by Ace Gray
“Is this it?” The driver asked.
“Yeah,” I croaked.
Police tape still blocked my driveway, and Danger’s blood still pooled on the pavement as I slid underneath it and slunk toward my home. The home that I had worked so goddamn hard to fortify, but that had crumbled anyway. We’d only ever wanted to remove the cancer, but we ended up undermining its foundation.
And now I was empty.
Except there was a light.
On in my bedroom.
I knew who it was. That same song she’d strummed inside me that first day played again but deeper, darker. The bass came in and something menacing hung on the notes. She’d come back to me. I followed the serenade, running, floating—fuck if I know—until I was standing in my doorway, looking down at my girl as she shoved things into a suitcase.
Mercy.
Packing frantically.
To leave me.
Where my heart had leapt before, it tumbled. I’d been fooling myself to believe that she’d come around. All those times I’d let my anger take control, I’d been right. She didn’t understand. She never had. I loved her. I needed her to breathe. What did a guy have to do? I’d been patient. I’d been kind. I’d kept my hands to myself when it killed me. Fucking killed me. Why wasn’t loving her with every fiber of my being enough? And if that wasn’t, what the fuck was?
My vision turned a little red. The color of love. The color of hate. My ears boxed out the sound of the room—the sound of her leaving me—and surrendered to the deafening roar of my anger inside me. I couldn’t hear the slam of my heart, but I felt it in my chest, clawing to get to her.
When it couldn’t, I reached for her instead.
By the wide-open terror plastered on her face when I grabbed her, I gathered Mercy screamed as she started struggling in my arms. But I couldn’t hear. And I couldn’t let her go. I’d drown without her. Didn’t she know that?
She fought. Hard and wild. The only way to keep hold of her was to pin her. To trap her. She had to breathe life into me. I needed it. I yanked at the thin denim strap of her overalls I’d snagged and pulled her to me, desperate to keep hold. She shoved harder, and the panic inside me had accelerated to pure self-preservation. She had to keep me alive.
She owed me.
How much had I done for her since Dantè left her? I’d even removed the parasite from her life in the first place. Didn’t she see what she could be—what she could become—without him?
I was her fucking savior.
She owed me penance.
I took her lips. Even as she whaled on my chest. The taste of her lit fire to the last few embers of life inside me. And as I kissed her again and again and again, I felt the inferno of lust I’d always carried for Mercy burn white hot.
I shoved at her overalls, tripping up at the complexity of buttons and snaps and excess fabric, but reveling in the feeling the heat of her skin so close to mine. I bit her shoulder and felt the vibration of her full-body, delicious scream. My heart was thumping in time with hers—surely a sign that this was right. I tasted the salt of tears on her cheek and knew what her arousal would taste like. Sweet, salt, and unadulterated Mercy.
She would be mine, body and soul this time. She had to be.
A single strap gave way and I shoved at the tube top she was wearing underneath until her pert breast peeked out at me. It was the perfect, tanned teardrop that I’d always imagined. Fantasized over. I was finally going to feast on her flesh. I closed my eyes for a moment to imagine. When I opened them again, the sight of her swaying breast was even better than the first time.
She was still screaming, still fighting, but I couldn’t hear it as I weathered it. I wore a half smile on my face. She was beautiful in her savage fury and pain. A reflection of my insides. She always had been, she’d never known. Never accepted.
She’d accept this.
She’d love this.
She’d love me.
I’d make her.
And I knew, the second I buried myself in her, I’d bury the world for both of us. Just like I had buried Dantè Rogue.
Dantè had been right there all along. The first day, after my realization, I’d had a hard time breathing, the weight on my chest was almost unbearable. It pressed me deep into my hotel mattress. I could have touched him. Held him. Kissed him. He could have healed me in a way that I was desperate for, my very marrow ached with what could have been.
But he’d stayed hidden.
He hadn’t wanted me back. Us back. And look at what a toxic entity we’d become in his absence. I wanted to curl up and die. Or vomit. The hurt—the betrayal—was too much.
The second day, I woke up and something new coursed through my veins. Anger. He’d left me alone. He’d left me with them. He had his reasons, I’m sure, but not a single one I could fathom made up for that kind of selfishness.
He had promised me. He had said forever. That lasted just as long as he was comfortable. Just as long as it was easy. I had words for a prick like that. I ended up in front of Danger’s work—their work— to see him. To spew those accusations at him. He had no right to slither off when it came to me.
But no one came. The office never opened. Row—Dantè—whatever he wanted to call himself, never freaking came. And when I settled into my driver’s seat to go home, I blew out a deep breath and couldn’t tell if it was in relief or fury.
I stayed awake that night, battling the ebb and flow of fury and hurt. Everything I’d been tied to that man. Everything. And right around sunrise that was what pissed me off. I’d become one of those women who put all her stock in the men around her. I’d stayed on that surfboard, floating at the mercy of the ocean, until I became lost. I hadn’t paddled. I hadn’t caught the wave. I’d just stayed there, hoping that some boy would tell me which crest to catch.
I hated myself for it.
And then I decided to do something about it. I was putting my foot down. I was moving on from that house, that damage, that past, all its unbearable weight, and those boys once and for all. I was going to find myself. Then I would find Dantè, and I would give him the piece of my mind he deserved. I would tell him how I’d known. How I had seen his secrets and lies. How I’d seen him choose a life without me. And how I had gone out and done the same damn thing.
For a long time I thought I’d lose everything if I left that house. And there was a loss, the shattering loss of all he’d been to me, of the pedestal I’d kept him on, but I would face that head on. I didn’t have to break on the jagged points of it. It took leaving to realize how warped and twisted my life had become.
It had been an easy decision to slip in the back, gather my things and move…on. I wouldn’t sit there in that hotel room and wait for Dantè, and with the camera money running out, I couldn’t either. I was going to get my stuff and wash my hands of them all. I’d sleep in the shop if I had to.
I pulled off the road and into that unmarked lot that sat above the surf spot. I refused to acknowledge that it was our surf spot. Not right now. Not until I could look back on those memories with indifference rather than fury. I crept through the woods with the same detached view of things. Up that trail we’d taken so many times. Through the trees Dantè had kissed me against. I only needed to wait until the house was empty, then get in and get out.
For the first time in almost four years, I caught a break. The house was empty, still as a grave, when I finally laid eyes on it. I watched for a little while, until my thighs burned from my crouch where I was hidden. When I shook out my legs and tiptoed in, I stayed in the shadows and listened again.
Nothing.
So I ran into the room my stuff had shared with Diego. I was shoving things into bags as fast as I could when I felt the whisper of a breeze on my shoulders. My heart stopped for a singular moment just before my overalls were wrapped and twisted in a fist, and I was being pulled away from my suitcases. I screamed as I flung my arms out to try to stop the movement.
Even if the smell of c
oconut hadn’t given him away, I would have known it was Diego. The way he’d changed, how he’d come to demand things of me and my body.
“Stop!” I screamed, because I knew it was different this time. Whatever had been barely contained before had broken loose and was bent on destruction.
He didn’t say a word as I shoved and struggled against him, but I heard him take deep breaths behind me, drinking in my scent.
“Fucking let go of me Diego!” I dug my nails into him as he turned me to face him.
Before I could scream again, his lips mashed down onto mine. Everything about his kiss was wrong. My lips ground against my teeth. His hands dug into my arms painfully. I could feel his erection pressing into my hip even as I fought against him. But it wasn’t the physical touch that made vomit churn in my stomach. It was him. What he’d really become. What he was finally doing to me.
I screamed against his lips, and the sounds seemed to jumpstart his movements. His hands were on me, pawing at every inch of my chest and shoulders. I kept fighting him, but somehow he managed to keep me pinned tight to him. Tight to his lips.
My tears built inside me and bubbled over. Full sobs wracked my body as the emotion of my entire life broke inside me. They’d taken from me over and over and over again. Men, boys, and the lies that they all liked to tell me. My body was the last little bit of me that was mine, and mine alone, but Diego was going to take that too.
He finally managed to rip my strap, sending the button flying. The world went silent, even my own screams were lost in that deafening void. Only the plink, plink, plink of the small white button from my overalls sounded as it hit against the wooden floor as he continued mauling me, ripping my shirt from my skin. As he ripped away my dignity and trust from somewhere buried deep inside me.
Screams still poured from me as he palmed and tweaked my nipple; I made myself focus on the rawness of my throat. The ache of my jaw. Not on his hands. On anything but his hands.
Diego bent to press his lips to my chest, the wild surf-stained curls I’d combed and braided when things were better, now a thick veil hiding his violation. My tears fell unabashedly onto him as I kept shoving and shoving at his shoulders. Nothing I did seemed to matter, he didn’t flinch, even as I wrenched my body away from him, only my nipple suffered the consequences.
I knew I was begging him, my words had to be the manifestation of the wild pleas in my mind. Please and no and don’t and if you ever really loved me a litany over and over and over; my only prayer for him to let me go. When I started clawing at him, his skin flexed then gave way. There were droplets of heat, blood, beneath my fingernails, but what stung was the heat of his breath on my skin.
He shoved me up against the wall as if I wasn’t fighting, as if he wasn’t taking my world from me. He ripped my shirt from my other breast and with the disappearance of the fabric, I sagged against the wall. Tired on a soul-deep level from fighting him. From fighting life. Hadn’t my father told me this was my future? My only redeeming quality? Since I was nine.
Only Dantè had been different. Or so I thought. Today was going to be the day I realized the truth of it all.
Diego noticed the change, the surrender of my body. He kept his weight against me, but used his hands to shove my breasts together and explore the canyon of my cleavage with his tongue. The pain of my shoulders shaking against the wall behind me was almost hypnotic, like I’d been bewitched into accepting my fate. Into accepting this.
I was finally going to drown.
“Merce, can we please drive down the road to Shell Beach?” Dantè asked, sitting atop his surfboard past the break. At our beach.
“I wanna practice here. Where we met.” I was insistent.
“This beach will always be precious but these waves are big. The reef…” His words were sweet but his brow furrowed as he scanned the rocks and reef he knew all too well. “Please?”
“I’m the one that’s gonna beg.”
His face squinted further but he nodded. “Stay on this side of me.” He pointed far away from the rocks.
And I did what I was told, paddled over—far over—and turned. Wave after wave, I tried. I’d stood up before but I’d never ridden in. Today I would. Here I would. With him, I knew for sure, I would. I squared my shoulders again under his watchful eye, and this time, I timed it perfectly. I popped up on the board, the feel of the wind and spray dappling my face with perfect, joyous droplets. I even shifted enough to cut back without losing my balance completely.
That was when I chanced a look back over my shoulder. To him. My light, my love, the wave I planned to ride forever.
A single look was all it took; I flew from the board, the leash burning as it yanked at my ankle. Way off in the distance, muffled by the crash of waves, Dantè’s scream reached my ears just before the wave washed the sound of the world into nothing.
For a split second, it was peaceful.
But then I somersaulted. Coral ripped at my shoulder. Then my forehead. The leash at my leg was still taut, pulling me in a direction I didn’t want to go, as my lungs burned with the breath I was holding.
Finally, I found the bottom with my free foot and I pushed. I didn’t care that the razor-sharp floor cut into my foot. I just pushed.
Air shoved into my lungs the moment I broke the surface but that wasn’t what kept me alive. It was Dantè. He was bellowing “Fight” over the boom of the wave. Again and again.
When the waves pummeled me again and drug me under, it was that rhythmic command from the boy I loved that beat in my chest. It was that command that sent my hands for the leash to drag my board into my body. It was that command that urged me to face the glass shards in my feet again as I not only pushed for air but for my life.
I broke the surface again and wrapped onto the board a moment before Dantè was there wrapped around me.
“Fight,” I could hear it again now. The tone of his voice. The timbre as he competed with the chaos of the ocean. As he drug me from hell. “Fight.”
It wasn’t the unrelenting swirl of the drowning ocean, but Diego. His mouth still on me. His hands everywhere. My tube top was shoved around my midriff, and my overalls had slid to my waist, but that wouldn’t stop me.
I was going to fucking fight.
He wasn’t expecting it when I found that force within me, that force that always took me back to Dantè. My whimpers turned into a war cry as I shoved him. His hands wheeled away from my body, and I took the opportunity to shove the heel of my hand up into his nose. Blood flowed immediately and he howled as he cupped his face. When he doubled over, I dropped my shoulder and ran right into his chest. He screamed as my move hit his hands and jostled his nose.
I shoved again.
This time he lost his balance and fell back to the floor.
“Fight.”
I pulled my leg back and let it fly like I was aiming for goal posts. Right to his chin. His head snapped back and a few splatters of blood followed the arc of his neck. He slumped back onto the floor, his neck bent awkwardly against the foot of the mattress.
He didn’t flinch. He barely breathed. His body limp, with blood leaking down his face and pooling onto his chest. I blew out a single breath, then pulled my tube top and remaining strap back into place. Even though I was covered again, shivers wracked my spine.
I had to go. I knew that. But I couldn’t look away, my body locked up. What had happened between us flashed before me, and I heaved onto the floor, catching a little of his shin. He flinched and fear and fury choked me. I still felt his hands on me. His lips.
The tears were hot on my cheeks but the acid in my stomach was him. What he’d done. What he was willing to do. I hated him for it. I hated him and Danger and Rousse for all of it.
Without giving it a second thought, I stepped closer to him and raised my knee toward my chest. I let it drop, driving my heel into his balls.
I barely made it out the backdoor and down the trail, the tears were almost blinding. I wrapped my hands
around my rib cage and tried to keep my balance but the tree roots almost took me down. The feeling of his hands and lips on me kept playing tricks on my skin. There wasn’t water hot enough or enough steel wool on the planet to make me feel clean again.
He’d dirtied my heart.
And I felt it. So deep inside me, I didn’t know how to heal it. Dantè would have. The old version. The one that hadn’t left me to rot like that by myself. But now his name was a fresh knife to the heart. He could have sheltered me but he abandoned me instead. He was free. I’d been the one that begged the lawyer, hired her, and paid her. I’d stayed in this hellhole just to make it happen.
When I reached my car, I turned and slid down the door until I was a pile in the dirt. Every bone in my body hurt. The ache resonated in my soul. The cool breeze, that usually soothed me, did nothing more than raise the hairs on the back of my neck as I buried my head in my hands.
Diego was scum of the worst kind, but when I’d needed Dantè, he wasn’t there. It was a different type of pain. I couldn’t even call him to tell him how that battered my insides. But maybe I could call her…
I reached into my pocket for my phone, scrolled to find her number, and before I thought a lot about it, I clicked and heard it ring.
“Hi, you’ve reached the voice mailbox of Mackenzie Relle. I am either on the other line or away from my phone. Please feel free to call my office if you need immediate assistance, otherwise leave a message after the tone.”
Her voice was familiar but I was too busted up to figure out from where. Instead, I waited for the beep and then let my motion bubble up and over onto her voicemail.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I cried. “What did I do to you?” I gasped between sobs. “Dantè Rogue was the love of my life, and I would have sold my very soul to set him free—I almost did—but you didn’t tell me. And if you’d told me he was free, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t have had to fight him off. I wouldn’t feel his hands on me. He tried to rape me,” I cried into the phone. “He tried to rape me because I was alone. I’m alone because Dantè—” I choked on his name. “I loved him with all my heart, but Diego took my heart and ripped it apart when he bit my collarbone…”