Cruel Sanctuary (Wages of Sin Book 1)

by Tara Leigh

  My heart is pounding an uneven beat against my ribcage, my breath coming in shallow pants. I want time travel to be possible so I can kill this man with my bare hands. I want to prevent the entire fucking episode. I want to erase Aislinn’s memories. I want to tell her to stop talking.

  And still, Aislinn continues. “He didn’t … he didn’t get a chance to … Somehow, Marisol found the strength to crawl over to the knife. She stabbed him in the back. He didn’t die right away though, he went after her and they struggled.

  “I was so scared—I went back in the closet and closed the door myself.

  “But eventually, it got quiet. Blood started seeping beneath the door. So much blood. When I finally tried to get out, the door wouldn’t open. I had to position myself against the back wall and push on it with my feet. Marisol was blocking it. She wouldn’t wake up and I thought she was dead. I thought they were both dead.” Aislinn pauses for a moment, heaving a shuddering breath.

  I hear the low roar of a vacuum from several rooms away, a rhythmic back and forth whooshing noise. The commonplace household chore is completely at odds with the horrific tale Aislinn has shared. Is still sharing.

  “Incredibly, he was dead and Marisol wasn’t. But I didn’t know that then. I found a phone, and I called the only number I knew by heart—my father’s office.”

  The image of a little girl crawling over bloody bodies to call for help is so vivid in my mind, it’s as if I’d been there. I wish I had been there. “You were very brave, Aislinn.”

  “Brave?” The raw edge to her tone cuts deep. “I cowered in a closet, Damon. I did nothing.”

  “No. You survived. You called for help. And Marisol is alive today because of you.”

  “She’s alive, but she’ll never be able to look in a mirror without remembering what that man did to her.

  “And that’s why I got involved with The Network. Because I needed to do something for women who aren’t safe. I hid from Marisol’s awful reality once, and I won’t ever do that to anyone else.”

  The weight of Aislinn’s calm, cool stare presses heavily against my chest. “You have a story too. I know you do. You don’t have to tell me now, or ever. But, Damon, I’ve been face-to-face with true darkness. You may think that is all you are—but I see the light in you. And it’s beautiful.”

  35

  Aislinn

  “No,” Damon says. “I assure you, there is nothing beautiful about me, or my past.”

  “Try me.”

  “You don’t want to hear it. It’s ugly.”

  “Ugliness doesn’t scare me.”

  I hold tight to the slim hope that this will be the night Damon finally opens up to me. That he will bare something of himself he hasn’t shared with anyone else. Some small signal that he feels even a little bit of what I feel for him. Trust.

  I change tactics, reducing my voice to a barely there whisper. “Tell me about who you were before you became Damon King.”

  I want to know this man, and something tells me that the key to understanding him today is learning about the little boy he once was.

  Reluctance is written in his features and in the noticeable slump of his shoulders. I don’t prod further, waiting quietly as Damon wrestles with the demons that war within him.

  It takes a while, but eventually he begins talking. “I wanted to be an astronaut. Not just to travel to outer space, or to walk on the moon, or see Earth from light years away. I must have watched too many Hollywood blockbusters, because I had some crazy idea that we were in danger from forces we couldn’t see. I wanted to be a hero, to save our planet from enemies before they made it to our solar system.”

  My smile turns tender, imagining a young Damon staging elaborate battles with a mix of Legos and Star Wars figurines. “You reached for the stars. That’s sweet.”

  Damon’s admission seems to have lowered the guardrail he’d erected between us. “I was a latch-key kid. Had to keep myself busy—saving the world seemed as good a goal as any.”

  “And when your parents were home, what would you do?”

  “My parents never married, and I never knew my father. My grandparents used to take me out of the city every summer, to a lake house in Maine.” Damon looks down and clears his throat. “They died when I was eight. Car accident.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. That must have been very hard.”

  He fixes me with a steady, stoic stare. “Life is hard, Aislinn. It’s a lesson everyone learns sooner or later.”

  “True.” The word is a breath. I was the same age when I learned that lesson myself.

  “We bounced around the city a lot, probably to stay one step ahead of the creditors. When I was twelve, I took a test, just a standardized one that was given to the entire grade. When the results came back, everything changed. I was transferred to a new school, enrolled in a gifted program. Given a computer and a graphic calculator and a slew of new textbooks. Suddenly I didn’t have as much time to play save-the-world. I was too busy studying to become a NASA engineer.”

  A small sigh escapes my mouth. “You stopped believing in superheroes.”

  “I stopped believing in a lot of things.” The tone of his voice had changed, becoming hard and cynical, but now a wave of sadness transforms Damon’s features. “All of a sudden my mom was at PTA meetings, mingling with doctors and lawyers and real estate moguls. The other moms were either professionals or professional housewives, dedicating their entire lives to their husbands and children. It was a total culture shock for her—she had bounced from one job to the next, the word career wasn’t even in her vocabulary.

  “But once I started that school, nothing we had was good enough. Not our apartment or our clothes, or the plumber she’d been dating who would come over on Friday nights with flowers for her and something for me—a book or Rubik’s Cube or candy bar.” Damon drops my hands to pluck at a strand of fabric that has come loose from the couch cushion, twisting it around his fingers. “She dumped the plumber, dated a series of men who mostly ignored me. But after a while it didn’t matter because I was sent off to boarding school.”

  My father had wanted to send me away to boarding school. But my mother adamantly refused. I don’t remember my parents fighting much, but they did fight about that.

  At the time, it was an argument I wanted my father to win, if only to get some distance from the adults in my life. “Were you happy there, away from home?” I ask.

  “Happy?” He spits the word derisively, like the emotion is an impossibility. Not just then, but ever. “I didn’t really make friends. I was younger than everyone else to begin with, and then I graduated at sixteen.”

  “Sixteen? You were a baby.”

  He grunts. “And just as naïve. I finished college in two-and-a-half years and was hired by a bank to work in their quant division.”

  “What happened to NASA?” A pang of longing for the kid who wanted to travel to the stars hits me square in the chest.

  “Wall Street became more alluring than outer space, I guess.” His fingers still, and I sense a knot of words lodged in the back of Damon’s throat. Words I’m certain he hadn’t shared with anyone. “While I was away at school, my mom met someone. A big shot plastic surgeon. They married, and after I moved back to New York, they let me live with them while I looked for a place of my own.”

  The words unravel slowly at first, haltingly, and then speed up, tripping over each other. “Turns out, the surgeon had his own version of the Hippocratic Oath. Do no harm … except when it came to my mother. With her, all bets were off. But for a supposedly smart kid, I didn’t really catch on. And she had so many excuses. At first, they all seemed plausible. A fall during a new exercise class she was trying out. A slip in the shower. A burn from the new coffee machine.”

  “He was hurting her,” I whisper.

  “Yes. It was sickening. But since he was a doctor, it was one-stop shopping. The same hand that hit her could stitch her right up. Good as new.”

  My stoma
ch turns sour. “Until the next time.”

  “To make a long story longer, I eventually caught on. I begged her to leave him, said I was making good money and I could take care of her. It took nearly a year to convince her, but she finally decided to walk away with nothing but the clothes on her back, not even her wedding rings.”

  For a long moment there is nothing but silence.

  “The bastard figured out that she was staying in my apartment and managed to talk his way in, while I was at work. He beat her so badly she nearly died. But she was too scared of him to file charges.

  “So that was when I came up with a plan. If my mother couldn’t put him in jail, I would. I hacked into his medical practice and went to town. I made it look like he’d not only embezzled money from his partners, but that he’d also committed insurance fraud on a massive scale.”

  My eyes widen. “What happened? Did he go to jail?”

  “What happened is that I was too emotionally invested to think clearly. I went overboard, creating a fraud so large it couldn’t have been committed by just one doctor or even one office. I was caught and sentenced to ten years. The felony on my record ended my Wall Street career.”

  “And, your mother …” My voice trails off as the pieces fall into place. I know the ending to this story before Damon can tell me. It is both heartbreakingly predictable and entirely preventable.

  The statistics are clear. Most victims of spousal abuse return to their partner, time and again, despite broken bones and hospital stays. They return.

  All too often, they die.

  “She went back to him. And eventually, he killed her.”

  36

  Aislinn

  I t’s been almost twenty-four hours since Damon walked away from me, the tragedy of his mother’s death still polluting the air between us. Sensing that he’d shared more with me than he had with anyone else—ever—I didn’t stop him.

  Vulnerability is not a comfortable place to be, especially for a man like Damon. You are a snail without its shell, just waiting for someone to throw salt.

  But when I woke up, the faint trace of his woodsy, masculine scent was proof that he’d returned at some point in the night, for at least a little while.

  I wish he’d woken me.

  I rise from the desk chair now, stretching my arms above my head and arching my back. That deliciously sore feeling from spending the night in Damon’s arms is absent. I feel like me again.

  The me that lives alone and sleeps with her laptop, along with a mostly forgotten vibrator tucked into the back of a nightstand drawer.

  Time passes slowly when there’s no packed calendar to follow, nothing pressing to accomplish.

  I’ve checked in with Marisol. My mother hasn’t mentioned Ace again, and Marisol isn’t familiar with the name. I’ve called my father, which resulted in a lovely chat with Shelly.

  I’ve read Sebastián’s message several times, though I haven’t decided whether to call him yet.

  I’ve wandered through every inch of Damon’s apartment. I’ve opened up my Kindle app and read a book I bought ages ago—only to find that I’d arrived at the end but could barely remember the character’s names, let alone the plot.

  I even checked in with Davina. She said not to worry about the missed call. That everything had been handled and I should just “sit tight.”

  Sit tight.

  Tight or not, I was doing more sitting than I ever had, despite the daily self-defense lessons Damon arranged for me with the head of his security team. After the incident at the gala, he offered to teach me himself, but I knew I wouldn’t be much good at fending off an “attack” from him.

  Burke is as physically intimidating as Damon, but in a completely different way. He speaks with a hint of a Texas twang and looks like a hometown football hero. Close-cropped blond hair and eyes the color of washed denim. Brawny muscles that could have come from stacking hay bales.

  Undeniably attractive.

  And completely unappealing.

  Because he’s not Damon.

  We’re living under the same roof, but I miss my savage.

  I haven’t forgotten the look in Damon’s eyes when he talked about his mother. There is still so much grief and guilt there. A depth of emotion he’s been pushing down for so long that he’s convinced himself it has become something else, something twisted and dark.

  And maybe some of it is.

  But not all.

  Damon King is a ruthless bastard.

  A dark warrior with the soul of a savior.

  A cruel, corrupt savior … who believes himself beyond redemption.

  I don’t agree with that last part. Not at all.

  “Want to grab some lunch?”

  I spin around to find Finley standing just a few feet away. My stomach growls, answering for me. I shove my introspective thoughts away. It’s very likely I’ll never know what else is inside Damon’s head. Or his heart. “Sounds that way.”

  I follow her into the dining room. Two heaping bowls of salads have been set up on the sideboard, along with a tray of wraps, a platter of fruit, and a selection of drinks. Finley and I both make ourselves plates and fill glasses from the fresh pitcher of iced tea. She sits down first, and I select the chair across from her.

  When I look up from spreading a napkin over my lap, Finley is studying me closely. I fidget beneath her scrutiny, eventually asking, “Is there something on your mind you want to talk about?”

  She shrugs, forking a bite of salad into her mouth and chewing before saying only, “Nope, just thought we should get to know each other, is all.”

  A wry laugh trickles from my throat and I douse it with a sip of iced tea. “Getting to know someone usually involves conversation. Two-sided conversation.”

  Finley blinks, and for the first time I notice that her eyes are the same shade as mine. Exactly the same shade. It’s unnerving. “Okay then, let’s converse. You start.”

  Now it’s my turn to pause. This feels uncomfortably artificial. “Is Damon forcing you to hang out with me? To keep me company or something? Because we can eat our lunch silently, and then you can go back downstairs and tell your boss you followed his orders and have a new bestie. I’ll back you up on it.”

  I can almost hear the wheels turning in Finley’s head as she tucks into her food. And for the next few minutes, neither of us says anything. There is only the scrape of utensils on porcelain, the rattle of ice cubes, and the low hum of air coming through the vents.

  She finally looks back up. “You’re suggesting that I lie to my boss, and that I should be okay with it because you’ll lie, too.”

  Pretty much. “We don’t need to be friends, Finley.”

  “So, I’m not good enough for you—is that it?”

  “What? No, of course not. I don’t know anything about you.”

  “And you’re not curious? You don’t want to pretend to be my friend, just to get dirt on King?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that. And I’m not looking for dirt on Damon—from you or anyone else.”

  Finley spears a piece of pineapple, the fork hovering above her plate. “Okay then, let’s do it. For real.”

  “Have a conversation?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wait as she chews on the fruit. “Well then, tell me about yourself. How did you start working for Damon?”

  The fork drops with a clang on her plate. “I thought you weren’t going to use me for information?”

  My jaw sags as I stare at her. “Do you know how conversations work? You find the thing you have in common—in our case, Damon—and then work outward. Is there something else we can use?”

  A strange expression passes over her face before I can attempt to read it. Then she shakes her head. “No.”

  “Okay, then. So … do you want to tell me how you started working here?”

  Waiting for Finley to decide, I feel like a kid on the first day of school, trying to sort friend from foe among my new classmates. “Damon was
a friend of my father’s,” she says, her tone reluctant.

  Okay, I can do this. “Did you grow up in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh? What part? I was Upper—”

  “Downtown. Lower East Side, mostly.”

  “Are you still close with your father?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, Finley.” I take a sip of my iced tea. “How about your mom?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  I sigh. “You know, this would probably feel less like an interrogation if you ask me questions, too. It’s kind of like a tennis match—we go back and forth.”

  She crosses her arms over her chest. “Why are you here?”

  “It’s not by choice, believe me.”

  “You don’t look like a prisoner to me.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m not allowed to leave.”

  “True. But I don’t think you want to go.”

  “I …” I hesitate, unsure how to respond. The last time I’d expressed any desire to leave was the night I was attacked. Before Damon murdered a man in front of me.

  To keep me safe.

  “I guess I feel safe here. Right now, I don’t really know who to trust.”

  “But you trust Damon? You barely know him.”

  She’s right. But then I consider the framed prints on his wall.

  The look in his eyes when I came out of his bedroom wearing a ball gown.

  The grip of his hand holding mine as he led me away from the scene of the crime.

  The absolute certainty in his voice when he called me brave.

  I’ve got you, Aislinn.

  If there is anyone on earth I trust, it is Damon King. “I trust him with my life.”

  37

  Damon

  I ’m wiping the sweat off my face after a hard workout when my phone lights up with a name I’ve grown to hate.

  Chad Fucking Lytton.

  The stuffed shirt has been calling me every few hours since the awards dinner. I haven’t answered because I haven’t had the patience to deal with him yet. I’ve been too busy exacting vengeance for Cruz’s second attack on Aislinn.