A lot of trauma is like that. I know people who’ve been hurt like that and healed like that.
But that’s not how it was with me.
Sometimes it grows. Something awful happens and hurts you, like getting cut with a knife, and you get help and the wound closes up and it looks okay to everyone. Maybe it even looks okay to you. But what you don’t know is, the knife was dipped in poison. Deep inside you, where no one can see, something black and fetid grows and grows until it controls your entire body and your entire life.
Its slow progress means you can’t ask for help because that awful thing happened years ago and it would be crazy to be affected by it now. And, besides, everyone thinks you’re okay and your parents are so proud of you and you don’t want to let them down. So you pretend it’s something else. You blame kids at school or teachers and you nod and agree when doctors say it’s social phobia or agoraphobia or anything else that isn’t the truth. Because you don’t want to admit how he affected you—that would be letting him win and you’re stronger than that.
So you agree with your mom when she says she’ll home school you. You take that online college course instead of enrolling in person. You choose a job where you never have to leave the house and you make friends with women on the internet you’ve never met. And all the time this thing grows inside you, out of sight, a solid heavy mass that weighs you down and keeps you indoors.
Until someone comes along and forces you out into the open.
I’d been going deeper and deeper into myself, further and further into my past. I’d seen, maybe for the first time, how the thing inside me had ruined my life. And now I was finally back at the event that had birthed it.
I pushed back against Alexei and he locked his arms even tighter around me. He felt very far away, way up at the mouth of the cave. But his warmth and strength still reached me.
“I was eight,” I said.
I felt his chest move—a silent intake of breath. He hadn’t guessed that, hadn’t guessed I’d been that young. His arms seemed to grow harder around me, his muscles tensing in anger.
The simple act of saying my age made my stomach lurch. It felt as though the rocks in the dark cave had grown suddenly slippery. Just thinking about this stuff was risking a fall into the past, a full on meltdown that would make me small and weak again. That was exactly what had always stopped me from doing this on my own. But now, as long as I could feel that distant warmth from Alexei, I was okay.
“My mom had taken me to a shopping mall. Do you remember how big things feel, when you’re small? Well, this place was vast, even for a grown up. And they’d only just opened it, so everything was shiny and new. I loved it—I was so excited. And then it got even better because my mom took me to the big department store inside the mall, and all the women there looked like princesses. I was running around the clothing displays, trying on hats. It was great.”
I stopped for a moment. I could feel it taking shape around me: the smooth marble tiles beneath my little sneakers, the soft piped music...it was like viewing the past through a protective veil as thin and fragile as saran wrap. I could still feel Alexei behind me, warming my back, but my front had started to feel cold, so cold….
My mouth had suddenly gone dry. I wet my lips. “And then I turned around,” I said, “and my mom wasn’t there.”
I felt Alexei grow tense behind me.
“At first, I thought she was playing a game. I ran around and tried to find her, but I couldn’t. And the clothes around me weren’t familiar—I’d been in coats and hats and now I was in shoes...” On the last word, my voice shifted and changed, becoming smaller. Younger.
“I looked around and I realized I was all alone. I was in this huge, echoing place within another huge place and I didn’t know how to find my mom. What if she’d forgotten me and gone home without me? I didn’t know my way home!” The fragile barrier between me and the past was melting away, now, the saran wrap becoming just a few insubstantial cobwebs. My voice was thick with fear. “I asked, out loud, if anyone had seen my mom, but no one heard. It was a brand new store and all the staff were too busy running around, restocking things. No one was listening to me.”
I felt Alexei half-relax on the seat behind me. He’d heard the fear in my voice. He thought that he’d been wrong, that the trauma was just being lost in a store. He wanted that to be the case. And it killed me that I couldn’t make it so. Part of me wanted to lie to him, but I owed him more than that.
“And then he appeared. Stan. He was plain-clothes security in the store and he said he’d help me find my mom. I was so relieved. I took his hand and he walked me right through the store”—I swallowed—”to the exit. He said he thought he’d seen my mom leave, up ahead, and I believed him.”
I felt myself sliding in the darkness. There was no more barrier between the past and me. I fell right into it, immersed in it, as real as it had been then.
“He took me into another store, one that hadn’t opened yet. And I thought we shouldn’t be in there because there were big signs saying Do Not Enter and there was construction stuff inside and wires hanging from the ceiling. But he said it was all okay and my mom was just through here and that it was a short cut.” My voice was running on automatic, now. My body went limp in Alexei’s arms and he tensed as he felt the change. My eyes stared straight ahead. “There was an office in the back and—”
I was narrating the past. And then I was narrating the present.
“He...there’s a table and I’m—”
“Gabriella,” Alexei’s voice was a faint echo from far, far above.
I looked around the empty office, frantic. Stan had sat me down on the edge of the table and my little legs were kicking nervously in the air. I could feel a warmth behind me, as if someone was there, but that made no sense because Stan was in front of me, unbuttoning—
“Why is he doing that? I’m scared—”
“Gabriella!”
“No,” I told Stan, “don’t. I want to find my mommy!”
“Gabriella!”
I was being shaken. I blinked two times. Three times. And then I was looking into blue eyes shot through with the coldest, most brutal anger I’ve ever seen.
“I will find him,” Alexei said thickly. “And I will kill him.”
I realized I was facing him. He’d turned me around and he’d been shaking me, too, desperately trying to bring me back. It felt like he’d only just succeeded. I wondered how close I’d come to being lost down there in the darkness forever, catatonic in a hospital ward.
I took a few breaths. It felt as if I was back up above ground, now, looking at that dark cave mouth from a safe distance while Alexei held me.
“Some construction workers found me,” I said. “Hours later. I’d crawled off the table where he’d left me and squeezed into an air conditioning duct—the smallest, safest place I could find. They never caught the guy, or even identified him. He didn’t work for the store.” I swallowed. “My mom had been maybe ten feet away, the whole time I was looking for her—she was on the other side of a display.”
I pressed myself to him but, however, hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get warm. “My folks sent me for therapy, of course. And we all thought it worked, me included. By the time I realized it hadn’t, my whole life had changed.”
“And you were scared to go out,” he said.
“In case I got lost again. In case there was no one there to help me.”
His arms tightened around me and, at last, I started to feel his warmth seep into my fear-chilled body. “Gabriella,” he said, “from now on, I promise there will always be someone there.”
I wanted it to be true. I pressed my face to his chest and stayed there, with him holding me tight, until I knew it was true. And only then did the tears come, big hot floods of them soaking through his shirt.
It was a full hour before we moved from that position. But when we did, I felt stronger than I had in years. The thing inside me—the Dread—hadn�
��t disappeared or even shrunk. But I felt as if I had a handle on what it was, at least. It was the first time I’d ever talked to anyone about it since my original, failed therapy.
When we got out of the old junker, the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. Alexei slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me close as we walked back to our car. It felt as if everything was new again and that gave me hope, despite our situation.
I spent the journey back casting little sidelong glances at Alexei, trying to get my head around the idea of this gorgeous, muscled beast of a man wanted me...and that he hadn’t run a mile when he discovered the depths of my fucked-upness, and the reason for it.
But where did we go from here? We were still on the run, we still had a very dangerous man to find...when were we supposed to fit in us?
I figured we should start by talking. I’d sit down with him, back at the motel, and we’d spend some time actually getting to know each other. I knew almost nothing about him aside from his distrust of technology and his ruthless efficiency when it came to things like food. I didn’t know what he did for fun. Did he even have fun?
That started a faint, twisting unease in my stomach. I started to think about how different we were. He was still planning to go back to the Bratva and take up his old job again if we got this whole mess straightened out. He believed that killing was all he was good for, that he couldn’t change.
I had to convince him that he could.
One thing at a time. We’d go back to the motel and we’d talk. That’d be a start. And just to ensure it went well, I’d put the red sweater he liked back on. Even if the talking went nowhere, the sweater was sure to keep things positive. I remembered how he’d looked at me in it that morning, as if he’d wanted to leap right across the breakfast table and ravish me. And now that there was nothing holding him back…I gripped the edge of my seat and pressed my thighs together.
***
Back in our motel room, I checked the time and saw that we’d need to grab some lunch soon. But there was time for a talk first...and time for Alexei to pounce on me. Cheeks flushed in anticipation, I found the red sweater and held it up in the air in front of me, checking to see if it was too crumpled to wear.
A hole appeared in the sweater. A neat, circular hole right in the center. I felt my hair move as something shot past my head.
I lowered the sweater and saw the hole in the window, then turned and saw the hole in the wall behind me. And then Alexei was diving on me and knocking me to the floor as more bullets ripped through the room.
Alexei
In the army, they drill you on things a thousand times over...and then they do it all again. It’s not just sadism or breaking you down; it’s to ensure that, when something happens for real, the reaction is so ingrained that you do it without even thinking about it. I’d come under fire, real and simulated, so many times that the feeling of my chest hitting the ground had come to feel like an echo of the shot. I should have just dived for cover.
But when that first shot rang out, I just stood there and stared at Gabriella. She looked back at me, holding her sweater with the hole in it. Lifting it up had probably saved her life—the gunman had had to guess where her head had been. I knew that and I knew he’d fire again, but still I didn’t move. I was like a machine with jammed gears—all my army reflexes were clashing with my need to protect her.
I’d never had to worry about someone else, before. Not like this. Everything was different, since the junkyard. She wasn’t a fellow soldier and she wasn’t just a VIP, like when I’d sometimes been one of Luka’s bodyguards. I’d fallen for her completely and it was only now that I realized how vulnerable that made both of us.
I finally unfroze and dived on her, knocking her to the floor behind the bed, just as a second shot rang out. I pressed her to the floor, patting her body to check for wounds.
“I’m okay,” she said breathlessly.
But I kept checking her. Sometimes people are in shock, they don’t know they’ve been hit and then they bleed out—
“I’m okay,” she said again. I stared at her, still hunkered down over her. I’d never felt such pounding, all-consuming fear. I’d never felt so connected to anyone before. She was a part of me, now, and one I had to protect.
More shots slammed into the wall above us...and then they stopped. The gunman was probably across the street with a rifle, sights locked on the bed. He’d stopped firing in the hope we’d come out. As soon as one of us put our heads out—
“Stay down,” I told Gabriella.
She nodded, her eyes huge with fear. “What do we do?”
Normally, it would be smart to wait it out. As long as we stayed behind the bed, we were safe. Someone had probably already called the cops and we could have just waited for them to arrive. But in our case, the cops would pull me in for questioning, maybe even implicate me or both of us in Lev’s death. I couldn’t protect Gabriella in jail.
“We have to get out of here,” I told her. I looked around. The foot of the bed was beyond the window—if we stayed low until we reached it, the gunman wouldn’t be able to see us.
Hopefully.
I rolled off of her and lay on my belly, then motioned for her to do the same. “We’re going to crawl out, okay? Belly-crawl, like this.” I demonstrated. “Don’t get up. Don’t go any higher.”
She nodded. She’d gone deathly pale.
I couldn’t be sure I was right about how much of the room the gunman could see. If I was wrong, would he shoot me the second I crawled out from behind the bed? Or was he a professional—would he wait for me to report the coast was clear, then shoot Gabriella as she followed and finally shoot me too?
That’s what I would have done, if it had been me. I felt sick at the thought. So much had changed!
I took a deep breath...and crawled out, bracing myself for the impact. None came. I took a second to look around the room. Everything was still and quiet. A few feathers were drifting around—one of the shots must have clipped a pillow.
I glanced at the door and realized it was on the same wall as the window. We’d be dead the instant we went out that way. The only other door led to the tiny bathroom and I knew the window in there was too small to climb through. But it was better than staying in the bedroom.
I belly-crawled across the carpet and then beckoned for Gabriella. She crawled across exactly as I’d shown her and I helped her to her feet in the bathroom, slamming the door behind us. The room was so small that the two of us took up most of the floor space. Both of us looked at the window: I’d been right: much too small.
The cops would be on their way. Three minutes at most and we’d be under arrest.
“Who is it?” asked Gabriella. “The Bratva?”
I shook my head, still looking around the room. “He’s using a rifle and he almost got you with the first shot. I think it’s Seventeen.”
“How the hell did he find us?!”
“Think about it later. We have to get out of here.”
I turned in a full circle. The window was too small to get through. One wall lead back into our room and the other was solid cinder-block. But the fourth wall, the one with the sink and the mirror...I frowned and tried to picture the layout of the room, and how the next room must join to it. I realized the bathrooms touched, back-to-back.
“The next room’s bathroom is behind here,” I said. I rapped on the wall—just a thin, cheap partition. I could hear sirens in the distance. Shit!
“Great, but how do we—”
My eyes searched the room for something to use as a hammer, but there was nothing. We’re going to get caught. I had a vision of me dragged off in handcuffs and Gabriella left alone as cars full of Bratva thugs pulled up—
Fuck that.
I jumped up onto the toilet and slammed my foot down on the sink as hard as I could. One kick and it drooped. Two and it hung limply from the wall, water spraying from a broken pipe. I jumped down, wrapped my arms around it and heaved. The
thing came loose, a hunk of porcelain and metal that weighed twenty pounds.
“Move back,” I said.
Gabriella flattened herself against the door.
I smashed the sink against the partition wall. Water, plaster and dust filled the air and the plasterboard caved inward. I pulled back and slammed the sink into the wall again, almost throwing it. This time, I smashed a hole right through. A third hit and the hole was big enough to climb through. I tossed the sink down, grabbed Gabriella’s hand and helped her through the hole, then climbed through after her.
The sirens were getting closer. We ran through the room—thankfully unoccupied—and over to the door. I stood against it, panting. If the gunman still had his rifle’s scope zoomed in, watching our window, he wouldn’t see us leave. If he’d guessed what we’d done and had pulled his view back, he’d shoot us as soon as we opened the door.
“Walk,” I said. “Don’t run.”
She nodded and squeezed my hand.
I took a deep breath and opened the door, tensing in anticipation of the shot. I forced myself to walk into the open air and Gabriella followed right behind me. One step. Two steps.
No shots rang out.
We walked to the corner of the building and then, as soon as we were out of sight, ran for our car. By the time we were in it, the cops were pulling up at the front of the motel. We made it out of the street maybe three seconds before they shut it down.
I drove a couple of blocks away and then turned into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts. We both slumped in our seats and stared at each other, hearts pounding. Then we grabbed each other and hugged tight.
Gabriella checked the clock on her phone and then showed me. It was 1:36pm. “I checked the time just before I held up that sweater,” she told me. “It was exactly 1:30.”
Kissing My Killer Page 15
