“You realize…we’ve been…?” I cleared my throat, unable to say the words—less out of modesty and more out of my difficulties with coming to terms with the fact that I opened my legs for yet another monster.
Ignoring me, she untucked her arm from behind her back and presented a fragrant bouquet of pristine roses. She placed the vase of flowers on the bench beside the tub. A dozen were red, and a dozen were yellow.
I ejected from the warmth of the water faster than my equilibrium could endure. Water noisily slid from my skin, made slightly ruddy by the scalding water. I reached out and clutched the bouquet. My heart beat with a painful and rapid rhythm as I recalled the flowers I was given while forced to remain in a deranged cult. The flowers were a symbol of my naïveté. I once thought they were a facet of Noah, revealing a gentler nature in contradiction with the way he tortured me physically and mentally. Unbeknownst to me, until it was almost too late, I discovered it was all a lie.
“Braedan brought them for you.” My mother answered my unspoken question. “He gave me the most beautiful set of white chrysanthemums. I don’t know how he remembered my favorite flowers. I only mentioned my love for the flowers in passing.” She slid from the edge of the tub to stand, and turned toward the brass towel rack, retrieving a red terry cloth towel. “Can he be any more of a blessing to this family?” Returning to me with her eyes closed, she wrapped the towel around my body. She gestured for me to get out of the tub, taking several steps backward.
I fingered the flowers as I questioned whether I wanted to adopt my usual habits and put on a show for my mother, to help her gain what was important to her.
There would always be parts of me I couldn’t wish out of existence. I could never act against the two people who sacrificed and had gone through so much, due in large part to my mistakes.
I rationalized to prepare myself to do the unthinkable: I had my parents there as a buffer, and it was one dinner.
While plodding down the stairs, my attention was enamored with the scene easily seen from my vantage point. My father and Shiloh—Braedan—were in the sitting room chatting over tumblers of bourbon. The ease at which Braedan engaged in conversation with my father was difficult to absorb.
Upon sight of me, Braedan rose from his chair like a gentleman, encouraging my father to do the same.
Our gazes locked on one another, and I relived all the things I tried to forget: my birthday kiss, the night at Sonja’s house, the night she died, and the night of Sonja’s funeral. The faint tingle on my skin transformed into an all-consuming burn. Every part of me clamored to be touched by him. My mind hadn’t forgotten the emotional pain he inflicted on me at Rebirth, and it fought to suppress the desires of my heart and body.
His grin was laden with sensuality. It was as though we were sharing the same memories and experiencing them all over again. His eye contact became something I could no longer hold.
“There she is.” Wearing a grin filled with his drunkenness, my father staggered over to me, spilling bourbon on the wood floor as he did. He wrapped his free arm around my neck and pulled me in for a hug and a kiss on the forehead like he did when I was a tween. The scent of liquor permeated his suit and his breath.
His drinking was something my mother and I noticed, and she refused to speak about it. Since I returned to D.C., his drinking habits snuck up to a level above normal. Where once a drink was in his hand on rare occasions, it wasn’t unusual to see him with two or three before the afternoon.
After confronting him once about his drinking, I couldn’t find the strength to do it again. He’d barely spoken to me since. Knowing I was the cause, the guilt kept me from berating him for his coping method. I had no idea how to help him or approach him without creating an even bigger rift between him and my mother.
“I think your mother is almost done cooking dinner.” My father hung his nose in the air, and gave an appreciative nod to the scent of dinner wafting around the atmosphere.
Taken aback by my father’s announcement, I widened my eyes in shock. “Mom’s cooking?”
“By cooking, you know it means she arranged the food the cook has prepared on a plate, but we won’t say that out loud to her.” My father turned to Braedan and darted out his hand. “Keaton, I believe you’ve met Braedan Michaels a few times, haven’t you?”
My father’s disconnection couldn’t have been more apparent.
I straightened the crooked lapel of my father’s oxford shirt. “More than a few times, and he's been here before, too. Remember, Dad?"
My father shuttered his dark brown eyes. His light-brown skin turned ruddy with embarrassment. He shook his head, swaying as he did. “Right.” He nodded in a dramatic way. “Right.”
“It’s nice to see you again.” I plastered on a plastic grin and extended my hand to greet Braedan while keeping my gaze elsewhere.
My mother appeared between my father and me. Her posture turned rigid when my father quietly burped. “So formal.” She waved at the air and gave my shoulder a light tap. “Don’t mind us. You can at least give the man a hug.”
She was ignored.
Braedan took my hand, holding it firmly but gently, and bowed. The longer side of his hair slipped from its molded style and tickled the back of my hand. A kiss that could’ve doubled as sweet and erotic was placed on the back of my palm. Shock waves filled with emotion and reminders rifled up my arm, pervading every inch of my skin.
His hazel eyes lifted to study me through his dense black eyelashes. “You look beautiful, Keaton.”
The rumble of his voice sent a second wave of flashes of heat up my arm. The memory of the nights we spent together played on a continuous loop inside my head and wouldn’t abate. I remembered his breathy statements when we were together. Our connection was predicated on an emotional entanglement I’d been accustomed to craving, and had gone long without. Braedan had enacted a free-moving electrical current, and in the moment, I had no way nor the will to turn it off.
Keeping his hold on my hand, Braedan straightened his spine and tucked a stray strand of my hair behind my ear. He stepped forward, pressing his body to mine. His heavy breath splayed across my cheek, increasing my fever. Fingertips lingered at the lobe of my ear as he gently kissed my cheek, only a centimeter from my lips.
When he parted and gave me a reprieve from the thick air threatening to suffocate me, I averted my eyes.
My mother and father remained near us, observing the entire interaction with looks of anticipation stuck on their faces.
I gave them a false smile.
“Arthur, help me set the table?” My mother snapped out of her daze, and tugged my father’s hand toward the formal dining room. As my parents traveled across the narrow hall leading to the stairs, they left Braedan and me alone.
The minute my parents were out of my immediate sight, I yanked my hand from Braedan’s hold.
His grip on the untouched drink in his hand intensified. A sullen shadow darkened his hazel eyes.
“Can I get you another?” I kept my volume high, hoping to fool my parents into believing nothing was out the ordinary. I delayed, watching my mother and father leave the room with a wandering eye.
“I haven’t touched this one, to be forthright.” Braedan’s unsteady hand ran up and over his black hair, moving disobedient strands away from his face. “Archie would be very sore if he knew I was simply holding this. I didn’t want to be rude to your father.”
My attention snapped onto him, interested in the identity of the man I’d never met. “Who’s Archie?” I became hypnotized by the place where his burn scar was the most severe—it peeked out of the edge of his high collar shirt, covered in a black V-neck sweater snugly fit across his chest.
The hints of forest green in his hazel eyes glinted with the tilt of his head and the reflection of the dim lighting from overhead. “Someone who’s been more of a father to me than my own.”
From what I was once told by Nadine and Noah, it couldn’t have been true: S
hiloh lived a life full of luxury with an excessive amount of love—love that they lacked for his older brother, Noah. It made sense to why Shiloh turned out to be the man I remembered, while he adopted the character of Reven at Rebirth, and not the false character he’d shown me lately.
I peered over my shoulder, relieved to find my parents out of my view. I exhaled in frustration and tore down my wall of congeniality. Returning back to Braedan, I gave him every ounce of my anger with the weight of my glare. “I have to pretend we’re on good terms through this dinner. When you leave, please tell my parents you weren’t interested in me, then leave them and me alone.”
Tension took over his features. “I’m not in your life to add more stress or to detract from the good. I thought I proved it more than once.” His face lightened, a skewed slant appeared at the corner of his generous lips. “I miss you when you’re not with me…more and more.”
My mouth moved, and yet I couldn’t project any sound. “Stop…the act.”
He took a large leap forward. The swift movement pulled my eyes to him. “You think I’m faking this? Do you believe I want to punish you?”
“It’s what you did,” I gritted through my teeth. “What you always did. Why else would you wait until after I had sex with you to reveal who you were? Why would you wait until I…” Deciding he didn’t deserve to hear the magnitude of my feelings for him, I didn’t continue. “It was cruel to do, especially after what I’ve been through.”
I didn’t want to believe the shift I witnessed in him—my words had hurt him. “I was prepared to show you who I truly was when I took you away from Noah. I was prepared to face whatever the consequences might have been the night Nadine and Adam attempted to steal you away and murdered your friend. More than once I’ve tried to reveal the truth about my identity. It was you who decided you weren't ready.” Swiveling sideways to face the club chair, he set the tumbler down on the crystal coaster on the glass side table.
“My choice to not reveal who I was the minute we first spoke on the phone was more out of my need to help you than any attempt to hurt you.” Facing me once more, he allowed his gaze to study every area of my face before meeting my eye level and regarding me with an intensity that pinned me. “I recognized what I heard in your voice when we spoke on the phone, and I wanted to be there for you in every way.”
His chest heaved with a heavy inhale. “You must think I hate you after what I did—what I was coerced into doing at Rebirth. I understand it. You have to know, I’m…really fucked up, Keaton. I want to show you that underneath the damage and the person you encountered at Rebirth, I’m a different man.”
Staring into the face of the person who terrified me for seven months, I couldn’t consolidate him with the man I spent my most recent and treasured moments. My mind seemed thrown into an island of disbelief and confusion. I expected a certain set of behavior from Reven. The way he was with me before and after he showed me the truth threw me into a never-ending tailspin. He set a stick of dynamite to my first impressions of him as Reven, and left me without any hope I could rediscover the obliterated pieces of the character.
“Why are you doing this to me, Shiloh?” The acute pain in my voice couldn’t be stifled. “What do you really want?”
“Shiloh is dead.” He glanced for something over my shoulder and appeared to relax at whatever he did or didn’t find. “As for what I want beyond what I’ve already told you the first time you posed the question, it’s simpler than you can imagine—or maybe more complex. There are many things I have to tell you. Many more things I want to show you. When you’re ready, I’ll reveal everything.”
“Reveal what?”
“What you think you know about Noah and what happened at Rebirth is far from the whole truth.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing I felt or was made to go through at Rebirth was a lie. I didn’t imagine the torture, or the men who touched me because you told them to, or you…” I struggled for breath as I fought to ward off the tears. My eyes were clouded by the wells of water. “I didn’t imagine the night you raped me.”
He folded his arms across his chest tightly as though he were fighting against an unknown gesture. “I’m not saying this because I expect your forgiveness to come easily, but if you knew the world I was reared in, you would understand.”
“You’re still aware of what’s right and what’s wrong?” I fumbled over my words, having difficulty steering our conversation.
“But…” His posture bent and he had trouble with looking at me. “You never said no.”
My brow lifted in incredulity. “Excuse me?”
“The night I took you in your room, you never made a move to stop me, nor did you decline.”
Aghast, my head lazily moved from left to right. “Do you remember forcing me to give you oral sex? Do you remember me saying no then? It didn’t stop you before, did it? I never said no to you that night because I wasn’t allowed.”
“Are you admitting that”—he moved forward and a rush of heat blanketed my skin—“when I was inside you, you couldn’t say no because you were mine? If that’s true, how could I have stolen what I already own?”
I clutched my stomach, on the verge of a disdain I hadn’t experienced since Gregory, once the golden boy of D.C., threw me over the trunk of his car on the night of my graduation and ignored my screams as he took from me what I never intended to give him.
“You can’t seriously be this deluded,” I said, my words vacant and soft.
“I have yet to fully grasp your world,” Braedan mumbled, his eyes darting to the floor. “There are many things I don’t understand because it stands in contradiction with the world I was reared in. I’m doing everything I can to reveal every facet of me; the ugly parts are there because of my past, and the beautiful parts that are there because of you.”
He slid his hand down the side of my head. “Why can’t you see me as anything other than a monster? What made you reach a point where you felt this persistent inclination to hate me?”
“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“I wanted your love, Keaton, as I’ve always wanted. Despite your words to the contrary…I know I finally have it.”
“Fuck…you,” I spat as tears of anger spilled down my cheeks. Walking past Braedan, I slipped deeper into the room to stand before the fireplace. I studied the accessories on the hearth, wondering if I had the will or strength to grab a poker and unleash the violence brewing inside of me.
Braedan followed me, clinging to my hand. Pulling me into his arms, he held me closely. The thumping rhythm in his chest vibrated inside my body.
Fishing a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his black sports coat, he blotted my tear-stained face. “If I’d never taken you across the desk that night, would you still be this way? Or would you say to me what I already know? What I knew the second I was inside you again. You were always meant for me.”
Stunned and appalled, I hastily escaped his touch. “Are you even aware of how crazy you sound?”
His thumb and index finger rubbed at the damp silk material of his handkerchief, specifically where my tears stained the white silk. “I admitted I was a little insane. In another world, apart from this world, the thoughts I battle with constantly to be the man you compel me to be, are embraced and considered on the cusp of normal.”
He was Reven, in his skin, using a different voice and a less stilted manner of speaking. I hoped to find some way to remove all traces of doubt and confusion to permanently hold onto the anger and hatred I’d once held for the man—to see him for the man I remembered.
“You couldn’t have played the part of Reven well unless you were evil, or at least touched it,” I surmised. “You want to know when I reached the point of no return? When you shoved your erection into my mouth. When you told two men to rape me. When you told Noah to torture me. When you took me across the desk and stole what was left of me. All the awful things you did and said to me? You painted yourself as a mons
ter. If I imagined everything, tell me. Only then would you ever stand a chance for forgiveness.” A foreign part of me had emerged, making me hunger for vengeance while spewing words soaked in vinegar like I was fighting for freedom at Rebirth.
Having trouble engaging with me, he settled his gaze on the floor at my feet. “Knowing who truly ran Rebirth, who do you think orchestrated those events? I can assure you”—his intense eyes locked onto mine with a speed that alarmed me—“I was never the culprit.”
My stance became rigid and uninviting, closing myself off physically from him. “You can’t erase or rewrite history, and you can’t make me believe Noah manipulated everything you did to me.”
For a moment, a mark of innocence alighted in his eyes and tugged at my heart. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me and my mother—more than I can say.” I rubbed at my arms as though they were coated in filth. My voice had lost its will. I could no longer allow the words to slip from my lips, defying everything I stood for. I believed in forgiveness for those who wanted it. I believed there was a good heart buried in every monster.
I couldn’t blame Noah for losing my hope; my naïveté and stupidity were to blame. “But with all the good things you’ve done since you came into my life a second time, it doesn’t change anything. It can’t.”
“Who was Noah to you, Keaton?” His tone shifted into a deeper and daunting cadence. “I recall what you said in the interview shortly after Noah tried to discredit your truth. He was a monster to you, too, and you managed to fuck him despite all his poisonous deeds.” The curse was laden with enough envy and hatred to weigh me down. “You gave yourself to him, repeatedly.”
“And I left him,” I shot back with conviction.
“He hasn’t left you. He will continue to manipulate and destroy your life from afar. And he can continue because you can’t sever your emotional and mental attachment to him. Noah’s been implanted inside your mind from the moment you two…” Braedan’s voice faded into nothingness. His stare was blazing, igniting me at the core. “Noah resides inside you, killing who you are without being near you. He has the talent. It’s unfortunate he holds power over you, because of all the things Noah is deserving of, it was never you.”
Seducing Virtue (Wicked Trinity Book 3) Page 2
