by Lake, Keri
Along with it vanished the urge to thrash Aubree’s body against a wall. To pummel her with my fists for trying to pummel my shield. All I felt was sadness. Like saying the words aloud meant, somewhere inside, I’d accepted that they were gone. I didn’t. I refused, because with acceptance came contentment, and I would never dishonor them with such a passive state of mind.
“How?” she asked.
How? Telling her how might have given me a renewed dose of anger that I needed. It could also be dangerous for Aubree. God help her if she tried to convince me that my anger was irrational and unwarranted.
Could I trust her? Or, more importantly, could I trust myself?
An upward glance faced me with softened eyes that spoke of pain and understanding. They told me she knew something about holding back those demons and the uncertainty of trusting someone with those haunting secrets.
“It’s okay if you can’t, Nick.”
Like she could read my goddamn mind! I cleared my throat, the maddening rub of my thumb back and forth over my trigger finger pulling my attention away from her sad, golden eyes. I’d stolen the woman’s dark secret when I lifted her dress, discovered a very vulnerable piece of her.
I’d given her nothing in return.
Alarms blared inside my head, warning me not to peel back the armor I’d spent years casting and molding to protect the weak, soft bones beneath my skin. Bones so frail they could snap. I don’t owe her! A dark corner of my brain battled. I didn’t owe her a damn thing.
Tamping that inner voice down, I clamped my eyes shut, my mind searching for silence, preparing myself to peel back the scab of my most painful wound.
“I, uh … I had a meeting.” I didn’t recognize my own voice as I spoke, as if I’d climbed out of my skin and let the empty shell tell its story, while I watched from a safe distance. “With a game publisher who wanted to buy my design. Things were going well, so when he invited me to meet up with him for drinks, I did.” Every muscle in my body yearned to twitch and fidget, a series of alarms, warning me not to go any further. Yet, I did. “My wife, Lena, had to pick up our son from daycare and it kind of forced her to rush. I normally picked him up. She, um, called me later in the night. Jay had forgotten his rabbit.” Rubbing the back of my neck, I cleared my throat, as my muscles bunched and tension wound inside my gut. “He always slept with it, and wouldn’t go to sleep, so Lena ended up staying up late with him. I swung by the daycare to pick it up after my meeting.”
Eyes screwed tight, fingers digging into my palms, I swallowed back the unsaid confession—that if I hadn’t been so selfish, so self-absorbed, so desperate to succeed and make a better life, I would’ve been the one to pick Jay up. I’d have held my son one more time, felt the weight of him in my arms. Lena would’ve been at work, like every other night. Our fate might’ve been different.
“I’m guessing maybe they saw the lights on in the house, or something. There were six of them.” Ire pounded through my muscles, winding the tightly coiled ball of anxiety inside my gut, as I thought of all those men having their way with my wife, all at once. I stretched my fingers, uncurling my fists to keep from striking out at the wall—or worse, at Aubree. “All members of the Seven Mile Crew. When I … arrived home, I noticed the door was unlocked. Wasn’t like Lena. She never left the doors unlocked. Had OCD with that and checking burners. I heard noises coming from upstairs. Kinda muffled.”
Rolling my head against my shoulders didn’t lesson the tight pull in my neck and shoulders, and my fingers continued to stretch, my eyes twitching in one last- ditch effort to make me abort the story. To back away before shit got painful. The ball of rage burned inside my stomach, so fucking hot, my hands trembled. Poison. It pulsed through my body, leaving a black sludge in its wake that I yearned to cut out of me. I rubbed my forearm, licked my parched lips.
With tears in her eyes, Aubree stared back at me. “They hurt her, didn’t they?”
My lip twisted as my nostrils flared, coils winding tight, so tight in my stomach. “Yeah. Two … two of the men were raping her at the same time. The others held her down and … watched.” Dryness climbed my throat, as I remembered the sounds of skin smacking, the laughter over her agonizing cries. “I fought them off of her. Killed one of them. Sliced the ear off another.” I smiled at that, the pain I was able to inflict. The pain I’d inflicted again just days before when I’d sliced off his other ear before killing the cocksucker. “All I had was a fallen knife I’d grabbed from the floor.” My hand trembled as my thumb traced the inner lines of my palm. An ache throbbed inside my heart as a sharp pain struck my skull, and I tipped my head, pressing two fingers into the scar. “We never kept a gun in the house because of Jay. It’s why we got Blue.”
Her lips parted as she exhaled a breath, and the tear trapped inside her eye finally fell down her cheek.
At her silence, I kept going. I didn’t know why. Maybe I did trust Aubree. Maybe a part of me needed to share everything with her because only she could understand what it felt like to have a life destroyed by that bastard fuck, Culling. it almost felt like I was purging the poison without cutting into myself. I still yearned for the pain, but Aubree’s sad eyes, her silence and attention as I told my story, somehow kept me grounded. “They got the upper hand, knocked me out cold with the butt of a gun. I woke up hours later.” Rubbing my hand across my forehead, I rocked to hold back the tears welling in my eyes. “They were still raping her. Torturing her.” I pounded my fist into my head, then knuckled my temples, but still, tears fell. I couldn’t keep them in, not at the thought of my helpless wife and the pain she’d suffered. Pain I couldn’t stop. “My beautiful Lena.”
Keep it together. Lock it in. A new surge of anger swelled inside of me, choking back the tears. “I snuck up on them, beat the one guy’s face, and he shot me in the leg. My son woke up from the gunshot. He was …” Fuck. Fuck. I widened my eyes and sucked in a breath as I battled a frown and more tears.
Why was I doing it to myself? Why was I telling her everything?
I slapped my palms to the floor, preparing to get up, to find my knife and cut the shit out of me, but a visual of Jay collapsing to the floor with the sound of a gun had me collapsing into myself. “He was murdered in front of me.”
My throat tugged, and my elbow slammed into the wall behind me, crashing through the brittle drywall. I raised trembling hands to either side of my head, desperate for breath, but my lungs locked up and mouth open to a silent scream that I finally let go.
A string of curses bounced off the walls. I wanted to punch someone. Something. My entire body shook with rage.
My son. My beautiful boy, who’d fought to come into the world, had been violently ripped out of it.
“Sometimes … I still feel him in my arms, you know? Swaddled up. Safe. Protected.” My voice cracked, and I dug my fingers into the wound above my ear that’d forever mock me. “I failed him. Failed to protect him, like I said I always would.”
The bellows of pain that burst from my chest reverberated inside my skull.
When they quieted, the only sound that remained was the steady thud of blood beating inside my ears. Deep breaths blew back at my face as I sat with my head tucked between my knees. Sitting there, with my chest ripped open, heart exposed for the first time in years, it occurred to me how torn apart I was inside, hemorrhaging with pain. Pain that needed release. What else could explain the sudden dull ache that felt like wounds sealing themselves?
I’d never told anyone what’d happened. Not even Alec.
“Michael … did this to you, didn’t he? His men murdered your family?” Aubree’s soft voice broke through the white noise inside my skull.
“I awoke to hear one of them take a call. He told the others that Culling had given the order to get rid of us. Burn it down.” I lifted my head and dragged my face against my bicep to wipe the tears. “So they did. They burned it all. Including my wife and son.”
“Ah, God! Why?” Agony carries on Len
a’s voice, overpowering the constant high-pitched ringing inside my head.
The taste of metal coats my tongue and smoke stings my nose— so much smoke, it fills my lungs, as though a fire burns somewhere inside the house. I lift my head from the blood pooled beneath me. Mine? I don’t know. I can’t remember anything. So many blackouts dot the nightmare still playing out before my eyes.
The room is painted in blood, and I zero in on a long trail that leads to the hallway, where my wife has somehow crawled toward our son and curled her body around his, clutching him tightly. Her leg flinches, and that’s all it takes for me to push up onto my elbows and drag myself toward the two of them. I can’t even keep my head upright and there’s that fucking ringing in my ear that won’t go away, but I claw at the blood stained wood to reach them. I have no other choice.
Except for the surrounding pool of blood, they seem peaceful. As though sleeping curled into one another. Motionless. Tears have streamed down Lena’s cheek, the glisten reflecting the light in the room, as she buried her face in our son’s hair in a permanent kiss.
My heart bellows inside my chest, but as I lay beside them, the fear disappears. I’m not afraid to burn alive together, because I’ll never survive this.
With my head resting on my son’s back, I concentrate through the ringing for a heartbeat. Any sign that he might still be alive. Angry tears fill my eyes as his body remains still, so still, beneath me. My body trembles with the fury trapped deep inside my bones, fury I want to unleash on the world, on those rotten cocksuckers.
With an unsteady, heavy hand, I stroke his back and catch the wetness that slides between my finger and the fuzz of his pajamas. Lifting my hand reveals a thick coating of blood dripping down my fingertips. A sob rips through my chest, and I close my hand to a fist, wanting to pound the walls, the floor where his blood lies pooled, the faces of the men who did this to him. Every fucking one of them.
Across from me, Lena’s eyes almost seem to shift with the tears flooding them, but they’re vacant. Unfocused. She looks like she’s trapped inside a nightmare and can’t break free.
I watch the last spark of life slip from her eyes. The beautiful brightness I’ve loved for so long fading into a dull permanence of emptiness. Like a home once filled with mirth and childhood suddenly abandoned and left to decay.
I drag my hand across our son and clutch her wrist, and when she doesn’t so much as flinch, a howl of sorrow crushes my chest.
Closing my eyes, I kiss my son on the cheek, squeeze Lena’s hand in mine, and wait for the flames to pull me into eternal sleep alongside them.
Laughter—evil, wicked laughter—echoes from somewhere below. It reaches me in the blackness, over my sobs and the ringing in my ears. It pokes holes behind my eyelids and scrapes along my spine like a knife chipping at my bones.
My eyes flip open. They’re still inside the house. From across the room, I eye the fallen knife.
An urgency pulls at my muscles, and before my mind catches up, I’m already halfway across the floor, pulling myself along toward it. I don’t know how many there are, but I’ll die trying to take as many as I can with me. The knife fumbles in my hand that feels too heavy, too big for my wrists. I drop it and pick it up again. Bracing my palm on the wall beside me, I push while drawing my weakened legs to a stand, stumbling across the floor towards the door.
The room is blurry, out of focus. The ringing intensifies. I’m on autopilot, sliding across the walls to the staircase.
Over crackles and pops, the mumbling of voices precedes the echo of laughter.
I know now. I heard her voice. She stayed with our son and brought me to life for one reason—to avenge them.
“I’m haunted by fire.” As the memory faded away, I stared off, watching the beams of moonlight through the window cut across the darkness of the room. “Couldn’t watch a flame without feeling the scorching heat on my face and tasting the blood on my tongue, without the smell of burning flesh suffocating my lungs.”
Tears fell down Aubree’s cheeks. Lifting up onto her knees, she shot straight for my chest without saying a word and wrapped her arms around my neck.
Part of me wanted to throw her across the room. To push her away. To claw at her skin that touched mine. Instead, I wrapped my arms around her and dragged her into my body. I took in the feel of her warmth, the pulse of her breath at my neck, the tremble in her muscles that coincided with my own, like two bolts of electricity joining in one powerful surge.
My muscles tightened around her, as though I could squeeze the very life right out of her, as the shadowed side of my brain grasped an urge to snap her into the thousand tiny broken fragments that made up my insides. Forcing those thoughts away, I merely held her. Gently. Quietly. Selfishly. Burying my face in her hair filled my senses with her sweet, clean scent, until, at last, I calmed. Through long easy breaths, the tension in my muscles softened. The rage slipped back into its dark corner of my mind.
I finally breathed.
Aubree pulled away, and immediately my body cried out for her, craved the warmth once more. I wanted to grab her and take her to my bed, stealing every ounce of heat inside her body for my own—but I didn’t.
“I’m your retribution,” she said, in a solemn voice.
“Yes.”
“Are you planning to kill me for revenge?”
“No.” It was the truth. I couldn’t kill such an angel of mercy. She’d given me the power to control the one thing that made me lose control.
Her head tipped to the side. “Then, why are you keeping me?”
I stared down at the smeared blood that’d dried over the palm of my hand. “Because I can’t let you go yet.”
I couldn’t even say why, and thankfully she didn’t ask. An urgency tugged at me to keep her, like a voice inside my head, telling me that the woman needed my help, whether she’d asked for it or not. That to let her go would ruin everything.
The same inner voice that uttered two words to change everything.
Save her.
31
Nick
Rain tapped against the Mustang’s windshield, as I pulled up to the empty lot where my house had once stood. Wasn’t even five in the morning, which meant the block was quiet, dark, just as it’d always been each time I’d visited my wife and son.
I slid out of the driver’s seat and strolled up to the charred remains of my home. Rotted, blackened wood lay piled over crumbled bricks and cinder blocks. Because no one had called the fire station, it’d burned right down to the ground and took the abandoned house next door along with it. Scrappers, no doubt, had stolen all the pipes and metal. One of the toilets had been propped in the center of the destruction with ‘shithole’ written around the rim of it.
What was once my entire world had been reduced to rubble and ruin. Nothing more than a joke for trespassers.
Aubree sat in the car, as I rounded the Mustang. From the trunk, I grabbed the shovel before making my way beyond the wreckage to the Willow tree in back. It’d been little more than a sapling when we bought the house almost eight years before, and had grown into a majestic tree that stood what must’ve been thirty feet tall. Jay had loved to hang out beneath its drooping branches, and often hid away there most of the day with Blue, playing in its fragile, swaying limbs. I slammed the shovel at the base of the tree, digging up the grass that’d grown there. The October rain was cold as fuck and my hands numbed as I toiled.
A shine caught my eye in the moon’s light.
Crouching to the ground, I sifted through loose dirt. Lifting the small truck, one of Jay’s I’d unearthed, I squeezed my eyes shut to hold back the tears.
Get it together. He’s not here.
I returned to the car and opened the back, sliding Blue into my arms. As I carried him to the gravesite, the door slammed behind me, and I turned to see Aubree jogging over, her hair already wet with rain.
She stopped just short of us. “I’m sorry, if you need to be alone I can …”
“You’ll be soaking wet.”
“I’m fine.”
We reached the gravesite, which had turned soppy with mud. Lowering down on one knee, I set Blue inside the hole I’d dug and stroked his damp coat. “Catch you on the other side, buddy.”
Aubree knelt down beside me, petting him behind his collar. “Thank you,” she whispered, and stood beside the grave as I pushed the dirt over with the shovel.
As soaked by the rain as I was, Aubree stood shivering, teeth chattering, while I finished burying Blue, but she never once complained of cold or my reluctant pace. Back inside the Mustang, I cranked the heat up and my gaze landed on the goose bumps broken out across her legs as I fired up the vehicle and headed back toward the mansion.
Little was said along the way, until we’d finally arrived home. The rain had intensified, and we jogged to the overhang at the front of the house. I opened the door, and once we’d stepped inside, she removed her coat.
Like I was a goddamn lion fixated on my next meal, my mouth watered at the sight of her—wet and shivering inside the darkened house.
Her boots glistened with water, the dress she’d worn so saturated, it clung to her body, giving a good peek at her lace bra beneath. The sight made me ravenous, thirsty for the water dripping from her neck to between her breasts.
Christ, she wasn’t even trying to be sexy, and I somehow couldn’t shake the urge to touch her, to have those wet thighs straddling me while I fucked her against the wall, right there in the foyer.
I slipped past her before I risked doing something stupid and made my way toward the kitchen, desperate for a drink. Nabbing the whiskey on the counter, I took a long swig, and when I set it down, caught sight of Aubree standing in the doorway.
“Can I have some of that?” She sauntered across the room until standing at arm’s length from me.
In spite of the bruise on her cheek, I stood mesmerized by her wet hair, the shine of her skin, those pert breasts peeking through her dress.
