The Sect (41 page)

Gazing up at his broad body as it neared my side of the table, I began to protest, “Noah, what are you—”

Crouching over, he pulled my chair out from the table. He rounded my position and placed a finger to his lips, shaking his head. “Noah Oliver. This is going to sound very fucking contrived, but I had to tell you, from the first moment I saw you, I knew you would upend my world. Are you going to give me a chance to find out if I was right?”

I held out my hand, shaking his. “Keaton Mara and from the moment I saw you, I knew you would fuck me up.”

 
“So,” he drawled, his eyes slanting as he looked down at me, “my hotel’s across the street.”

“I don’t go to bed with men I’ve just met,” I stated with a plastic attempt at being demure. It used to be so natural. Now, there was very little demureness about me anymore.

He grabbed my hand, pulling me up to stand. “Are you sure? Because I have a whip with
your
name on it.”

My eyes widened as I pressed my hands against his chest. “What happened to starting over?”

He shrugged, holding me close. “We’re two people who rearranged ourselves to be more screwed up than we already were, there is no such thing as starting over.”

My concerns about how we would survive in the real world began to fade. All I knew was in the months without him, I wasn’t living. He had twisted me and remade me into a woman very different from the one who was taken, much less the woman I was before Gregory Mitchum took hold of me.
 

We had to survive in the real world because only he would’ve understood me. Only he could’ve comprehended why I was the way I was and how to deal with it.
 

I could live in the world without him, but I couldn’t persevere in the world without him.

Every second we spent together in the next six hours proved that fact. The moments he wielded the whip, leaving his marks on my flesh and pulling me to beg for more. The other moments when he touched me tenderly. The many hours in which he fucked me so hard I couldn’t feel my legs. Or the moments he held me as I drifted between sleep and wakefulness and told me about how torturous it was to be without me. That he thought he could do it, but realized he couldn’t fully function in a world—outside of the one he created—without me at his side.

“From what I’ve told you, tell me what you think is true and what’s a lie?” Noah asked, his voice just as hoarse and taxed as mine.

I sucked my teeth as he pressed a little too hard on the welt located on the curve of my ass. It was two hours until morning as we remained in bed, inside my hotel suite. We were both naked, sated, and a little exhausted, but too stubborn to go to sleep. I rested on my stomach while holding tightly to a down pillow. Straddling the back of my thighs, he applied the salve to my marks, making them sting a little less.

I looked over my shoulder at him and shook my head at him. “I don’t know.”

He leaned forward, grabbing my hair and manipulated it to fall over my opposite shoulder. “You do. You knew me, and I made you doubt that you did. You always knew me, Keaton.” His lips grazed against my exposed shoulder, reminding me in seconds how deeply I was in entwined with him; I would never unknot myself from his binding and skewed control.

“I believe all of your story,” I began, “you didn’t really lie, you just let me assume that Shiloh was the revenant. All along, you told me the real story, you just changed the characters around. At the same time, I believed Shiloh’s story was true, too. I think you never had a real relationship with him and that you were really just strangers who lived in the same house for a while.

“I think the only way you recruited him to be what he was at Rebirth was by appealing to what you knew about him. He could become a God amongst devils and that’s what drew him.”

“Very, very good, princess. And?” He quirked a brow, urging me to continue. His face disappeared from my view as he began to place kisses down my spine.

I clutched my pillow tighter, responding to the fire he ignited and fought against the weight of my suddenly heavy lids. “I-I don’t know.”

He grabbed my waist and turned me around, none too carefully. I winced and bit my lip to stifle the whimpers. “I wanted to leave, Keaton. I wanted to just go and leave it all up to Shiloh and Nadine. You made me stay. I promised to save your soul and that’s what I did. In my own particular way, I saved you.”

Perplexed, I searched his face. “Debatable.”

“Is it?” He gave me a crooked smile, bringing back the boyish charm. “I’m sure you think about the what ifs and what nots. Had you not been taken, where would you be right now?”

“I thanked you for Gregory. That is all I can thank you for.”

“For now,” he said matter-of-factly. “I killed the men who raped you, just like I promised you I would. You owe me, Keaton. I want you to tell me the truth you forgot to mention.”

I carefully leaned up my elbows, placing my face just inches from his. “Who was Mrs. Sherman?”

He smirked, reaching up to finger my lips. “Not Mrs. Sherman, and if I told you, you would find it hard to believe.”

I gave him a look that made his smile deepen.

“An ex-nun with an alcohol dependency problem who I met in rehab. She…helped me. She wants to keep her anonymity and I owe to her to keep her that way.” He slipped his hands down to grasp my neck. “You have something to do, princess, and you know how I hate it when you disobey me. Tell me the truth you conveniently want to avoid.”

“You loved someone who didn’t love you back,” I stated quietly. “The story about jealousy and killing because of that jealousy, it was all predictive of what was going to happen. Looking back at it now, you were telling me your plan in a cryptic way and I never caught on.” I thought about the newspaper and many of the things he said that hadn’t made sense to me then. “You were constantly giving me bits and pieces of who you really were…but then you denied it with your cruelty.”

His hold on my neck firmed as he sloped forward and kissed me gently. His thumb traced my lips as he left very little space between him and me. His eyes turned softer; his expression sullen. “Good, princess. You finally understand.”

“What if I never love you, Noah? It’s going to bother you eventually. It would have to.” My eyes drifted down to trace a path between his sternum to the perfectly cut lines forming his firm six-pack stomach. “A part of me wishes I could tell you that something has changed—or will change—and it was returned. A larger part is glad it hasn’t.”

“It’s better that you don’t,” he remarked solemnly. “I wouldn’t know how to accept it. Someday, if I want you to and you don’t…maybe it will be a problem. I just want this right now. As long as you need me…you’ll keep me from being the guy I don’t want to be. The guy who needed a place like Rebirth to feel normal.” He slanted forward, kissing me gentler than he had before.
 

A knock on the door pulled us both out of our little world. “It’s my parents—more than likely my mother,” I grumbled.

His eyes lifted, studying my face with questions he wouldn’t ask. When my mother’s frantic voice was heard on the other side, I was proven right.

He looked at the door and his posture became tense.

“Are you sure we can do this?” I asked him. “It’s not too late to hide in the bathroom. You can keep being my sick little secret.”

His eyes darted to mine as he gave me a gentle smile. He kissed my forehead and ejected off the bed, grabbing the terry cloth robe from the floor. I carefully slipped off the bed, allowing him to help me into it. I slowly paced toward the door, waiting for him to dress appropriately before I felt comfortable answering. When he was redressed, I hesitated with my hand on the knob. I searched his eyes, not exactly looking for his answer, but attempting to find certainty in my own answer. I had to make sure I could go through with it.

He gave me a reassuring smile and a nod. “We’re going to make this real, princess. I am where I’m meant to be and so are you.”

In the morning, we had breakfast with my parents. My mother insisted that we join her and my father after her short introduction to Noah inside my suite. I had my doubts in the beginning but was quickly convinced. We lied about how he met, partially. I told my parents that he was a prisoner, too, and that he saved me from the various times I could’ve died, or worse yet, been completely broken to the point I wouldn’t have wanted to live.
 

It was the truth. As warped and nonsensical as it sounded, if Noah hadn’t been the way he was with me at Rebirth, I never would’ve lived through it.
 

He charmed his harshest critics, my parents. His background—though he was cryptic and evasive about it—appealed to my father, who, like Noah, fought and climbed his way to the top. My mother was happy with the surface things that mattered to her. Noah’s looks, his income bracket, and his plans for the future; to, if he could help it, take care of me in the same manner he did when I needed him.
 

She later told me during our bathroom chat break that she liked him, but it wasn’t because of the reasons I thought they were. She said the look in my eyes when I looked at Noah was all she’d been waiting to see before she approved of any man I dated.
 

She was grateful that he was responsible for bringing her daughter back and keeping her safe.
 

It was ironic when he was the reason I couldn’t come back into her life on my terms in the first place.

Because of him, I could make my way in a world that had become foreign to me. Because of me, he could navigate a world he abandoned because he thought he had no place in it.
 

We could survive in the real world because there was no other option. We needed each other, and in a sense, we experienced a transformation through each other. It didn’t matter what label he had for the place where I was a prisoner. Noah Oliver killed me, slowly and meticulously.
 

He promised me freedom when my prison sentence was up, but I didn’t so easily believe I’d ever feel it again. Any place with him was a prison. But I’d grown to like the way the walls confined me and kept me safe. They made me feel when I had numbed myself from everything. Noah’s prison was hell, but it was where a woman like me—who sold her soul to a devil proclaiming to be my dark savior, delivering me from the sins of my past—belonged.