Survivor (The Soul Mates Series Book 1)

by Victoria Johns

  “OK,” I reply, urging her to sit down on the bed and lean against the wall with me.

  “My mom ran off when I was ten years old, I searched our house for days until my father got so mad he locked me in the basement. That only made things worse, for one I wasn’t a fan of the dark and for another, that’s where he put all her stuff,” she whispered. “I remember crying because I’d found all of her stuff and couldn’t understand why it was there. I kept picking up random trinkets and things out of boxes and smiling whilst I was sobbing. When he finally let me out, he told me I had to forget her because I didn’t have a mother anymore. It was more than I could cope with, because that meant I was all alone with him and my brothers, oh and the house staff. I got this crazy idea that she’d be sad when she finally came home and found her stuff all gone. So I kept sneaking into the basement and retrieving bits and putting them back in their place around the house, because I could remember where they’d been.”

  Cara was in some distant place now dragging this stuff up, her body was no longer rigid with fear, it was slumped, almost defeatist in pose.

  “I couldn’t stop doing it, even though I could hear my father constantly raging when he found her stuff on shelves or book cases and anything he found he smashed or put in the trash. One day the youngest of my brothers, Mattia, saw me in the playroom, putting out a photo of her cuddling us all. He was twelve and father caught him trying to put it back in the basement. I was always closest to Mattia and my father knew this, so as a punishment he made me watch whilst he forced our older brother Guiseppe to beat him with a cane. I can’t forget any of it. Ever. Mattia was trying so hard not to cry, his back was bleeding and I felt his pain, every blow, because I caused it. Guiseppe never forgave me, it was my fault that he was forced to be the man that had to do that. The things Guiseppe has done are all my fault. I made him turn into the monster he is.”

  “Baby…”

  “And just to make sure I understood my wrong doing he made my other brothers get involved, they were told to bring all the stuff up, from the basement, to the yard and I was made to watch as my father doused the lot in petrol and set fire to it.”

  “Shit Cara, that’s nasty,” and it was, what kind of father makes his children punish each other and then mentally torture them by destroying their mother’s belongings?

  A fucking sick one.

  “I can’t forget it Ross, the looks of disdain from my brothers, the look of blame and disappointment from my father. That day changed Guiseppe, he became a scary person, just what my father kept telling him he was destined to become. I saw what they were capable of and all of it spins round and round in my head.”

  “Not that there is anythin’ positive to find in this shit, but your mom left. Did she manage to stay away? If she can survive, you can.”

  “No. I know she’s dead. My father likes his old fashioned ledgers even in this day and age with me and computers, he uses one of them to strike fear into the hearts of others. The date of her death is marked in ledger as a “payment made” and if that’s not bad enough, she was Guiseppe’s first kill. Killing her was the only way that he could prove to my father that he was ready to step up and be groomed. He was also destined to take his place at my father’s side and he’s just about the scariest person I know.”

  “Fuck.” There isn’t much more that I can say, I can’t make this go away, I can only pray that by letting her off load somehow it helps her deal with all the acts of cruelty from her childhood.

  Whilst Cara sits here and cries over the death of her mother, I gather her in my arms and soak up some of her feeling and compassion. I need it desperately to rub off on me, If it doesn’t I’m in danger of hunting the fucking lot of them down and making them feel the kind of torment that this girl has been carrying around for too long.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Talking about things doesn’t make me forget them.

  Nothing does.

  But it did mean that I was able to convey some reasoning behind my fear to Ross. It would have to do until I was able to tell him the real truth. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

  “So am I. It’s cruel and fuckin’ vile that your family are capable of these things, but I’m not surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “It had to be ugly for you to run in the first place. It had to be bad for you to retreat inside your own head like you just did. And finally, I’m never surprised by human nature and my job means I’ve seen a lot of it, usually the worst kind.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I felt obliged to offer, I can’t keep taking from him, I’m not used to one sided relationships. There has to be a balance for everything to remain equal.

  “Fuck no. You do not need any more nightmares,” he told me, shaking his head and smiling. He had a great smile, but I could still see a hint of pain that he was failing to hide in his eyes. I had no idea how Ross did his job but it was clear that it had taken its toll on him. “Ready to head back?”

  “What happens when we get back?”

  “We carry on, but this time we plan as well as train.” The glint in his eye told me that this was his thing. It was a rush to him and despite the danger, it made his blood pump with excitement because of it.

  We went back in his truck, my old clanger was incapacitated and we’d made arrangements to get it towed to the junkyard. Climbing out of the cabin I looked at him nervously and said, “I’ll catch you later then?” I had no idea where we stood, he knew personal things about the real me, he’d seen me at my worst both physically and mentally and we’d had sex once. That alone meant I was out of my depth and had no clue how to proceed. Whatever this was, it was already outside of my sphere of experience.

  “Where you goin’?”

  “My trailer?” It came out as a question because I didn’t understand why he was asking and it was clear he had other ideas.

  “You stay in the house.”

  “I’ll…” I tried.

  “In my room,” he continued.

  “But…”

  “In my bed,” he pressed.

  “I don’t…”

  “With me,” he finished, grabbing my bag out of the back of the truck.

  “Ross, honestly, I won’t run again.”

  He dumped my bag on the floor and came to me, getting in my space. “I need to know you’re safe. I want to trust that you won’t run but that’s not the only reason. Baby, this… it’s been a while for me too.” I could tell by the way he finished his statement he wanted me to understand what he meant.

  “How the heck is that possible? You’re… well… you!” I flustered my way through it, I was getting embarrassed.

  Ross started laughing at me, “You think I’m hot.”

  His self assured teasing was too close to home, I’d been taught to guard my feelings. Emotions and feelings made you vulnerable if they were discovered, so my answer was definitely snappy, “I do not!”

  “Sure you do, you can’t get enough of me,” he continued heading into the house with my bag.

  Now I was starting to get really pissed off, “Need I remind you, I left. You came after me.”

  “Does the chase make it more excitin’ for you baby?” he carried on teasing and then as he reached the bottom of the stairs, he hurled my bag up them to the landing.

  “You really do think you’re all that,” I said narrowing my eyes, slamming my hands on my hips, preparing to dish some attitude.

  Jake turned and came back to me, getting close enough for my breath to catch in my throat. He started walking slowly, backing me up to the wall. Raising his hand, he gently stroked my cheek, “It’s Ok that you dig me, it’s a huge turn on that I can get you so twisted up inside, but I’m not a bastard either Cara. You want to give it to me, I’ll take it and fuckin’ enjoy it. But just so you know, I don’t want to be a complication when your life is already causing you those. I can wait for you to be ready and I hope like fuck you will be. We’ve got somethin’. I don’t k
now what that somethin’ is, but I’m hopin’ like fuck you feel the need, like I do, to explore it. All that said, I’ll keep you safe whatever. The rest is up to you beautiful.”

  Ross leant down and kissed my cheek in the same place his large fingers had been stroking only moments before. He turned and left me a quivering wreck, trying to find some ledge on the wall capable of keeping me upright. “Wow,” I whispered.

  “Wow, you don’t know wow yet baby,” he shouted from the kitchen. Clearly I didn’t whisper very quietly then. “You say the word baby and I’ll give you a wow so wonderful, wow won’t even cover it.”

  Oh. My. Days.

  I was so far out of my depth here it wasn’t funny, it was scary.

  Maybe our previous coupling gave him the impression I was experienced. I so wasn’t and had no idea how to tell him this, what happened before was a fluke. It was me complying with his guidance, it was me going with the flow. A flow I was more than happy to follow at the time.

  Deciding to pull up my big girl panties and get on with my life, I raced up the stairs to retrieve my bag. I’d never had cause to go upstairs before and my only insight to the layout was following my man protector through a pair of binocular lenses.

  Ross’s room was like all the other rooms in the house, functional. A king sized bed, two night stands, a lamp and a cupboard designed for clothes which Ross clearly didn’t use. The clean clothes he was working through were bursting out of an old army hold all, explosion style and his dirty clothes were waiting for the laundry fairy to deal with them. The bed was covered in simple cotton sheets, was loaded with pillows and was unmade.

  Off to the side, via another door, was the bathroom. I found I couldn’t look at it without imagining dirty things. I swear my eyesight could make out the hand print he’d left on the wall and even though the tiles looked cold and unwelcoming, I wanted nothing more than to be forced against them, feeling Ross lose his control.

  “Cara,” he said, snapping me from my day dream. “I see you found the right room.” I nodded nervously at him, I was in the same room as Ross and a freaking bed and didn’t know whether to be ashamed about the thoughts I was having or not. “We need to redefine your base point of reference, you’re not stayin’ in your cabin anymore. Do you trust me?”

  “Depends…”

  Ross held a loft a scarf from his hands. “I want to blind fold you and walk you from the edge of the junkyard, round the property and see if you can find your way out. I won’t leave you, but I want to understand how you’ll cope so I can train you accordingly.”

  How I’d cope? Seriously! The dark would scare the poop out of me, but that would be it. “Can we do it my way?”

  “Sure, what’s your way?”

  “Give me thirty minutes to walk around eyes wide open and then we’ll try it.”

  “Whatever, your call.”

  *****

  Ross

  This should be fun.

  I’d mentally scratched this challenge and training exercise into our schedule for the next few days. I just needed to know whether the shit floating around her head would overwhelm her and stop her need to survive. I had to find out whether darkness would be the trigger, it was unlikely she’d get kidnapped in broad daylight. The idea came to me after she mentioned that she’d been locked in her basement as a child.

  “Do you want me to walk around with you?”

  “No, that’s fine,” she told me and off she went. I followed her to the front porch and watched her start at the junkyard gate. From there she started to pace and count, she never once retraced her steps unless she got to a room and was faced with multiple exit points.

  It was fascinating to watch, she’d count and lightly touch objects of furniture that she thought might get in her way. I had no idea how this was going to work, it was a technique I’d never seen. Most of us undertook this exercise in the army, but did it by slapping on the blindfold and banging into shit. Somehow, if you bruised your body up enough you body learned to magically avoid them. Depending on how she went with this, we’d see about ramping it up. That exercise was slightly more alarming, being dumped in the trunk of a car and being expected to remember the route was murder on the senses, but vital for survival in enemy territory.

  Watching her get lost in her own head was something mysterious, she blocked everything else out and focused, there was a time when I could see her eyes flitting from side to side and her fingers moving with the number rhythm leaving her mouth. She was pretty when she wasn’t stressed out and running for her life. Fuck, she was pretty anyway, a real natural beauty.

  “Ready,” she shouted, standing waiting for me at the gate. I absent mindedly checked my watch, nineteen minutes. This should be hilarious I thought to myself, but I had to keep that in check, she wouldn’t take kindly to me laughing at her.

  “You sure? You’re early, you’ve still got some time left.”

  “Sure, let’s do this.”

  I pulled the scarf from my back pocket and made my way to her, holding her eyes as I crossed the junkyard, hoping like fuck I was conveying a message to stay calm and not be afraid. “OK, I’ll be right beside you the whole time. I won’t let you bump into shit and bruise up those pretty legs. I’m gonna put it on OK?” I carried on doing as I promised and as soon as the scarf hit her eyes, she started to hyper ventilate, her breathing pitching as she grabbed my wrists and clung on. “You’re OK. You’re OK. We’ll stand here until you’re ready.” I felt her grip on my wrists slacken off and after a few minutes she’d composed herself enough to nod that it was time to go.

  “Take me to the porch edge,” I requested. “You’re facin’ the right direction.” Cara took off and I could hear the same mumbling that she’d done when we were running.

  Within a minute she stopped, “Am I here?”

  “Yep. Beginners fuckin’ luck. Take me to the trailer.” Cara pivoted in the correct direction, full of confidence and fire and mumbled her way over to the trailer.

  “Fluke,” I grumbled, “Take me to the kitchen.” Cara repeated it and led me to the kitchen, then the back door, then each of the other rooms in turn, mumbling numbers and gracefully touching the prominent bits of furniture she’d remembered.

  “Give up yet?” she asked randomly.

  “I know I probably should but I have no idea why.”

  I watched her reach up to remove the blindfold, “Did I pass?”

  “Yeah with excellence, how?” Her face changed like she’d realized her mistake and given something away. “I’m missin’ somethin’ big here, aren’t I?”

  “Maybe. I’m hungry, lunch?”

  And that was definitely not going to work. “Nope. Tell me now. If you’re hidin’ somethin’ I need to know. Your trainin’ could be fuckin’ useless if you don’t come clean.” The idea that she could see through the blindfold or had cheated hit me, so I held it up to my eyes. There was no way she could see through that. “I mean it Cara,” I was getting pissed off and I’m fairly sure she could tell.

  “Uh, it’s nothing special. I just remember things,” she answered me sheepishly.

  “Quit fuckin’ around and tell me. I just watched you ace somethin’ that it takes marines weeks to pass.”

  “I’m not fucking around. I told you, I have a good memory. Ask me something, anything.”

  I was on the spot now, I had no idea what to ask her. “Can you memorize sequences if I give you a list?”

  “Yes.”

  So I rattled off five, then ten, then thirty and finally fifty numbers even I couldn’t remember and waited for her to wing them back at me.

  And she did.

  Unbelievable.

  “If I asked you the plate number of my Ford, could you tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “My dad’s truck and the ones in the junkyard.”

  “Yes.”

  The answer was in front of me, but I couldn’t put it together. “My dad’s business checkin’ account details?”

>   “Yes.”

  Whoa, freaky shit. There was still something glaringly obvious that I was missing and as if she could see me wrestling with it, her impatience won. “I know the exact account numbers, transactions, dates of those transactions and receipt numbers of everything in your dad’s accounts.”

  “What?” That was both unbelievable and surely impossible.

  “Oh for God’s sake. I know all that shit for all of the accounts I manage for your dad and his buddies. I can flip mental math quicker than you can probably think up the sum and ask me. I remember, do you get it now? I remember. I can’t forget. Any of it. Any lists, information, books, ledgers, numbers, faces of people I’ve seen. Anything I’ve seen.”

  She was heaving with exhaustion after off loading that mammoth amount of information and all I could come up with was, “Fuck me, they’re not worried about you leadin’ the Feds to the money.”

  “No! I am the money. I know it all. I can see it all. I can remember it all. My dad keeps ledgers so people think I’m a traditional account, he keeps me locked away because I’m the goose that has the secret to the golden eggs. The detail isn’t in his books, it’s me and I’m as traditional as landing a helicopter of canyon day trippers on the moon.” Cara was still screaming at me, stood like she was going to have some kind of meltdown if I didn’t convey I understand her.

  “You’re the money.”

  “I’m the money!”

  “Fuckin’ hell.” I couldn’t say anymore, it was a wonder I was still standing upright. She was a medical marvel, people with her skills were in the population minority and unfortunately for her she was born into the worst possible family. She’d become exploited to the point where she was more fucking valuable than the Hope diamond and it was a death sentence.

  I was not expecting this.

  I had no idea how to bring her drama to an end, no motherfucking idea how I was going to make her safe. There would be no bartering or trading for her safety. The only thing that would keep the mad men hunting her at bay, was if her life was over and her brain no longer had the capability to function.