by Kitty Thomas
I couldn’t stop silent tears from sliding down my cheeks. Shannon finally realized I was crying when we stopped at a red light.
“What’s wrong?”
He really didn’t know? He really couldn’t comprehend?
“I just killed someone.” Never mind that he had. I’d never expected him to cry over it. But I at least expected him to understand on some basic level why I might, particularly since my victim was an innocent. The sick idea slid into me that she could have been the professor’s victim, too. And I’d killed her. To protect Shannon? To protect myself?
There wasn’t a flicker of anything human in him. Nothing registered with him. He didn’t get it. How could I ever be safe with him if he didn’t get it?
I managed to collect myself by the time we got to a small pizza parlor a couple of towns over. We sat in a booth in a back corner where patrons were smoking, even though I was sure it was against the law. They didn’t care, and nobody else seemed to, either.
“You’re glad he’s gone, right?” Shannon asked after our pizza and drinks arrived. “I couldn’t let him...” he trailed off, remembering we were in semi-public, and maybe not as completely anonymous as we’d like to be.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just... I wasn’t prepared for how I would feel or for... what happened.” I had to speak in code, too, now. Even in my darkest fantasies, where I was more active in Stevens’ murder, I couldn’t have anticipated an unexpected visitor. An innocent bystander. The way I had made metal rip through flesh, and blood and life spill out in such sweeping finality.
I closed my eyes against the images that came unbidden, filling in some of the gaps, leaving no doubt that it had been me doing that awful thing. In a twisted way, I almost wished Shannon had gone after her and left me to deal with Stevens. Maybe I could have reached the gun and ended him quickly. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel like a shadow about to be destroyed by the light.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah?” he said between bites of a fully loaded pizza.
“Don’t you feel...” I trailed off, wishing we were having this non-conversation in the car, but also knowing that possible witnesses in nearby booths were the only thing forcing me to keep it together.
He looked at me blankly. “What should I feel?”
And there was my answer. I knew I would be haunted by this for the rest of my life, and tomorrow Shannon would get up, have a hearty breakfast, breathe in the crisp air, and just go on, not a single ruffle against his soul. I envied him that.
“Hey, do you want to go to Paris? It’ll be spring soon. I’ve heard Paris is nice in the spring. You could see some of your friends,” he said.
I had never before seen him this happy and animated. This peaceful—like all the pieces inside him suddenly fit together right.
“What about my plants?” Once again, my mind wandered to the fate of all of the professor’s plants. And now I was worried about leaving my own for an extended time.
“We’ll be gone a couple of weeks maybe.”
“Yeah, Paris sounds great.” But my voice was flat. I didn’t even bother asking how we’d accomplish that. He’d figure out fake IDs and passports or whatever we needed. I was sure he knew a guy, and all would be taken care of as if by the wave of a wand.
“Good. We’ll make a quick stop at the house when we get back and check on the cat and your plants. We’ll get in late—well after all the nosy neighbors are asleep. We can let them believe we’re still in Thailand.”
I wondered if he’d planned this all along, to get me somewhere off far away for a week or two to distract me from what I’d participated in.
When we stopped for the night, it wasn’t a run-down motel. It was some place much nicer. It was the kind of hotel you take someone you love, though by this point I was sure, if Shannon didn’t understand regret, he could never understand love.
More than ever, I saw him as a wild animal trying to live inside an artificial habitat. He was a predator who didn’t belong here in our world. It wouldn’t matter if he was ever caught and put in jail. He was already caged just by the constraint of trying to blend with society, to look normal.
I stood in the middle of the hotel bedroom while steam from Shannon’s shower poured out of the bathroom. I stared at the gleaming gun on the bed. He’d removed the silencer.
I felt at that moment, that it was me or him. It had to be. I wasn’t sure which outcome was worse.
I didn’t think, even after everything, that I could pull the trigger to end myself. And if I killed him, here, now, in this nice hotel, I’d go straight to prison unless I could convince them it was self-defense. A credible story started to unfold in my mind. I would tell them I was that missing girl. I would make them remember. He had kidnapped me. I took the one opportunity I had to free myself. I had to do it, don’t you see? I had to. It was me or him.
I picked the gun up and pointed it at the bathroom door in time for Shannon to emerge from the mist.
“What are you doing, Elodie? I thought we trusted one another.” His voice was calm and steady, and I knew he wasn’t even a little worried I’d shoot him, which only made me want to pull the trigger more. I inched my finger closer to the small lever that would end him.
“Do you even know how to use that gun?” he asked. “The safety’s on. You might want to take care of that.”
I was afraid to look too closely at the gun, afraid Shannon would rush and tackle me. And then what? I flicked the safety off with my eyes still on him, the barrel of the gun still pointed at the center of his chest... the chest water was dripping off of down into the folds of the towel secured around his waist, while he stood serene. Confident.
“Is it hot?” he asked.
“What?”
“Hot. Is a round chambered or do you need to rack the slide? You don’t know, do you?”
I didn’t. And I wasn’t sure how to find out. I could just pull the trigger and if nothing happened, then I’d know.
“What’s your plan after you shoot me? You want to go to prison? Haven’t you been in enough of those lately?”
“I already figured that out. I’ll tell them who I am. I’ll tell them you were holding me prisoner. They’ll find all your weapons. They’ll believe me.”
Shannon nodded. “Very good. And the questions? The media? I thought you didn’t want that.”
“I’ve got my memories. I can handle it now.”
“Can you?”
My arm was starting to feel weak from holding the gun up, so I steadied my grip with my other hand.
“I don’t think you can pull the trigger. You don’t have it in you. You already proved that once tonight while I cleaned up your mess.”
“I was protecting you.”
“Great job,” he said. The sarcasm dripped off him as he stared bluntly at the gun. He sighed. “Well, do it if that’s what you want.”
Did he have no self-preservation instinct? I knew he did. He wouldn’t have been so careful, so meticulous if he didn’t care about his fate. But I knew why he wasn’t troubled. We both knew. I couldn’t shoot him.
I turned the gun on myself, and for the first time since this drama had started, Shannon looked scared.
“Elodie, point the gun back at me,” he said urgently.
“So you know I won’t shoot you, but you’re not so sure about whether or not I’ll shoot myself.”
And then it happened. Shannon cried. They were silent stealth tears creeping down his cheeks, but I knew he felt them drip down and fall off his face.
“I can’t lose you, Elodie. You’re the only thing human I have to hold onto. If I don’t have you, then I don’t know what anything feels like. I need you with me. I need you to translate all the things I can’t feel.”
“What good could that possibly do? You couldn’t even process my guilt over killing an innocent person.”
“I’m not stupid, goddammit! I know how you felt. I just can’t feel the same thing directly.”
An unju
st mercy. I should be the one who could happily skip along without a ripple.
“Maybe you will if I pull the trigger. Maybe this is the final lesson in how to be a real person. How to feel actual pain and empathy.”
The expression on his face was like a wounded animal, looking at his attacker in disbelief. “You knew what I was. I never lied or pretended with you. I let you see it all.”
And then, against all I thought I was capable of, I pulled the trigger. Instinctively I flinched, but nothing happened. The chamber had been empty. Shannon lunged for me, and the gun slipped out of my hands as his full weight settled on top of me on the bed.
“Is this how it’s going to be now? Am I going to have to keep you on suicide watch?” he asked, his breathing coming out wild and heavy.
“I can’t live with what I’ve done. I can’t stop seeing the things you’ve done.”
“I won’t involve you ever again. I shouldn’t have brought you along this time. I thought I was doing something good for you so you could get your revenge.”
In fairness to him, I’d thought it was something good for me, too. I’d thought I needed to not just be told or hear that Stevens was gone, but to see it happen with my own eyes, to watch him struggle, to absorb his fear out of the air as if it might energize and sustain me. To watch the light go out of his eyes and see for myself that he couldn’t hurt anybody else again and that he’d gotten what he deserved. But the actual cold reality of death and murder wasn’t the glamourized fantasy of the movies with no emotional consequences. It was harsh, brutal, awkwardly violent, and poisonous to all who participated.
Except that Shannon didn’t seem affected. How could he be? I was sure he didn’t have a soul to damage. He was impervious to all this inconvenient humanity.
“But you’re not going to stop doing it,” I said.
“Of course not. I told you... everybody I kill deserves to die.”
“But not that woman,” I said.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“But you would have. She would have been collateral damage.”
“I was too focused on the results and not focused enough on the planning. It was because I cared more this time. But yes, I would have done what was necessary. Whatever you believe, I’m sorry you had to make that choice tonight. But I’m glad you made it. Aren’t you glad you made it? Would you rather I go to prison?”
“I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I can live with who you are. Or with who I am now.”
“You’re the same. One moment doesn’t change that.”
“It changes everything.”
Shannon eased off me, and pulled me into his arms. I thought at first he might squeeze me to death, he was holding me so tight.
“I wish I could take this for you,” he said, quietly. “I could handle it. I would take the guilt and pain so you wouldn’t have to feel it.”
“I wouldn’t have to feel anything if you’d let me...”
“No. We’ll go to Paris. Everything will be better there. You’ll see. A trip is what you need. You can see your friends. You can show me the sights.”
“You’ve never been to Paris?” I asked.
Shannon shook his head.
“But you speak fluent French.”
“No. I’ve been learning it ever since I found out you spoke it. I have CD’s in the car. I know just enough to get by.”
His mouth found mine, and despite what I wanted to be true, I still wanted him. Sex with Shannon that night wasn’t the victory fuck after a fresh kill that I’d feared it would be. And it wasn’t ropes and whips and power games. It felt like making love. And I wanted to believe it, that this was real, that it was something he was capable of feeling with me. Even seeing him cry wasn’t enough to fully convince me that I was some magical exception to the cold deadness inside him.
Afterward, he held me for a long time until I had almost drifted off, surrendering to dreams to make me forget for just a little while how badly everything had gotten fucked up.
But then, moments before I reached that happy release, he got up, unzipped a bag, and pulled out a coil of rope and tied me to the bed. My heart rate picked up. “Shannon?”
His answering expression was grim. “I don’t trust you with loaded guns lying around. This is for your own safety.”
When he’d secured me, he got back into bed beside me and pulled the covers over us. “Go to sleep. Things won’t seem so bad in the morning.”
Whoever had first coined that phrase was an idiot.
***
A week later, we were in a hotel suite in Paris. Shannon seemed weirdly happy traveling with me, as if he could tick off the box marked romantic vacation on his normalcy checklist. I sat up in bed and drank coffee and ate pastries off the room service tray. Shannon stood beside the window looking out at the breathtaking view of the Eiffel tower.
“Do you want to go to the Louvre today before we meet your friends for dinner later?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Shannon had taken a softer turn with me since the night we killed Stevens and his TA. As if almost losing me had snapped something into focus for him. At least where I was concerned. Or maybe it was that he thought I was too fragile to handle anything that would remind me of who and what he was. Or what I’d become in his care.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah?” He still stared out the window.
“Why did you stop? The kink stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we go back to it?”
He turned sharply from the window, his gaze now intently focused on me. “You want that? After...”
“I need it. I mean... if you want...” More than ever, I needed that release from everything that those games brought. I couldn’t say it out loud, but I needed to be punished, no matter how hollow the effort.
That dark intensity came back to his eyes. “Yes. When we get back home.”
I let out a long breath. “Good. Thank you.”
“Sir,” he corrected.
Despite everything I was dealing with and all the things I thought I’d never get over, the feeling of safety and security wrapped around me again like the warm, inviting smell of the coffee on the tray in front of me.
“Sir,” I said.
I went back to my breakfast. I’d momentarily forgotten the previous night’s dream, but now it rushed into my mind with the force of a typhoon wind, practically leaping into vivid color right in front of me. I was back in the theme park with Trevor. The dream replayed that last day before Shannon had shown up. Yet somehow, the dream version of me had seen the future already. Half of me lived the reality as it was, knowing nothing of myself or the truth, and another half of me seemed to be off to the side watching, already knowing everything that was to come.
Shannon’s dark clad figure filled the doorway. Gunfire sounded. Trevor crumpled to the ground, blood spilling out of him. I ran to him on autopilot, trying to stop the blood, trying to keep him there, trying to hold the lie of our life together, all while trying to remember I’d already done this, and Trevor wasn’t the good guy.
But neither was Shannon. I watched it all play out again. And then, the choice... do I go back out into the world not knowing who I am, or do I go with this man?
Shannon held his hand out, and all the knowledge of everything that was to come flooded into me, and the two parts of myself merged. And once again, I knew everything. I looked at him for a long moment, frozen in this space, this fork in the road. Finally, I took his hand, and we walked out of the castle into a future that only felt real with him.
Author's Note
To hear about new releases FIRST, and for a full list of my books, please visit: kittythomas.com.
To hear random observations of cat behavior, Legos and the weird shit my husband says, visit my Facebook page (which can also be found through my website)
Readers who love my work often ask what they can do to help. While I don’t believe my readers “owe” me anyt
hing, for those who want to know what they can do, the BEST thing you can ever do for me and my work is tell your friends about it and leave a review at the digital retailer you purchased it from. Just a line or two about what you thought. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. But those two things: reviews and word of mouth help me and my work the absolute most.
Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work!
Kitty ^.^
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following people for their help with Tabula Rasa:
Amy Martin for her help with French translation.
Robin Ludwig @ gobookcoverdesign.com for the fabulous cover art!
Thank you to Cathy for copyedits!
Thank you to Michelle and Karen for their great beta read suggestions! Special thanks to Michelle for all the body disposal help. Who knew getting rid of bodies was so much work! ;)
And thank you to M for digital formatting! Love you!
If you enjoyed Tabula Rasa, you may also enjoy these other titles by Kitty Thomas:
Comfort Food
Mafia Captive
Blood Mate
Broken Dolls
For full title list please visit kittythomas.com
