by Sara Reinke
She stepped toward him. He tried to shy away, but wound up stumbling and sitting down hard on one of the stair risers. When she touched his face, he flinched; she spread her fingers gently through his hair, her skin warm against his.
“Is that what happened? You have amnesia…?” she whispered, her voice sounding pained. “Oh, my God.”
“It’s nothing,” he said with a frown, brushing her hand away.
“Nothing?” She looked momentarily wounded.
“Yeah. Nothing. Twenty something years lost. A…drop in the bucket,” he said, remembering what Julien had told him. “I’ve lived almost two centuries since then.”
“Thirty years,” she said, drawing his gaze. Her eyes had hardened, a crimp forming between her brows, and her voice sounded brittle, like a thin crust of frost had settled over her.
“Your father kept me prisoner from 1793 to 1815. I was seven when he took me. You were eight. So this drop in the bucket of your life, as you called it, was thirty years.”
“Prisoner?” Aaron asked, caught off-guard. He had no difficulty whatsoever in believing his father capable of something so heinous. God knew he’d seen Lamar’s cruel capabilities first-hand on more occasions than he cared to recount. But until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that Naima might have also been victimized by Lamar, as he had been—or for so long.
“Yes.” Naima nodded once. “Your father abducted me when I was a child. He kept me locked away beneath the floor in his library. And because your bedroom was next to the library, you could talk to me through the floorboards. You were company to me when I had no one else.” She started to walk away, balling her hands into fists at her sides. “You were my friend.”
“Why did he take you?” Aaron asked, drawing her to a halt.
“Because I’m a half-breed,” Naima replied evenly, sparing him a glance off her shoulder that could have sliced through steel. “Half-human, half-Brethren. And worse—half Morin. He used me to try and humiliate my grandfather, to hurt him. He dragged me before the entire council of Brethren males and called me an abomination, a disgrace to my Brethren ancestry. The council voted to banish me to Indian tunnels that ran beneath our farms—to seal me in what we called the Beneath, and leave me there to die.”
He watched as tension slowly knotted through her entire body, her spine growing ram-rod stiff, her shoulders thrust back, her chin and jawline set like iron. “Lamar had other plans,” she said. “I wasn’t down there a day before he had me taken out again, with no one else aware—least of all my grandfather. That was when he locked me beneath the floor in his library, made me his prisoner…his slave…his pet for the next twenty-two years.” With a cold glare, she added, “I hope you can appreciate, then, why that doesn’t constitute nothing to me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
What have I done? Naima thought, watching Aaron sleep on the sofa in her living room. He’d all but collapsed there, lulled (she supposed) by the inviting warmth of the fire simmering at the nearby hearth. She’d watched as he’d sat there, child-like in his struggle to remain awake, his eyelids growing heavy at first; when they’d at last droop close, he’d give a start and a soft gasp, his eyes snapping open, and then the whole effort would begin anew.
This man is a complete stranger to me, she thought. Augustus was right. The Aaron I knew is long gone and forgotten—even to himself.
She heard her cell phone ring, vibrating on an end table on the other side of the roomed to the floor. Naima didn’t move to answer it, or even see who was calling, because she already had a sinking suspicion—Davone. Again.
Davone Simmons was a nuisance she knew she’d have to deal with sooner or later, but for the moment, she preferred the latter of the two. A twenty-two-year-old kid who played baseball for Mason’s team, the Mustangs, Davone had been a dalliance for Naima for the past six months or so, a pretty plaything who had entertained her now and again. She’d been supposed to meet him at the Pacific Northern division championship party the night before, but obviously her plans had changed.
Or maybe not so obviously, she thought, because she’d tried to politely explain her absence to him on the phone earlier that morning—after he’d left a half-dozen or more messages for her throughout the entire night. “My grandfather’s fallen ill,” she’d told him, not a complete lie. “He’s in the ICU right now and they don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
To which Davone had supplied, by way of sympathy: “Damn, girl, that’s some shit right there.”
She wasn’t fucking him for his empathetic skills.
God, she thought, as Davone’s call rolled over to her voice mail. Already she could see she had three waiting from him, messages he’d left in rapid succession over the last hour and a half. She was definitely going to have to find a way to let the kid down easily—but down just the same. And soon.
From the couch, Aaron uttered a soft groan in her sleep. He’d slumped sideways, letting his cheek settle against the seat of the sofa while his feet remained dangling over the side in a seated posture.
Amnesia, she thought in dismay. He can’t remember me…or anything else. It’s like none of it ever happened to him. Again, she thought of Augustus’ admonition, the unexpected truth she’d come to realize in his words:
Whatever your past connection to that man at the clinic, it is long over with and done. There will be no resurrecting or salvaging it.
No matter what, even with the revelation of his lost memories, Naima couldn’t accept that the Aaron she had known was gone. Memories don’t define a person’s character, their soul, she thought. I refuse to believe he’s changed inside. That the man I knew is gone forever. I can’t accept that. I won’t.
As she crept past the sofa on her way to the kitchen, she noticed the hem of Aaron’s black T-shirt had pulled loose from his pants, riding up to reveal bare skin beneath. His hips had pivoted enough for her to see part of his flank, as well as his abdomen, and she paused.
What is that? she wondered, because she could see some kind of mark on his skin. At first, she didn’t recognized what it was, because it was something that, as a Brethren, she’d never seen on herself or any of her kin—except for once, on Brandon Noble, and his throat had been cut when he’d been too young to fully heal from the wound. But when she leaned over the side of the couch and very carefully so as not to disturb Aaron, drew the bottom of his shirt up to expose more of his back, she realized.
Scars.
What the…? Her frown deepened as Naima leaned further over, tugging against his shirt, pulling it up toward his sternum. Even from her limited vantage, she could see Aaron’s back was riddled with overlapping, twisting marks of pinkish-silver stripes—hundreds of scars. Although she didn’t need much by way of imagination to realize how Aaron had come by them, it was beyond her comprehension to consider justhow many times he must have been beaten—and how severely—to have overwhelmed his naturally heightened healing capabilities enough to scar.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered in aghast.
It’s alright.
She remembered Aaron whispering this. In her mind, she could see him before her, no more than a foot away, close enough for her to feel each ragged intake and exhalation of exhausted breath against her face. He’d been a young man, nineteen or twenty, his body lean and strapped with muscles, his skin glossed with sweat. They were naked, but there was nothing sexual about it, despite their proximity.
It’s alright.
She remembered Aaron whispering this. They had been bound to what Lamar Davenant had called “the tree.” It had looked like a diminutive gallows to Naima, set on a broad, wheeled base so that he could move it anywhere in the library he’d wished. A pulley mechanism had been crafted into the device—because apparently Lamar had an eye and mind for that sort of engineering—so that when one or more people were tied to the device, usually by their hands from an eyelet in the lateral beam, he could raise or lower them as he pleased. Historically, this had come to mean that
Naima and Aaron would be bound facing each other, with their wrists together over their heads as they stood flat-footed on the floor. Then, with only a few turns of the crank, Lamar would hoist them aloft, leaving their feet to dangle a foot or more off the ground.
Lamar’s sadistic abuse had frightened and bewildered Naima when she’d been a child, because it had come seemingly without motive or reason. But as she’d grown older, she’d come to understand that not only was Lamar driven by his relentless hatred of Michel, but also by his own sadistic fascination with Naima herself.
“Just how much of her Brethren nature holds sway in her form?” he’d often muse. “Where does the human within her stop, and the Brethren begin?”
Lamar had enjoyed testing this particular hypothesis. Because he’d needed a full-blooded Brethren by which to compare the results of his abusive experiments on Naima—and because he had been the closest among his children in age to Naima—Aaron had often been forced to suffer through the same torments and tortures, all in the same of satisfying his father’s cruel curiosity. For his part, Aaron had realized the longer he endured Lamar’s abuse without crying out in pain, the longer Lamar would focus his sadistic attention on him. He’d all but forget about Naima in his relentless determination to see the boy break.
For hours while tied to the tree, she’d watch Lamar whip Aaron, time and time again. Lamar would grow more and more furious, the blows more and more brutal, slicing Aaron open deeper and deeper. Stop it, she’d want to scream, to plead, but the words would always wind up trapped in her throat, strangling her. Because if she cried out, then Lamar would have swung that murderous gaze—and the whip—her way.
All the while, with every blow, Aaron would lock his eyes with hers and hold it fast, as if it was a physical bond somehow, something he clutched at desperately for comfort, for rescue. With every blow, he’d struggle not to let the pain show.
Not for his father, she thought. For me. He didn’t want me to know how much he was hurting. He always tried to protect me.
“Are you alright?”
Aaron had roused, but she’d been distracted by memories and hadn’t even noticed. She’d been staring off into space, trance-like. Startled, she gave a little jerk, and found him grimacing as he sat up on the couch.
“I…I’m fine,” she whispered, nodding. “How about you? How are you feeling?”
“Better. Thanks for letting me crash awhile.”
His shirt hem remained slightly hiked and out of place, but he didn’t notice until her eyes traveled toward it, drawn to the scars on his flank. When he realized her attention, he pulled the shirt down again, as if ashamed that she’d seen the marks.
“What happened to your back?” she asked softly.
“Nothing,” he murmured, not meeting her gaze.
“He did that to you, didn’t he? Lamar, I mean…your father. I thought he’d been dead all of these years, but Augustus told me he’s not. He’s still alive. He’s still hurting you.”
Aaron shook his head. “I…I don’t know what you’re…” he mumbled. He raked his fingers restlessly through his hair, then glanced at her. “I should go. It…it’s not safe for you to let me stay here.”
“You’re not healed yet,” she said.
“I’ll be alright,” he said as, with a wince, he rose to his feet. “I’ll live, at any rate,” he added in a mutter.
“You don’t have a car anymore.”
The corner of his mouth hooked. “I’ll take yours.”
“I’m not giving you the keys.”
Another fleeting smile. “Don’t need them. I can hotwire an engine.”
“Maybe I don’t want you to go.”
He raised his eyebrow at this.
“Not yet, anyway,” she added quickly. “Maybe I can help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Remember,” she said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? For me to tell you about your past.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But why would you want to?” His expression grew somewhat hardened and wary. “Look, whatever happened back then…whatever I did…if I helped you, then, hey, great. You’ve helped me back, okay? We can call it even.” “Even?” she asked, bristling. When he
started to limp past her, heading for the front door, she grabbed him telekinetically and spun him around to face her. His eyes widened in surprise, and she shoved him back down onto the couch.
“Let me go,” he said, the tendons bridging his neck and shoulders suddenly straining as he tried vainly to move.
“No,” she seethed in reply, fists balled as she squared off against him. “You didn’t just help me.”
“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Whatever. Let me go.”
“You used to piss your father off so he’d beat you instead of me. You did it on purpose. You didn’t care that he’d beat the shit out of you—beat you until you passed out from the blood loss and pain—as long as he didn’t hurt me.”
He didn’t have a smartass come-back for that. Instead, he looked bewildered again, and more than a little surprised.
“Lamar had a whip he liked to use with a long, thick, braided cord, do you remember that?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “No.”
“The strap had a piece of steel, a ball bearing, tied at the end, and when it hit you, it’d cut like a knife,” she continued. “You’d bite your tongue so hard you’d have blood streaming down your chin, all so you wouldn’t cry out, so your bastard father would keep heaping his sick abuse on you, not me.”
She released him from her telekinetic hold, and he slumped in his seat, nearly falling sideways. Propping himself up on his elbow, he leaned against to sofa cushions for a long moment, not looking at her. “I…I don’t remember that.”
“You used to let him take branding irons to you,” Naima snapped, her voice growing louder and sharper, and God, she wanted to grab him by the arms and shake him hard, make him remember. “He’d tie you up so your shoulders would be yanked out of the sockets or your wrists sheared open, cinch a rope around your neck so goddamn tight, you’d turn blue and pass out from lack of oxygen. All of these things—and hundreds more—so he’d leave me alone.”
She forced herself to stop, to shut the hell up, even though there was more she could have told him—so much more. She could have told him about another time they’d been tied together to the whipping tree. She estimated that she’d been in her early twenties by then, as it would be several more years before Aaron had helped to free her. On that occasion, after beating Aaron nearly unconscious, Lamar had then walked around to her side. He’d been sweating with exertion, his hair askew, his breathing heavy.
Naima had shut her eyes and whimpered in fright, balling her fists and steeling herself for the inevitability of the lash’s kiss against her spine. She’d opened them again in bewildered surprise when instead, Lamar had cut the ropes loose from around her wrists, letting her crumple to the ground in a trembling heap.
“Get up,” Lamar said to her, his voice low and hoarse.
As she’d stumbled to her feet, she looked up at Aaron. Semi-lucid, he blinked at her, heavy-lidded, dazed but coherent enough to be alarmed for her. “Father…” he’d gasped, but his voice had cut short as Lamar caught him beneath the chin the handle of the whip.
“Hush,” Lamar told him, his voice oddly gentle. Snatching the whip back, leaving Aaron’s head to droop down again toward his chest, Lamar strolled across the library to have a leisurely seat on his favorite sofa. “Put your mouth on him,” he said to Naima, crossing one leg over the other and leaning back, settling himself comfortably.
The order confused her, and she blinked between him and Aaron, puzzled and frightened. She expected her delay to enrage Lamar, but instead, he smirked, then nodded once to indicate Aaron.
“Put your mouth on him,” he said again.
Still not understanding what Lamar expected, she did the only thing she could think of and leaned in to kiss Aaron.
/> “Not there,” Lamar said, stopping her within millimeters of Aaron’s mouth.
And Naima understood.
Although over the years, Lamar had violated her plenty of times, and in countless, humiliating ways, he had never raped her. He’d never been able to achieve an erection, although to her horrified witness, he’d desperately tried. He’d use his hands, make her use her hands, force her to take him into her mouth—soft, flaccid and fat against her tongue, like a limp, lifeless eel or slug. No matter what he’d do—or what he’d make Naima do—his genitalia hadn’t responded.
Thus, when he said it again, gentle but persistent—“Put your mouth on him.”—she’d understood what he wanted, what he was demanding of her. It wasn’t until she lowered herself to her knees in front of Aaron, however, that comprehension seemed to seep into his dazed mind. His breath abruptly stopped, his eyes widening.
“No,” he whispered, not to Lamar but to Naima. He looked panic-stricken, and squirmed against his bonds, distraught. Looking toward Lamar, he pleaded, “Father…!”
“Aaron,” she said, drawing his alarmed gaze. “It’s alright.”
She smiled, trying to comfort and reassure him, just as he had so many times done for her. She tried not to think of Lamar sitting behind her, watching her with sick, patient glee. Whenever he’d forced her to perform sex acts on him, she’d been terrified and repulsed; with Aaron, however, she found herself seized with a remarkable and inexplicable sense of calm—and excitement. Her heart was racing, her breath fluttering beneath her breasts, and peculiar warmth seemed to have filled the pit of her stomach, spreading throughout her. She was trembling, not with fear, but rather with unexpected but eager anticipation.
When she reached out, closing her fingers around the warm width of him, she felt a shudder race through Aaron form and her own excitement heightened at the realization that he liked it, that her touch felt good to him.
“Naima,” he breathed, then his voice dissolved into a breathless sort of moan as she slipped the very tip of him into her mouth. The ropes creaked above him as he again tugged against the bonds.
