“You’d better give her that information,” Zyah said. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“I do so love a good Romeo and Juliet story.” Alena sighed.
Zyah shook her head. She was afraid Alena might be taking that story a little too far herself.
EIGHT
Zyah sat in the armchair across from the bed trying to puzzle out what was causing Player to continually have such horrific, traumatic nightmares when his brain was slowly repairing itself. They were four weeks in. Four weeks. He was so much better. During the day, he was up and talking with her grandmother. Entertaining her. He was pale but getting stronger every day. His balance was still a little off. It wasn’t like he could go run races, but it was a brain injury.
Steele continued to come every day, but instead of twice a day, he was coming once a day. Zyah could tell the brain injury itself was mostly healed. Steele didn’t want Player overdoing anything. He wanted him up and walking around, with his brothers supervising. He liked him with Anat, outside when they could sit for small blocks of time, nothing strenuous. Player was stronger, there was no doubt about it, but the nightmares and horrendous migraines were as bad as ever.
Zyah hadn’t dared sleep in the guest room. She showered when she came home from work and just went straight to her bedroom, giving her grandfather’s charcoal drawing her traditional hello and pressing a kiss to her father’s intricate scrolled frame with two fingers before sliding into the chair beside the bed. Player always said the same thing.
“Not safe for you in here.”
She always said the same thing right back to him. “Not safe for you without me.”
He couldn’t exactly argue with her. They stared at each other in the darkness. Why did he have to be so damn gorgeous? Why did she have to like him so much? When she was in his head, there was nothing of the smiling man he gave to her grandmother. With the things she saw in his head, she didn’t understand how he could smile.
“Babe. Really. You gotta let them take me back to the clubhouse. Steele can take care of me.”
“And what happens when you fall asleep, Player, and your mind starts with that weird illusion? It’s happening every single night, and the effects are getting stronger. If we can’t figure out what’s happening soon, something bad is going to happen.”
They had to talk about it. He didn’t want to. He never wanted to bring his nightmares out into the open. He wanted to pretend illusions were illusions and nightmares were nightmares, but that wasn’t going to help either one of them.
“You’re right, Zyah. Absolutely right, which is why I have to go. We can’t take chances with Anat. I can’t. I’m not willing to take a chance with either of your lives, and I have the feeling that’s exactly what’s going on here.”
Player stretched his arms behind his head, locking his fingers beneath the thick mass of unruly hair she had the sudden urge to tame. He stared up at the ceiling, not at her, giving her the impression he didn’t want to look at her.
“We’re still going to talk about this,” she said stubbornly. She hadn’t gotten as far as she had in the business world by being a shrinking violet. “I’m in your head every night, Player. It isn’t like I haven’t seen what’s there. Maybe it’s real, maybe it isn’t.”
She knew it was real. No child thought up those kinds of horrors. That dark, dank basement with the rats and chains and too little food. With the pedophiles and bloody bodies. The torture, shivering and biting cold. The discipline and punishments, the turning of bodies into weapons. Most of all, learning to build bombs. She closed her eyes, grateful Player was staring at the ceiling. Let him think she thought his dreams were a child’s nightmares.
“I have no idea why I keep having dreams at night.”
Zyah analyzed his tone. There was truth, but also a lie. “You often had nightmares even before you had a brain injury.”
“Could you just not put it like that?”
She winced at the venom in his voice. He really didn’t like the term brain injury. She’d noticed when Steele had used it a couple of times Player had gone quiet and not responded. He’d been very moody lately. She hated not being able to read him. He saved his sweetness for her grandmother. She wanted that sweetness for her, but then it was dangerous wanting that side of him. She was already too entangled with him. She didn’t want to be wanted because they had off-the-charts chemistry—sex was great until it wasn’t—or because she could fix his brain when he came apart. She wanted someone who loved her, not just needed her.
“I’m sorry, Zyah. I shouldn’t be snapping at you. I need to be outside. Riding on my bike. Feeling the wind in my face. I don’t know. I just feel like something bad is going to happen. And if it does, I don’t want it to happen anywhere near you or your grandmother.”
That was all true. She heard the sincerity in his voice. She could listen to his voice all night. Every night. She could lie in bed beside him, feeling the heat of his body, or sit, like she was now, and just feel him close to her and be happy with him in the same room. She didn’t understand why he didn’t feel the same way.
It wasn’t about him being a player like she’d first thought. He was a good man. She knew that from being with him every single night. She was in his mind. She was connecting with him. He was holding back from her. Deliberately.
She got that he’d been shot, that the injury had been life-threatening, but they shared the same mind every night. Healing him the way she did, she had to give herself to him, surrender who she was to him. He saw her, saw into who she was, just as she could see him. He was rejecting the person she was, and that hurt.
No matter what her grandmother said, she felt her gift had to be faulty. The other women in her family had the gift. They found the men who felt the exact same way about them. She went barefoot in her home, connecting with the earth. Feeling vibrations. So certain. Every single time, it was always Player, and yet he never felt those same strong connections back. The physical, yes. Their chemistry was extremely strong, and he felt that, just as she did. He needed her, certainly. But a devastating connection that was forever, that would bind them together heart to heart, soul to soul—Player had no knowledge of such a thing, or at least he rejected that bond with her.
Zyah knew she should let him leave. Go to his brothers in Torpedo Ink. Let them take him to his clubhouse. Find a way to try to separate herself from him. She was already tangled with him so tightly she knew it would hurt for years to come when they separated. Something undefined, some powerful portent inside, told her if she let him go, he would die. She couldn’t do that. She was always intelligent enough to listen to her instincts, and everything in her shouted to keep him close. She hoped it wasn’t just her wanting to belong to him. Could she really be that lonely? She doubted it. She was independent. She knew she always would be, even if she found the perfect man.
“Zyah?”
“It’s all right, Player. You don’t have to talk to me. I’m here, so just try to get some sleep. Steele said the more you sleep, the faster you’ll heal.” She was tired of trying to connect with him on the same level. It wasn’t going to happen. She had to face that.
She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself tightly, staring at the artwork her grandfather had painstakingly drawn all those years ago for her grandmother. It was very different. Very unique. Black and white. Charcoal. Such beautiful, precise lines. Even his signature falcon had been drawn with those lines. She couldn’t believe how much time and care he must have taken to draw such a masterpiece for Anat. The piece was an abstract, lines, whorls, squiggles and what looked like bird wings. Thick shading and thinner ones. She sometimes traced them lovingly over the glass. She almost knew them by heart.
Her father’s frame was equally as beautiful, a carved masterpiece, undeniably precious to her and every line memorized as well, that incredible scrollwork that looked as if it ha
d been dug up from some ancient pyramid and was covered in the very stars above them. She often traced the various carvings, and now that she had seen the doors to Alena’s restaurant and knew that Player had been the one to carve them, she thought he was the only one who might equal her father in his ability to capture such beauty in wood for her.
“I don’t like going to sleep when you’re upset.”
“What’s different about tonight than any other night? Let’s just get you healed and out of here. Isn’t that what we both want?” She was careful to keep the hurt out of her voice.
He didn’t answer. She kept her head down, aware that, although it was very dark out, the light shining off the sea gave them both the ability to read expressions if they chose. She didn’t want to chance him seeing her face. He made her feel vulnerable. Exposed. Every time she was with him—near him—she felt that way. She detested it when he felt so far from her. When she knew he wasn’t feeling the same way and never would.
She stayed very quiet, going over in her mind the things she saw repeatedly in his nightmare, trying to ignore the childhood trauma. She concentrated on the beginning. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Something wasn’t quite right there. It was as if the other children loved the story and the memories the hallucinogenic mushrooms brought them, but Player had a terrible aversion to the novel. He detested the recollection, which was odd because it happened repeatedly and he laughed with the others. He was so good at faking his amusement that those who knew him well believed him.
Zyah turned that over and over in her mind. She replayed the images of the various times she saw him do it in his dreams. The age changed, but the circumstances were often the same. There was some kind of intense trauma, a horrific torture of one or more of the others, and the reading would be asked for. At first, she could never get beyond the terrible things that had been done to the members of Torpedo Ink as children or teens, but eventually she forced herself to only look at Player’s face. He despised when they asked for the reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
He never stopped Absinthe or Transporter or Absinthe’s brother, Demyan, from reading the hated book, but he didn’t look at the others while it was being read. Why didn’t they notice? Because all of them had been beaten, tortured and used. They were all in such a terrible state and barely surviving. They were just children. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was entertainment, and Player knew it. They had to get their minds off what was happening to them, to their bodies. His illusions of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the caterpillar were his way of contributing to his brothers and sisters, but the cost to him was much greater than any of them understood. Maybe even greater than he understood.
She rubbed her hand up and down her thigh, massaging her aching muscle. She really needed a long hot soak in a tub. That was one of the things she loved to do at night. Or sit in the hot tub on the lower deck out under the stars in the middle of the night. She didn’t dare, not with Player waking every night in a cold sweat, out of his mind, the illusion turning to some strange reality she couldn’t quite fathom but needed to figure out fast because last night, for the first time, she had actually heard the ticking of a clock. That hadn’t been there before, not in all the four weeks of terrible nightmares and illusions.
Zyah glanced over at the bed. Player had drifted off. His body often went out fast, needing to rest and heal whether he wanted to or not. She glanced at her watch. He sometimes got a couple of hours of sleep before the nightmare took him. She hoped he would get at least that much. She knew from experience he was a very light sleeper, so she didn’t make the mistake of standing up and pacing like she wanted to. Instead, she eased her legs out and stretched to give her muscles a much-needed break.
Once more, she concentrated on young Player’s face while Absinthe read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud to everyone. He stared down at his hands, even when the others clamored for the characters to run around the basement with them. They wanted entertainment. He wasn’t proud in providing it for them. Why? It made him sick to do so. He squirmed, even though he kept a little half smile on his face. Guilt crossed his handsome features. Even then he’d already been so good-looking. What did he have to feel guilty about? He was every bit as tortured as the others. Beaten. Raped. The flesh torn from his body. Thin from lack of food.
The characters from the book suddenly joined them, acting out the scenes, making the others laugh, but Player’s expression never changed from that dark, miserable little boy staring down at his hands with that enigmatic little half smile. He didn’t think he was powerful, and yet he kept the characters acting out the scenes so easily, without looking or waving his hands toward them as a child might. Cards ran across the room to the delight of the others. Flamingos were held upside down to play croquet with.
Player’s fingers began to move against his thigh in a familiar pattern. She had seen that pattern many, many times now. In his dreams and out of them. In his head he began to build things. Even while he created the illusion for his childhood sisters and brothers, he began to build the things that took him away from what was tearing him up inside.
Zyah sat up straight. Player detested the illusion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that he took himself away from it by doing something else. He occupied himself by doing things his brain was very familiar with. He built bombs. He had been forced at a young age to learn, and he was good at it. Very good. He had a mind for it, and his hands were steady. His eyes were excellent. His memory impeccable. He was fast. The pocket watch. The gold pocket watch. The one that went from the White Rabbit’s very innocent golden pocket watch to the other one that suddenly appeared in the nightmare with the shadowy figure standing over the boy at the bench.
She forced herself to breathe evenly, afraid the change in her breathing would wake Player. She knew she was getting close to some revelation. She just didn’t know what it was. Who could be so twisted that they would do these things to children? She pressed her fingers to her lips and shook her head, wiping her mind blank. She couldn’t think about that and help him. He needed help. He had to get through this. She had to get to a place where she understood what was actually happening to him to throw him from his nightmare into his illusion and then into an alternate reality that became his reality.
So keep looking at that little boy down in that basement, Zyah. What do you see him doing while the others are watching the show he’s giving them? What did she see? He was tapping the rhythm on his thigh. Building the bomb in his head. Perfecting it. She saw the moment his head came up and alarm spread through him. What was it? What was different? What did he see that no one else did? They were still smiling. The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland characters were still cavorting around the room.
Zyah peered into the image until her eyes felt like they were bleeding. She looked everywhere and then looked again. Into the dark corners. The ceiling. She looked for the rabbit. The watch. Anything that was not part of the original story line that would have told a little boy that his illusion had gone from amusement into madness. Into the blurring of a line into possible reality.
She was connected to his mind. She had to stop trying to stay apart from him if she was going to find out the truth and let herself connect wholly with him, but if she did, it would just be that much harder to tear herself away from him.
She deserved better. She wasn’t going to settle for a man who didn’t love her. She didn’t want to be needed because she had a gift that could shore him up when his gift harmed him. She didn’t want to be wanted for sex. Okay, maybe that wasn’t being quite as truthful. She pressed her hand to her forehead, trying to decide whether to continue to be a coward and just call herself that.
Player made a sound. The moment he did, she forgot about her dilemma and jumped up. From experience, she knew better than to touch him. He was already sweating, fighting the sheets.
Without
warning, the silly rabbit appeared. She was used to him now, life-sized, just standing there, staring at his watch, pink nose wiggling. In front of him was the table. Before he had been shadowy, barely across from the bed, standing just in front of her grandfather’s picture. That seemed such a sacrilege to her. Her grandfather and father had kept her safe for years, and now, when she needed their magic the most, it was failing her. Her gift was failing. Everything she counted on was failing.
A man sat on the bench with his back to her, as he did in all of Player’s nightmares, still shadowy, still undefined, but she could make out wide shoulders. His head was down, and he concentrated on the various pieces of equipment in front of him. She had seen Player putting bombs together in his head enough times to know the likelihood was that whatever those individual tools, instruments and equipment were, put together, made up a bomb. The White Rabbit morphed into another man, one with a gold watch standing behind the man at work at the table.
The man working on the bomb was Player. Young or old, she would know him. His brown hair was wild and artfully kissed with white streaks. His back had the Torpedo Ink colors tatted into his skin, covering a multitude of scars and burns. The shadowy figure stared down at his pocket watch while he hunched over Player’s shoulder.
Suddenly, Zyah heard the ticking of the clock loud in the room, just as she had heard the night before. Her heart jumped and then began to pound. “Player. Wake up. Wake up now.”
The man with the pocket watch lifted his head as if he’d heard her. That was very frightening. Immediately, she began to dance, pushing her feet into the floor, calling up the magic of the earth. She gently extended her arms to bind Player to her, weaving them together, her voice singing softly to him to call him back to her. Fortunately, she had managed to forestall the nightmare before he was too far into it. By staying in the bedroom with him, she hadn’t allowed whatever was gripping him so tight at night to take him down that path and fling him fully into another reality. If she didn’t gather her courage and connect fully with him to see what he had discovered as a little boy when he had been so alarmed, she might lose him after all.
Reckless Road Page 17