“Does he do this often?” Braedan questioned while removing his hat.
“Only lately.” My nerves threatened to overcome me. The urge to survey my surroundings couldn’t be ignored. At a stoplight in the bottlenecked traffic, Braedan reached in the glove compartment box and retrieved a gun. He handed it to me, keeping it low and away from any outsider’s view. “Loaded.” He cocked the gun and pointed to a small trigger point on the back. “Safety.”
I clasped the heavy and cold metal gingerly and pointed it at the back of Braedan’s seat.
“Don’t unlatch the safety unless you’re planning to shoot to kill. I’d rather not have a Pulp Fiction moment when I drive over a speed bump.”
Laughter erupted from deep inside my belly. Feeling guilty over my reaction, I covered my mouth and fought to bridle my reaction. The fine lines in the corner of his heavy-lidded hazel eyes indicated Braedan was smiling as well.
“Is that the only movie you saw?” I questioned. “If it was, I’m sure it scared the bejesus out of you if you’ve never seen any movie before it.”
“It did,” he replied, his tone feather-light.
The glimpse of my reflection in the passenger window stained with droplets of melted snow forced me to turn the corners of my mouth down. Slipping back into my seat, I kept the gun up while it shook in my unsteady hand, and I remained silent for the duration of the ride.
“Keaton?” With a sigh, Braedan rubbed the crinkles forming at the bridge of his nose. He clenched his fist and took a step forward, but after shaking his head, he rested back against the front side panel of his car, parked in front of my parents’ home.
Braedan had sat uncomfortably by and watched me drop my father at least a dozen times in the snow bank in front of my parents’ walk.
“Let me help you.” Irritation bled into his voice as he combed a hand into his hair. “Eventually, you’re going to hurt him or yourself.”
I barely had the air capacity to speak as I continued to fight to gain a grip on my father, who never awoke during the ordeal. “I don’t want you inside my—my parents’ house.”
“You have a gun,” he reminded me and struggled with a grin when my behind met a snowbank and my father slipped from my grip. “If I do anything to make you uncomfortable, you are free to shoot me.”
“I am not”—I tried to grab my father’s arms as his bottom half dragged on the ground, but he slipped out of my hold—“going to shoot you.”
He pushed off the hood of his car and plodded toward me. With effortless movements, he picked up my father, throwing him over his shoulder without so much as straining a muscle. “Where do you want me to place him?”
I busied myself with dusting snow off my dress with my uninjured hand. “I can’t let you inside.”
Braedan lurched forward, slowed by my father’s weight on his back, and grabbed my hand, guiding it to the gun strapped outside of my garter, poking out of my lace dress. “I gave it to you for a purpose. Use it.”
I conceded, slowly heading toward the walk up, leading to the house. I unlocked the door and staked my territory in my safe place to run or fight, if needed. “You can put him upstairs in their bedroom. It’s the third door on your left.”
Braedan tipped his head toward me and headed up the stairs, disappearing from my view.
I paced around in the foyer, waiting for him to finish and kept track of the minutes he spent upstairs. He appeared within five minutes at the top of the stairs.
“May I have a glass of water?” he requested, descending the stairs.
“Then you have to leave,” I said quickly.
He nodded in agreement. “Then, I’ll leave.”
My steps were swift into the kitchen where I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator. I turned around to hand it to Braedan. Blinding me with his speed, he backed me against the refrigerator, stole the gun from my garter belt, and removed the clip. The water slipped from my hands, landing with a dull thud on the floor.
He stared down at me as my breathing became audible and my chest moved dramatically, pressing against him. He held up his hands, one holding the gun, one holding the clip, and took one large step away from me.
The message wasn’t the only thing he’d left me with. I shook my head, attempting to shake the shameful craving out of my thoughts. I clutched my whirling stomach with my trembling hands and took a few breaths to collect myself.
He plucked the water from the floor and slowly perused up my body on his way to standing upright. “You should ice that hand before the swelling worsens. I would do it myself, but I think you would be less than inclined to accept my help.” With a subdued smile, he glanced at the doorway. “As I swore to, I’m going to go. Thank you for the dance.”
“How did you learn to use a gun?” I called out, stopping him in his stride toward the front of the house. I wrung my hands. The pain made me remember myself. I couldn’t determine why I baited him with a silly question to get him to stay.
He looked over his shoulder at me for a moment and turned back to his path without moving. “We had our own judicial system in the community. The more severe crimes received the most severe punishments. There were brothers who were designated to train as executioners. I was one of them. Not sure if Noah knew. He was smart to shoot me in the back.”
I rummaged around in the freezer for ice and had trouble wrapping it one-handed in a dish towel. I placed it carefully on my knuckles. “If you had your way of doing things, and I’m guessing you believed in restrictions with sex, why was the man who assaulted your brother allowed to live? Did you have any consequences for rape?”
When I looked up again, Braedan was facing me and standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “Our community became a refuge of sorts for dastardly criminals as long as they could afford to stay—or were of some use to my father. What you’re referring to wasn’t called rape in our bible. The King James version—I didn’t know it existed until Noah showed it to me—isn’t the bible I learned to adhere my life to.”
His regard was trained to the dish towel. With a shake of his head, he rooted around the kitchen for a plastic bag and fixed a proper ice pack for my hand, gently placing it on my knuckles. “It was called something else, and it was a normal occurrence with the mothers and sisters when deemed necessary. It was against our laws for fathers or brothers to commit the act amongst each other. It doesn’t mean sodomy was forbidden—they used…devices with the younger generation when the crime was extreme enough. In their eyes, eliciting sin from women was a severe crime.”
While my time at Rebirth was short, I could comprehend how easily one could be brainwashed into a distorted groupthink. For the longest time, I thought I had escaped my worst fear, yet it stared me down in the months I spent with Noah, allowing him to persistently fracture me.
I approached Braedan, feeling no fear, only hoping to show him I understood. “I’m sorry for all you went through, Braedan. Lesser men wouldn’t have lived through it.”
“I wasn’t living—barely. I’ve been sleepwalking through my life, and eventually became a shell, clamoring for the approval of a brother who would never give it to me. When you came along, the dynamic changed with Noah. I started to see my brother as something else: fallible. And you? You brought me back to life, Keaton.”
His past transgressions wouldn’t cease filling my mind and failed to stop my well hand as it habitually moved a stray lock of hair away from his molded style.
The discomfort between us made the heat rise. He pressed forward, locking me against the wall, making the appliances shudder with the impact. Our breathing increased, ricocheting off one another in some sort of competition.
The horrible memories became covered by the newer ones. I was addicted and longing, wanting it again no matter how wrong it was. “Why…did you do this to me?”
“Freedom comes with a price, and it means seeing things for what they are—no matter how painful.” He caressed my lips between his teeth and opened his mo
uth for a tongue-laced kiss. “I meant my promise to you, to free you and to love you. Stop fighting me and you will have so much more.”
He kissed me again, robbing me of my will and my ability to breathe at the same time. I questioned how it happened. How the man I once hated became a pinnacle of an awakening. Wanton need vibrated underneath my skin. I battled with myself to keep what I wanted at bay. My desire for him was so sickeningly thick inside my core it ached.
“Does my kiss clear up things for you, Keaton?” His voice was laced in arsenic to murder my will.
“I-I don’t know.” My lips and my words sputtered against his mouth.
He squinted and pushed himself slightly apart from me while maintaining a firm grip on my body. “What do you want, Keaton?”
“I…” I writhed in his hold, hoping to remove myself.
He clenched down harder on my waist and leaned against my face, giving me no room to see anything other than him. “Answer me.”
“I…I want you.”
He blinked, looking disappointed over the words I wouldn’t say. “You have so much more.”
“What scares me is that it might not be true. That underneath the man who truly wants to redeem himself is the man you truly are, and he might return when I’m too far gone.” My words were partially true. I was terrified I might’ve already reached the point where I couldn’t turn back.
The more time I spent around Braedan, the more he cut me open. I couldn’t fight the alarm bells, telling me I would bleed out and he would suck me dry of my vitality and laugh when I no longer held any hints toward being alive. “Putting aside everything you’ve done, I’m scared most of all of letting you have my heart and being reminded every moment—by my memories—why you should never have had it.”
He searched my eyes in silence for a while. “This…is a viable danger?”
“Yes,” I said, a surprising sob escaping. In shame, I averted my eyes. “Even if this is real, I can’t let myself accept it. I want to be a good person, Braedan. I want to be the good and remarkably decent person who forgives without fail. I can't anymore.” I slowly cast my gaze up at him. “If you taught me anything at Rebirth, it's we’re nothing without the choices we make, and those choices define who we are. I wish I was a better person who could give you my forgiveness and say what we both already know. I can’t, no matter how much I wish I could.”
“If you wanted to hate me as much as you claim to”—he pushed his hair back as it slid from its style to graze his jawline—“why would you want the ability to forgive me?”
“Because trying to hold onto what I felt for you when I was at Rebirth while loving you is killing me more than it is you. Because by not forgiving you, I’m inviting the ghost of your bad deeds to haunt me forever.”
He slid his feet forward, closing the space between us. “I wish you would forgive me.” His words were uttered with a sullen softness that cut me past my skin. “I know eventually you will. I can make you be a different person, Keaton. It’s the least I can do, because whether you’re aware of it or not, you did the same thing for me.” Clasping the back of my head, he gave me a gentle goodbye kiss on my forehead.
THE SHOWER WATER ran down in rivulets on my tan skin, bathing me in searing hot water. A knot of tension in my pelvis wouldn’t cease. I’d done all that I could, short of touching it, but the suffering was never alleviated.
Behind my shuttered eyelids, Keaton illuminated my sight. Her almond-shaped, sun-kissed brown eyes. Her thick lips often curled into a pout when she fought against showing me her infectious smile. Her laughter was a harmony I’d never bared witness to while at Rebirth. I had grown fixated on the sound once I learned how to evoke it.
The sight of her in the tight and short black lace dress at the charity event fueled my desires. Memories of her reaction to me devoured my thoughts, fooling my body into believing she stood a touch away. Her heartbeat vibrated through my chest. The scent of her wetness weakened the divide between a man of patience and a man with a mission.
Every moment I spent in her presence, I battled to restrain myself from enticing her to succumb to the idea that she never belonged to Noah. We belonged to one another the instant her file crossed my hands.
I exemplified the many reasons she should trust me only to contend with another obstacle. My composure had begun to elude me. It took strength outside of what I held in reserves to break through to a new man, one who was worthy of her. The desire for selfish indulgences became self-contained lava on my skin, and I burned for her.
My palm skipped down my stomach to hold the thick base of my erect shaft in my hand. A ghost pain gave me pause. The nightmarish memory of my mother ruined my ascent. Her expression the instant she barged into my room while my nude pubescent body was concealed by blankets suffused my thoughts and cracked an angry whip down on my desires.
I bared witness to the face in my waking horrors and my haunting recollections. It was a face permanently twisted up in displeasure and adorned with large blue eyes, blackening with the degeneration into her more volatile nature, becoming soulless; it was far from the scariest element tied to the woman. My mother and many others attempted to extract my sins by marring my skin and infiltrating my mind with a pain that could never heal.
Pressing my hands against the warm tile, I willed myself to regain focus on less dire memories.
The soft hum of my phone, emitting a loud intoning chime the longer it went ignored, assisted in diminishing my more horrid thoughts.
I drew back the shower door. My feet met the radiant heated tile, dampening the surface with my drenched steps. Upon reaching the marble vanity, I retrieved my phone, holding it closer to my view. Keaton’s name displayed across the screen, and I almost lost the will to speak. The sight of her name jerked me out of my decline. Since I’d returned to claim what was mine, Keaton had become the bonfire to my starless thoughts.
“Hello?” I squawked.
“I’m sorry to bother you.” She offered up an unnecessary apology. She never had nor never would have the need to apologize to me. It was a sentiment I expressed to her constantly. My deception appeared to entice her to fall prey to her usual habits. She had a strength inside her I intended to bring to a slow boil. Currently, she was barely simmering against the heat.
My rocky, steep climb to obtain what I coveted was cluttered with warning signs, promising falling rocks would constantly greet me, creating a barricade to obstruct me from my goal.
“I didn’t want to call you, but with you having gone to AA, I thought you could help him again.” Her breathy sigh raddled my ears. “This was stupid. I’m at least two hours away from D.C. and…”
Her voice faded. Alarmed she meant to hang up, I acted swiftly. “Keaton, wait. Don’t hang up.” The urgency in my voice teetered on desperation. “Tell me what happened.”
Several hours in my car later, I arrived at a small pub located in a very small village three hours away from D.C. As I surveyed the scene, I held tightly to the metal case as I entered the bar. The wide selection of alcohol caught my eye for a moment, reminding me of one of my many shortcomings.
I had hoped the patrons wouldn’t outnumber my estimation, to my surprise, I overestimated; there were only five customers who needed to be silenced.
Keaton’s consideration was held prisoner by my entrance. She stood at the far end of the bar, unsuccessful in her attempts to wake her father. A black dress adorned her body, clinging to every peak and valley of her steep curves. Her black hair, a darker color than it was at Rebirth, swirled in fluid waves down her shoulders and back.
Under my undivided regard, her light-fawn skin began to radiate. She struggled to diminish her smile. The mere act to fight against what came naturally to her, put my mind at ease. I found comfort in knowing I hadn’t erased my progress with her. My only obstacle was her grapple against what was already there—her feelings for me.
Giving her a grin of acknowledgment with the slight of my head, I proceeded to d
o what I intended. I promised the patrons a cut of money in the metal case if they signed a nondisclosure agreement about what was seen. Not a single person had the fortitude to spurn my offer.
The bar patrons filed out, leaving Keaton, the bartender, her father, and me alone in the narrow and dank space. Arthur, fully inebriated and no longer conscious, maintained his position slumped over the bar and immobile. Keaton stood by her father, persistently nudging his shoulder to rouse him awake.
I approached her, keeping at a safe range away from her—more for her benefit than my own.
“I can’t believe you came. Thank you.” She pointed to the currently empty case clutched in my grasp and swayed her head. “How did you know it would work?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll pay you back,” she promised me, her eyes swirling, determined to avoid the sight of me.
“You would insult me if you did.” Examining Arthur in his state, it was difficult to avoid the parallels. I drank for one reason: I lacked the desire to be conscious throughout the day and allowed each aching minute to pass me by while never having to live through it. It could be argued if I wasn’t such a coward, I would’ve killed myself long ago. My spirit was damaged by my parents. What was left of it died the day after they perished in a plane crash. I left the community in secret and escaped the expectations of my father’s followers—to assume the role of my father’s vacated position.
I hadn’t begun to feel again until I took on the role of Reven. Embodying him, I experienced a power I had never been able to wield. I felt like a god, and didn’t begin to feel my humanity until Keaton.
What will haunt me—what I will never cease in making amends for—was how my decisions negatively impacted what our relationship could’ve been. She was never able to witness the magnitude of the affect she wielded over me while she was at Rebirth: She unhinged, intrigued, and infuriated me. She brought to mind my difficulties with controlling the range of emotions she brought forth. It left me vulnerable, easily steered me toward a path of destruction, and shepherded disastrous consequences.
Seducing Virtue (Wicked Trinity Book 3) Page 6
