Darker Than Desire

by Shiloh Walker

  He’d only told the sheriff, the night Max was shot, but there were others around when he did it and in a town like Madison, news spread like wildfire.

  “Why…” Sarah stopped and licked her lips, looking away. Her gaze roamed around the room and she stared at everything but him. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t understand why you would do that, Caine. We worked so hard to protect you, to give you peace here. Why would you tell?”

  “It wasn’t going to stay buried forever, Sarah.”

  A static, almost heavy silence fell through the room and David stood there as Sarah stared at him, her gaze flat, blank as a mirror. He couldn’t see a thing behind that gaze, had no idea what she was thinking. Not that he really cared. He knew what she wanted. For him to settle down here, stay here, probably take over the farm.

  Abruptly she sighed and looked away. “Of course. I just don’t know why you wanted to bring it all back up. You would be so much happier if you’d just let those troubles die.”

  * * *

  Her words haunted him.

  He lay in his bedroom for probably the last time, staring up at the ceiling until his lids were too heavy, and when he slid into dreams they were anything but pleasant.

  But then, his dreams never were.

  Let those troubles die.…

  In his dreams, those words echoed mockingly around him. Die. How could you let something die when it was a demon that lived inside you? He was facedown, tied to the bench again, while a whip cut into him.

  Let those troubles die! She screamed it this time, watching from the side, her hair falling from her prim white kapp—the little bonnet Amish women wore. And as she screamed, somebody came up behind him. He swore, jerking against the ropes. They couldn’t do this to him again. Not now. He was bigger. Stronger. Stronger than they were.

  There’s always somebody stronger, boy.

  He jerked his head up, found himself looking at Sorenson.

  Next to him stood Peter and one of the faceless monsters who’d joined in on the many, many times David had been dragged down into hell. It’s your turn now, boy. In time, you’ll be a man and it will be your turn to join the brotherhood. Be ready to receive the honor we give you. In time, you’ll pass it on to others. Just as we pass it on to you now.

  The words echoed in his ears, repeating, louder and louder, and when a hand touched his spine he jerked against the ropes. This time, they snapped like threads and he came up, spun around, grabbed the neck of the person behind him, slammed him—

  No.

  Her.

  It was Sybil.

  Her eyes were wide on his face.

  Caine …

  That was all she said before he killed her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Caine jerked upright in the bed, staring out the window at the dull grey of a predawn morning.

  “Shit.” He shoved the heels of his hands against his eyes. That didn’t help. Like an afterimage, her face was seared in his brain, pale and lifeless.

  He moved out of the bed, feeling too old, awkward in his skin as he stumbled to the foot of the bed and snagged the trousers. Drawing them on, he moved to the window and absently dug into the pocket, looking for one of the cigars he’d developed a taste for.

  They weren’t there, though, and he had to remind himself why—he’d been cutting back, so the smell of smoke wouldn’t be on his skin, wouldn’t bother Sybil or the kid.

  “Might as well pick the habit back up,” he muttered, bracing his hands on the windowsill. Since he couldn’t kill himself on the nicotine, he sucked in a slow, steady breath of the cool dawn air.

  The nightmare lingered in his mind, all too vivid.

  They usually started to fade almost the minute he woke up, but not this one.

  It clung to him like a greasy, sticky film and the worst of it was Sybil. Her wide eyes dull and sightless, her mouth slack.

  He saw the way she’d looked as she stood at his side in the cemetery. The way her eyes held his as he drove into her, clinging to her like she was all that mattered in the world. All that mattered to him.

  He remembered the way she’d looked at him before climbing back into her car, the sympathy, the sadness.

  If he’d gone with her, if he’d brought her back here, the nightmare wouldn’t have happened. When she was with him, the chaos in his mind faded away.

  He could lose himself in her body. Silence the screams. Or better yet … he could make her scream as he brought her to one breathless orgasm after another. That was the one time he could forget. Forget everything. Forget the pain, forget the shame, forget the misery.

  Only with her. It had only ever been with her.

  One hand curled into a fist, braced on the wall next to the window.

  He was desperate, almost painfully so, to see her, to touch her. But he had to stay away. He had to cut Caine out of him, and if he didn’t want the ugliness inside him to touch her it was best if he cut her out of his life as well.

  It wasn’t like he could ever give what she deserved anyway.

  She deserved somebody whole.

  David had so many broken, jagged pieces of himself missing, it was a wonder he could touch her without slicing her to ribbons.

  Shoving away from the window, he put his back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  He should have gone back there. To that house, dug up those bones and hidden them somewhere else.

  Of course, to do that, he would have had to know they were there.

  He’d never thought to ask.

  Max had kept his secrets well.

  Maybe it was time he figured out what other secrets the old man had kept.

  * * *

  He looked old and tired, lying in that bed. Wearing a pair of jeans that fit too close and felt scratchy against his skin, David rested his elbows on his knees and studied Max’s face.

  A few weeks ago, David had stood with the man on the edge of the river, staring out over the water while they spoke of old, ugly secrets. David had needed names. Max had just smiled, a serene, peaceful sort of smile that hadn’t made much sense, at the time.

  Of course it hadn’t, although it should have.

  Max had set about quietly cleaning up messes, just as he’d done twenty years ago. David had stupidly thought if they cut off the dragon’s head—by taking down his father—everything would stop. Max had known better and he’d gone about dealing with it in his own way.

  At the time, David hadn’t really understood just what was going on, even though he’d breathed out a sigh of relief each time one of them had died.

  Why wouldn’t he?

  He’d been just a kid, a skinny teenage boy barely kissing puberty, the first night his father had woken him up. You’re old enough now. Come on, boy. There’s something you need to see.

  He hadn’t known, hadn’t had any idea.

  Are you my son? Do you want to be part of the family? Part of something important? Are you willing to do what it takes to really be a man?

  Insidious words, softly spoken to a vulnerable boy.

  Yes.

  The next thing he knew, he was pressed against something hard and flat and hands were grabbing at him.

  He hadn’t been raped the first time. Or even the second.

  But each time, when he was dragged out there, crying and scared, his father had told him, Remember. This is part of being my son. You’ll learn what that means. This is who you are … part of you knew it, or you wouldn’t have said yes.

  Two years of pure hell stretched out before him and he came to know the names of a few others, but not all. He knew about Abel Blue, the Sims brothers.

  Some of the others David had suspected, but he hadn’t known for sure. Not until one by one they turned up dead.

  Keith Andrews, the chief of police.

  Abel Blue—one of the men who’d loved to take the whip to David.

  Billy Sutter, David’s own uncle.

  Luis Sims and then the final one, Garth Sims, Jeb’s
father.

  David’s father had been the dragon’s head, and he thought if his father was stopped, everything else would stop, too. It hadn’t stopped the way they’d planned, but in the end it had stopped. One by one, the men who’d torn his life apart had died. It wasn’t until the final one—Garth Sims, Jeb’s father—that David realized just what had been going on. Andrews died in a hunting accident—his partner found him dead at the bottom of a rocky incline, his neck broken from the fall, face smashed in. Abel Blue’s heart attack, the car crash that had killed Billy Sutter, all of them David could just write off as karma getting her pound of flesh.

  But Garth … that hadn’t been quite so easy to overlook.

  Everybody saw it as a tragic accident, but David knew better.

  There were likely only two—no, make that three people who knew the truth. David, possibly Garth’s son, Jeb, and the man who’d killed him.

  Max.

  Garth had been found bare-ass naked on the bottom of his pool, his blood alcohol level sky-high. All around the pool there had been scattered skin mags. It had painted a picture of a man who’d gotten plastered while getting his rocks off, then tumbled face-first into the water, too drunk to stop himself. Maybe he’d passed out.

  That was what Max had wanted people to think, totally destroying Garth’s image.

  Just as Garth had destroyed David so many times.

  The man to break David, as they called it, had been Peter, his own father.

  But the next one, and David’s most frequent abuser, was Garth Sims.

  Max had made sure Garth’s name was ruined.

  Those little details were what clued David in. Because he knew certain things about Garth. Garth didn’t drink. And David couldn’t see the cold, controlling bastard who’d terrorized him doing something like getting plastered while sitting naked and jacking off beside the pool.

  By the time it was all done, the boy called David hadn’t been seen in town for more than three years. He’d taken the name Caine. At twenty, he was bigger and stronger but still scared, still broken. He’d faced Max across the width of the porch, refusing to look at the house where he had tried to flee from hell.

  Why? he’d asked.

  Max had just smiled and shrugged. You get on back to the farm, Caine. Abraham needs you.

  But he hadn’t gone. Not right away.

  He’d done a quick walk through town, shoulders hunched, waiting for somebody to recognize him. Nobody had.

  After the first ten minutes, he’d slowly lifted his head, started to watch others from under the brim of his hat. How many others were there? He’d known the four, but sometimes people had come at him masked and sometimes the men had just watched. Watched as he was humiliated, watched as he was broken, watched as he bled and begged.

  It was that night that he realized he couldn’t leave the pain or the trouble behind. He couldn’t just let it die. It would always follow him.

  Unless they managed to cut this cancer out, it would eat at this town and it would eat at him.

  So he made himself go back, look at the memories. Through a disconnect of three years, he started to remember things, details. It was precious little, though. Some of that information might be inside the head of the old man lying on the hospital bed just two feet away.

  A weak, tired sigh escaped Max and then the man lifted his lids, eyed David narrowly. “An old man can’t even sleep without having people staring at him,” he grumbled.

  “You get a lot of people in here staring at you?”

  Max just watched him.

  David looked away, leaning back in his seat. The T-shirt he’d picked up with the jeans rode up and he scowled down at it, tugged it back into place. He’d left the plain clothes behind, back at the farm, taking only the clothes on his back because he’d planned to buy the sort of clothing he would have worn if he’d never left town.

  But everything still felt weird, the jeans too tight, the sleeves of the T-shirt too short. For reasons he didn’t quite understand, he felt exposed in these clothes and part of him wished he’d brought his plain clothes with him. He hadn’t ever joined that world, but bits and pieces had worked their way into his thoughts and those things would take a while, maybe even a lifetime, to unlearn.

  Feeling Max’s eyes on him, he stopped plucking at the shirt and met the older man’s gaze. “I can relate to the staring. I had to go buy clothes. I need a place to stay. People look at me like I’m a ghost.”

  “To them, you are.” Max reached out and pushed a button on the bed rail, raising the head of the bed until he was in an upright position. From there, he pinned his blue eyes on David. “They saw you for years, knew you—or so they thought. You were Caine Yoder, an Amish man. But under it all, that was never who you were. And now…”

  The old man went to shrug but stopped, grimacing in pain. “To some of them, it’s like you’re back from the dead, even though you never even left.”

  David curled his lip. “If people had looked, they might have figured that out a long time ago.”

  “Well.” Max smiled sourly. “People are very often stupid.”

  “Yeah.” David scowled down at his hands. Of course, he couldn’t be surprised that nobody had seen him—the real him. Sarah, Thomas, all of them had known who he was, even under the mask he’d worn when he was in town, and they had seen only the mask.

  Many of them had thought that in time he’d find peace, that he’d join the community. He’d never been baptized into it, and if they’d belonged to the larger, more traditional community miles away things would have gone very differently. Old Order Amish believed very strongly in the church, the community. But the smaller community that Abraham and his family belonged to was less traditional, with a more modern view on things. They allowed vehicles for the purpose of jobs outside the community, and while David—or Caine, as they’d known him—had never joined the church, they’d continued to accept him, work with him, talk to him.

  They’d accepted the broken, bleeding boy Abraham had brought into his home. They’d given David the one thing he’d never really known—a real home.

  That was another thing he would miss.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, he focused on the present, and on Max.

  “You look like a man with grim thoughts.”

  David skimmed a hand back over his hair, the shorter cut unfamiliar to him. Just like everything else around him right now. “I left.” He flicked his eyes to Max’s, saw that he understood. “I’m not going back.”

  “That was always your choice,” Max said softly. “Abraham was there for as long as you needed him, needed a haven.”

  “Abraham’s gone.”

  Max closed his eyes, but not before David caught sight of something sad there. “Yes. He’s gone now.

  “And what do you expect to do now?”

  David wasn’t sure how to answer that, what to say.

  So he just shrugged. “Have you been able to remember anything?”

  The attack that had landed Max Shepherd here was still very much a mystery. It had left his wife of more than five decades dead and he’d almost died himself.

  Nobody knew why.

  David had to fight not to show any of the anger that pulsed inside him as he thought of that sweet old lady he’d seen so many times over the years. He’d kept his distance at first, not wanting her to recognize him when he’d first started to sneak into town and try to get answers from Max, answers about where Lana was, answers about what had happened that night. He’d stopped after a while, because the old man had never given him answers and he’d realized the truth on his own—if Lana had come home, she’d come home to a whole hell of a lot of trouble. That hadn’t stopped him from going by the judge’s house, though. Or the Frampton place. David had been drawn back, always, like a moth to a flame. And there had been Max, and his Mary.

  Now Mary was dead, Max was wounded and David wanted answers.

  Feeling the weight of Max’s gaze, David shifted hi
s eyes back to the bed.

  Faded blue eyes studied him. “No.” Max sighed, his chest thinner than David remembered. Even for a man in his eighties, Max had always seemed bigger than life, strong enough to take on the world. Not anymore. “I have bits and pieces of the last few days, but that’s it.”

  He smiled a little. “Mary tried to make breakfast—burned the eggs. The smell. I’ll never forget that smell. And I had to eat them, too.” He closed his eyes, turned his head. “Now she’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  One hand tightened into a rawboned fist on the tan hospital blanket. “You and me both, son. Who would go and shoot an old woman like that? She never hurt anybody. Not once in her whole life.”

  David looked down at his hands. Big hands. Strong. Just then they felt useless. He felt useless. Here he was, twenty years later, and he felt helpless all over again. “It wasn’t about her, old man. You already know that.”

  Max’s blue eyes slid his way.

  Outside in the hallway a squeaking cart wheeled by, and they both lapsed into silence.

  Moments passed before either of them spoke again.

  “You remember calling me to come out to your place that day?”

  “Did I?” Max shook his head. “I can’t say as I do.”

  He could have been lying. The judge had a talent for lies, something David knew better than most. Eyes narrowing, he studied the man’s face, looked for some sign, some hint, but he saw nothing more than a tired old man lying in a hospital bed.

  “What are you going to do now? Got a place where you plan to live?” Max said. “I know it’s got to be hard leaving home. Have you thought—“

  He stopped as David leaned forward. “I don’t have a home. I haven’t had one in years—I don’t think I ever did. And quit trying to distract me. You called me to your house. For some reason, that day, the day you were shot. Do you remember why?”

  “I just said I don’t.”

  “No, you said you don’t remember calling me. Not the same as not knowing why you’d want to talk to me,” David pointed out.

  “Same thing in my mind.” Max sighed and shifted on the bed. “Damn miserable place. Can’t get comfortable.” He flicked his gaze to the open door and then back to David. In a low voice, he said, “Bits and pieces are loose in my head. It’s like a puzzle. I don’t see the picture yet. Don’t push me, boy.”