translation, he didn’t want to leave her alone. “You should have gone. I just want to sleep.”
“Can I make ye tea?”
She hated that he worried, but also loved it. At least he cared.
Guilt that her pathetic wallowing might somehow be punishing him had her agreeing. “Sure. Tea would be great.”
He silently left, and she fell back to sleep before he returned.
“Em’ry, I have your tea.”
“Just put it on the table,” she mumbled without opening her eyes.
He sighed and set it down. Warm lips pressed to her forehead and the mattress compressed. He lay next to her, his concern rolling over her like an inescapable fog, blanketing her until it filled every crevice.
“It’ll be all right, love. I promise it’ll be all right.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Saratoga Springs, New York—America
Present day
A loud crash awoke Emery, and she sat up with a start. It took her a moment to recall where she was and how long she’d been sleeping.
“Callan?”
Light flashed outside of the window, and a boom of thunder startled Ernie. Shivers chased up her spine. She pulled at the collar of her loose sweatshirt, covering her exposed shoulder.
Where was he?
She slipped out of bed, her bare toes pressing into the worn wood floor and her feet flattening against the cold planks. Her hands chafed up her arms as she squinted into the shadows illuminated again by the lightning.
Rain pummeled the slate roof, overtaking the silence in a steady, unfamiliar clatter. She had to pee, and she was incredibly thirsty. Spotting the cold tea on the table, she took a sip, just to wet her mouth.
“Callan?” Nothing.
She used the bathroom and slipped into her wool-lined boots, if only to have something on her feet. The floor creaked as she navigated the dark h
allway. Elspeth’s door was closed, and Uma’s was cracked.
She peeked inside, a blooming warmth spreading through her chest at the sight of her pale, cherub cheeks and tumbling black curls. Her little foot poked out of the blankets, so Emery crept in and carefully covered it.
Her fingers brushed over her curls, and she smiled. “Sweet angel,” she whispered, lightly pressing a kiss to her cheek.
Something creaked, and she flinched, turning toward the closet, but nothing was there. Just some hanging princess gowns and a pair of dilapidated fairy wings.
Finding her way into the kitchen, she poured a glass of water, sipping it silently as she stared out the window at the rain. The garden beds close to the house flooded with water and the rushing gutter spouts dumped into them with relentless overflow. No way Callan would be out walking in this.
She placed her glass in the sink and went to find him. The downstairs was empty, including the library.
She frowned, wondering where he could be. Her head tipped as she stared at the front door. She walked slowly through the foyer, staring out the glass through the rain. Her car and the blue Toyota were there, but Callan’s car was missing.
She touched her hip, reaching for her phone, but she must have left it upstairs. Where would he have gone at this time of night in this weather? What was open?
The grandfather clock in the hall proclaimed it was four thirty in the morning. She stared at the face, noting the way the minute hand clicked but didn’t move as if stuck on something.
The glass front of the clock had a tiny brass key. She turned it and the frame opened with a soft whine. She lifted her arm and felt around, something smooth and cold meeting her fingers.
Her hand closed around a rounded edge, and she pulled, freeing the captive minute hand. A knife. A big one. The kind she’d seen Callan carrying only days ago.
She put it back and went upstairs to get her phone. But when she made it to the room, she didn’t call him. She sat on the bed and stared at the trunk in the corner.
Hurt (The Hurt Series, #1) Page 35
