Lies & Lullabies

by Courtney Lane

  I closed the bedroom door and turned against it. Dozens of pictures on the far wall greeted me. Pictures of Grady and his family. Grady with his basketball team. Grady with his football team. Grady receiving awards in high school. Grady was valedictorian in high school. Grady graduated summa cum laude with a dual major in finance and computer science from a school that produced presidents.

  There were pictures of huge gatherings with whom I assumed to be his “friends.” Pictures of outings at places where suburban kids with means went with their friends. And after college, the pictures stopped. Photographs of his ex-wife and daughter were missing.

  I walked into the bathroom. The large windows poured the sun into the room. I retraced my steps and looked for a closet, stowing myself away inside the dark walk-in space lined with boxes instead of clothes.

  For the first time, I was as alone as I could ever be. My sister. Michael. Both horrible people but the only ones I could call upon as my family. And the ones I could call on I barely saw; Jasper and my mother.

  The scene downstairs and the pictures on the wall indicated Catch had been pretending all his life to be something he wasn’t—to feel things he didn’t. He would always be the most convincing liar I’d ever met.

  “Simone,” Catch’s voice reverberated from the other side of the door. His tone was sweeter than he normally would’ve used on me. “If you make me state a pun, I’ll break the door down.”

  I opened the door to the closet and sat clear on the other side.

  He flicked on the switch, illuminating the dark space.

  “The bathroom had too much light,” I explained to answer the question held in his gaze.

  “You’ve been through a whirlwind with the travel and uncovering the truth about the people who surrounded you. You were born to the wrong family.” He squatted down in front of me, folding his hands across his open legs. “How are you? Answer me truthfully.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  His forehead contracted, his blue eyes became mere slits between his dense dark eyelashes.

  “I’m far from anything near the vicinity of okay,” I offered, my voice soft and quiet.

  “It’s the first time I’ve asked and received a real answer. You are better than okay, sweetheart.” He reached up and stroked a stray piece of hair, a gentle gesture as though nothing equivalent to the implosion of my life—several times over—had happened.

  “I don’t know why you brought me here. I can’t do this to them—lie to them. I know more about you than they do, and I don’t know you at all. When you met me, you took on another man’s past. But the man you were with me? Was that you?”

  His eyes leveled onto me with a look so intense, my face ignited underneath the pressure. “I’m real for you and only you.”

  “You need to give me more. You killed Deana like my wishes meant nothing. I…the list of things you’ve done? Fuck, Catch, why can’t you understand?”

  “If you want more, ask for it.”

  “As if it would be that easy,” I muttered. As I thought about Jenna and what she might’ve gone through with Catch, my theories ran wild. “What did you do to your wife to make her think you were a sociopath? The same things you did to me?”

  “There isn’t a comparison. I didn’t care for her.” Standing upright, he leaned his back against the door, closing it. His eyes flickered over the boxes, throwing him into a rigid state. “What do you want, Simone? The truth or the lies? You were like everyone else. It was easier to lie to you in the beginning because you didn’t really want the truth. You liked the lies. The lies were safe and comfortable. The lies made your life go down a little easier. It made you wake up every morning with hope, thinking every minute and every day had the chance to be better. You were ready for the world of truth to come crashing down on you, and I obliged.”

  I glanced down at the ring. “Why did you really bring me here? You could’ve done this alone.”

  He brushed his hands over his hair and sighed. “Use your brain, Simone, not your heart.”

  I looked at my ring. “Oh, fuck, you meant it.” I stood too quickly. My head filled with white fuzz, making me dizzy. “You meant what you said to Michael about marrying me?”

  His long legs took two steps forward to stand within arm’s reach of me. “I’m giving you the family you were desperate to have.”

  “I want something real.”

  “What is it you think you want, Simone? Do you want me to tell you to leave? Pretend it doesn’t affect me, and tell you I’ll call a cab for you when my parents go to sleep to prevent them from seeing you leave? To tell you to call me in a week and I’ll give you money to get you set up, and then we’ll never see each other again?" He shook his head at me. “We aren’t those people. It will never happen. If you left, you’d live an existence worse than dying in purgatory. And without you, I’d return to the man you never had to cross.

  “Play the game with me this weekend and on holidays when we visit my parents. When we’re traveling across the world to wherever my job takes me, be at my side where I’m able to be myself again. This shouldn’t be a stretch for you. You’ve been lying to yourself all your life, and you were made to be with me.

  “Did you expect something different because of my parents’ good-natured personalities and comfortable lifestyle? The good life and the fast life aren’t all that different from each other.”

  “But despite all they gave you, you don’t love them. I hate to say it, but I’m halfway surprised they’re still alive.”

  “What?” A brow angled in mock amusement. “You expected me to kill them in a fit of teenage angst? Never has been and it never will be my style to kill the innocent or the people who don't mean me harm.”

  Incredulous, I gaped at him. “And the man who tried to save me when I ran?”

  “He meant me harm by taking you away from me. He was collateral damage.” He shrugged it off as though it were meaningless. “If anyone, innocent or guilty, stood in the way of you and me, they would be killed as well.”

  “Holy fuck, Catch.” Shaking my head, I tangled my fingers in my hair, at a complete loss. I pushed down the befuddlement, clouding my ability to think. “Can you answer one thing?” Everything I felt was wrong, and I needed to make sense of it by grasping onto a tragedy and finding out if he bled when he was in pain. “Did you feel anything when Brenley died?”

  “Of course I fucking did,” he spat at me, his mask cracking and breaking. He turned to the boxes lining the closet, rummaging around in search of a specific box. When he found it, he plucked the box out of the pile, steadying the ones on top to ensure they didn’t crumble. He dropped the box in front of me.

  I sat on the floor and slid the top open. The contents of the box consisted of hundreds of pictures and a few zip drives. Pictures of Brenley as she grew up were at my fingertips. Her mother wasn’t in very many of the pictures. Grady was always there.

  “She was beautiful.” I found a wedding picture of him and his ex-wife. She looked as miserable as he was cold.

  “She wasn’t you.” He sat across from me, the box stood between us. “I know what you want. I always have. I’ve studied for you like you were my toughest exam. I know you better than you pretend to know yourself, and you know me better than I assume to know myself.”

  Aching to touch him and forgo everything screaming untruths to make me recede from him, I slipped my hand in his. “I never answered your question about why I got the ravens on my back. I got the ravens subconsciously, because even though I couldn’t remember the night at the time, I remembered the feeling. My night with you was the first time in a long time when I felt like I’d found what I’d been searching for. I don’t know what I was looking for. I still don’t know what it is. All I know is it keeps tying me back to you.”

  His face was cloaked in beauty, his eyes were dressed in adulation. “Stay with me because I need you.” Intensity danced in his eyes as they perused my face, pushing me down into the s
pell of a sweet song. “Stay with me because I fell as hard for you as you did for me. Stay with me because I will love you more than anyone else ever has, and I’ll give you and our baby the life you always wanted.” He reached inside his back pocket and retrieved a small picture, placing it on my palm.

  Examining the black and white picture, I began to smile. It was an ultrasound picture of our baby when I was eight weeks pregnant—the night I ran away. “Our baby?”

  “Our family,” he corrected me, kissing my forehead. “It will always be real.”

  He took away the darkness surrounding me and pulled me even deeper into his bleak world. There wasn’t any other place where I’d find a comfortable fit. As I toyed with taking the ring off or keeping it on, the motion of my fingers halted and slid the ring back down past my knuckles.

  “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be back downstairs.”

  “My mother is particular about serving a warm dinner. If it grows cold, the dramatics come into play and lasts no less than thirty minutes. I’d rather not sit through it.” He planted a chaste peck on my lips, paused and held me. As he breathed me in, I exhaled.

  Diving into the pool of our dark sins with both feet, he kissed me to remind me that his dark lullaby was a sweeter treat to my ears than a chaotic, sour, downtempo beat that had been stuck on repeat since I was born; I wanted to dance to a song with a different tune.

  “Don’t take long,” he whispered against my lips and let me go.

  "Catch?"

  He halted with his hand on the door without turning to me.

  "Who do you work for?"

  "Ask me anything, and I'll answer it. That question is the only one I can never answer." He turned to regard me from over his shoulder and gave me a dour smile.

  * * * * * *

  As I put the box carefully back in a place it would fit, I stepped out of the closet and back into the bathroom. Using my reflection in the mirror, I tried to clean up my face.

  Taking one last look in the mirror, I perfected my mask.

  As I fixed the dress around the barely noticeable roundness in my stomach, I opened the door, heading downstairs to join the show of a happy family, already in session.

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  I want to thank you for reading this copy of Lies & Lullabies. If you’ve been reading my work for awhile, you may have noticed that this book wasn’t as dark as my previous works and contained a distinct lack of my usual numerous sex scenes; this was done intentionally.

  Seducing Virtue, the final book in the Wicked Trinity series, will be my next and final published work under the dark erotic genre. The book you have read isn’t necessarily an indication of a new direction, but rather a return to my old direction.

  I would be honored to have your support through my new transition, which will begin under the name Courtney V. Lane next year. Work under the Courtney V. Lane name will be paranormal erotic romance, and work similar in tone to the book you have just read.

  Whether this is the first, second, or umpteenth book you’ve read by me, I want to thank you for your support and hope it will continue in the future.

  V, D & J, thank you for being my foundation and my support.

  Mavens’ Lane, I’m honored to be an author you believe in, and want to spread the word about. Thank you for everything you do to support me and motivate me.

  K. Swiss, you’re a truly awesome individual who I know will someday be to famous for me. I look forward to that day. You deserve it and so much more.

  Judy, thank you for penciling me in and polishing this MS. You have a wonderful eye and I can’t wait to work with you again.

  Jamie "The Hammer" Buchanan, your simply badass. Enough said.

  My beta-readers, Annmarie, Felicia, and Jamie, I treasure your feedback. Thank you for reading the raw version and helping me make the story stronger.

  To the bloggers who are always there with their undying support: Charlie from We’ve Licked that Book, Rachel from Bound By Books, Ebbie from Author Groupies, Di Covey from Twisted Sisters’, Diana from Bookaholic Confessions, Tanya from Tasty Wordgasms, Catherine from The Cat’s Meow Book Stop, Aliana and Shweta from Fallen for Books, Karen from Kazza's Book Blog and Reviews, Agnese from Agnese Share Book, Tanaka, Jasmine, Flo, and so many more. I know it can be a tough and often times unappreciative job. Your dedication, support, and encouragement are very much appreciated.

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  Readers, thank you for the messages, recommending my books to others, taking the time to leave reviews, and your constant support. I am forever grateful.

  If I’ve forgotten anyone, please forgive the oversight of my mind and not my heart.