His (22 page)

“Hard day?” the bartender asked.

“Why?” I snapped my head up.

“You just look a bit out of it,” he said. “Another one?”

I looked down to see an empty glass in front of me. With a single finger, I pushed it forward. He tilted the bottle of whiskey and flooded the glass again.

Out of it. Out of my mind? Out of character, that was for sure. Mentally I ticked off the alarming symptoms. Guilt, something that had never afflicted me before. Irritation and unease. Worry.

“I should kill her,” I muttered.

“Mine, too,” the man sitting next to me said.

“Excuse me?”

“My wife. You can kill ‘er too.” His words were slurred, drunken.

At the other end of the bar the group of people cheered a good pool shot. A woman leaned over the pool table, her breasts hanging like pendulums. Her chest was wrinkled, the epidermis stretched and spotted from years of tanning.

“Oh,” I said.

“Damn bitches. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Nag, nag, nag. You can’t do anything right with ‘em. Don’t even bother trying, am I right?”

He held his beer bottle up and clinked it hard against my glass. My empty glass. I raised a finger and ordered another. The bartender obliged.

“She kick you out of the house?” the man said, his smiling face disgustingly ruddy.

“No,” I said.

The bar was growing dark, or maybe it was just me. Or the shadow. I blinked and looked around. It had come back, yes. She had distracted me from it, but she was not here now. I felt the numbness of the shadow creep into the edges of my mind.

“Outta my way, Sharon!” One of the drunken men elbowed the woman next to the pool table. Tattoos sleeved both of his thick arms, peeking out from under his stained white tee.

“You can’t get that shot,” she snapped back, moving unhappily back, arms crossed.

“Jus’ gotta get away sometime, I hear you,” the ruddy man next to me said. I breathed in, trying to find air.

“You feelin’ okay?” His beer breath assaulted me. I pushed back my stool from the bar. Everything was dark. I could barely see the edge of the bar in front of me.

“I… I just need to think.”

Glass shattered on the floor next to the pool table. I closed my eyes.

“You dumb fucking bitch!”

A slap. A scream.

Then the bar was gone, and in front of me was the tattooed man, his face snarling. I snapped my fist across his face. The sound of bone snapping. Waves of shadow darkened my vision, made it impossible for me to see anything except in flashes.

My fists. Blood. More blood. Pouring from his nose, his split lip.

Pain, total blackness. My ears ringing.

We were on the ground, me on top of him. The woman was screaming behind me, pulling at my shirt.

“Get off of him! Get off of him!”

The shadow laughing, laughing at me as I swung my fists down over and over again. I did not care about the pain in my knuckles. Gone were the guilt, the uncertainty, the irritation. In their place came pure satisfaction.

Bones shattered. The zygomatic bone under the eyes. The infraorbital—oh, god, it felt good. The crack, the shudder, the bursting blood vessels. Blood everywhere, washing the shadow away. Then somebody pulled me off of him, and before I could fight back I was outside of the bar, panting hard, blood running down my knuckles.

Feeling supremely unfulfilled.

     Kat    

I tried the door as soon as he left. I had replaced doors before, but he had sealed the pins holding the hinges in place.

In the closet, I scrounged for anything that could help. A hammer, a screwdriver, anything. The shelf at the top of the closet was too high for me to reach. I grabbed the armchair from the side of the bed and dragged it over. On tiptoe, my fingers searched the shelf and hit something hard.

A toolbox? My body tensed as I found a grip on the edge of the box.

I pulled the wood box out and immediately knew it wasn’t what I was looking for. A cherry colored wood, smooth and polished to a shine.

Curious, I sat down in the chair with the box on my lap. Inside, there were a few pairs of earrings, necklaces, rings. And a photo. I picked up the photo and turned it over.

A young boy with dark hair and light eyes, holding the hand of a woman who looked just like him.

My face turned hot and I dropped the photo as quickly as if it had turned to fire. It fluttered back down into the jewelry box. A mistake. I shouldn’t have looked inside here. A sickness gripped my heart.

Although I had been locked up in here for days, now was the first time that I felt I had to escape. The room had turned warm, the air stifling.

Slam!

I jerked my head up. The door had crashed open and Gavriel was standing in the entryway. The jewelry box clattered to the floor as I started up to my feet, and the photo tumbled down after the heavier things. He stared, eyes wide.

His hair was damp with sweat. Blood dripped down his arms to the tips of his fingers. As I watched, a drop of blood fell to the floor. He had cuts along his knuckles, and his skin had taken on a pallor that made him look almost like a vampire. But his eyes were the scariest.

His eyes looked at me completely blankly, as though I was just a ghost. The same way he had looked at me before, when we’d first met. Like he was dead, or I was.

“What happened?” I asked. The question sounded ridiculous to me in the open air.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. He walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his hands. He flexed his fists, the cuts bleeding freely.

“What… what—”

“You were looking through my things.”

He stared up at me from the bed. He wasn’t accusing me. He wasn’t guilting me. He was simply stating a fact. It disarmed me completely. I fell to my knees and began to scoop up the jewelry. When I got to the photo, he was already there in front of me. His hand reached down and took it before I could.

Kneeling in front of me. Staring, that awful, beautiful stare. He captivated me. His fingers stained the picture with blood as his thumb moved along the edge.

Did you do it?
I wanted to ask. I wondered how dark he truly was. I wondered if he was really a monster. But I couldn’t. And then, as though reading my mind, he responded.

“My father killed her.”

If I hadn’t already been sitting on the floor, I would have fallen to my knees in surprise. His eyes shone with tears, and when he blinked they streamed from the corners of his eyes down his cheeks.

“He was like me,” Gav continued. “He lived with a shadow over him. He was full of darkness.”

The words were wrenched from his throat, and he choked on the last, a sob stopping his throat. He bent his head.

“Go to the closet.”

His voice was flat. It would not tolerate disobedience. Shakily, I got to my feet and turned to the closet.

“There’s a smaller cardboard box near the one you found. Have you looked inside it yet?”

I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice to speak.

“Reach up and find it.”

I stood up on the chair. The hot flush under my skin felt like burning now.

“Do you have it?”

I touched cardboard, pulled it out.

“Yes,” I said. I sat down on the chair, too scared to look at him. He had hurt somebody tonight. Would he hurt me?

“Open it.”

“What’s—”

“Open it.”

The worst sentence I’ve ever heard. The amount of pain in his voice was staggering. He wasn’t faking this; I was sure of it. But I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the box. It was more photos. But these were not happy photos, not like the one in the jewelry box. These were all Polaroids, so dark that for a moment I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I did.

My stomach heaved. The top Polaroid was the same little boy. This time he was wearing only underwear. His body—

Oh, God. Oh dear God.

The boy was naked. His body was covered in bruises.

“Look at them,” he ordered. I froze, my hands clenching the cardboard box so tightly my fingernails dug back into my cuticles.

“Please—”

“Look.”

I couldn’t say no to him. I picked up the photographs with trembling hands and went through them. The second photograph made me lean forward and retch dry air.

He was bound with rope, his underwear dirty. His back was discolored: yellow and purple streaks and the edged impression of a belt, over and over again marked into his skin. Tears burned my eyes.

“Look,” he said again, his voice duller. I looked. It was too much. I couldn’t look away, and the only thing that saved me was the blurring of my tears. The photographs showed the life of a tortured child, instant by agonizing instant. The record of a body so damaged by bruises that they had worked their way to the inside.

“Who could do such a thing?” I whispered.

“This is what I look at before I go out to kill them,” he said. “This is all I see when I tie them down, when I slice them open. I see all this darkness. It overwhelms me. It creeps into my vision. There’s only one way I can get rid of it: I cut it out.”

He left me there, in the room, crying over the photos of a boy who had lost his innocence a long time ago. He washed his hands and brushed his teeth and crawled into bed.

My sobs subsided. My gasps for air turned to shuddering breaths, and then to a slow inhale, exhale. I put the boxes away and turned off the light.

Then I crawled in next to him and held him tightly. His arm curled around me. Without speaking, he folded me against his chest and we lay there, bodies tangled, cradling each other until we fell asleep.

It was then that I realized I was the one torturing him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

     Kat    

I woke before him in the morning. His arm was curled over my shoulder, and his lips grazed my forehead. When I shifted, he murmured, his lips moving against my skin like butterfly wings.

When I was a kid, I caught a butterfly in a glass jar. I remember taking it out and holding it in my hands. My mother scolded me.

“Its wings are delicate,” she said. “Just brushing them with your fingertips will destroy them. It’ll never be able to fly again.”

I felt the same way now. Without knowing, I had touched something delicate, something horribly damaged. I didn’t know what to do to keep from damaging him any more.

I did not want him to leave, but I did not know if I could force him to stay.

“Kitten,” he murmured.

“I’m here,” I said softly. The morning light had turned the room gray, but when he opened his eyes I saw the glint of blue-green that always swirled there below the surface.

“You didn’t leave.”

“Your arm was kind of in the way.”

He smiled and rolled over. I felt cold without the touch of his skin on me as he sat up on the edge of the bed.

Had we really slept together like this? Like lovers, entwined like two strands of frayed rope amid the silken sheets?

Was I falling for this monster? Was he a monster?

My eyes refocused on his back and I saw that he was looking at me. I reached out and touched his skin gently. Imagining the belt. Imagining the bruises.

Don’t touch the butterfly’s wings.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“What?”

“Today. Do you want the same thing?”

I wanted to tell him the truth: that all I wanted… was him. I wanted him to stay with me, to hold me, to pin me down and torture me with kisses like he had the first time. God, I wanted all this and so much more. But I couldn’t let him know how much of a hold he really had over me.

Not for the first time, I wondered if this was all a trick. Then I remembered the photos of the boy, and I swallowed my doubt. No, he was real. This was all real. The note of desire that crept into his speech when he talked to me, that was real too.

“What do you want?” he repeated, wearily. As though preparing himself for the Sisyphean task ahead: to try not to kill anyone today.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t say the things I wanted to say.
Come to bed
.
Kiss me.

Make me yours.

“How about a trade?”

He sounded so reasonable. So rational. As though I was a fair partner in this deal. He knew it wasn’t true. But I finally understood a corner of that sorrow that had been beaten into him. I understood the need for him to pull a veil over what he was doing.

He was not the only one here who was ashamed of the past.

“A trade.”

“Question for question.”

“That means you’re staying.”

“That’s part of the trade. But that also means you’re staying with me.”

The hint of desire in the curve of his lip. I saw all of the little things. I saw them, but did he want me to see them? Was he twisting me around him again with emotion?

I couldn’t shove the thought back into a dark corner of my brain. It was apparent in every movement he made.

He wanted me.

And I wanted him.

It may be delusion, but if it was, then it was the most delicious delusion I had ever tasted. His touch sent shivers of sparks through me that danger alone could not account for.

I wanted the soft part of him, yes, the lover, the charmer. The gentleman. But I also wanted the part of him that was raw and rough, the part of him that tied me up. The side that dressed perfectly because perfection was expected.

I could not be perfect, I thought, looking down at my wrists. Of all the imperfections of my body, these were the ones that would stay forever.

“Question for question.”

“So that you can know more about me. And I can know more about you.”

“Who goes first?”

He smiled.

“I knew you would want to play,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“Because you’re a curious little kitten, that’s why,” he said, falling back onto his side next to me. His hand caressed my cheek, holding me in the palm of his hand. Possessive.

“Okay,” I said. “You go first.”