Sacrifice The Knight: Checkmate, #6

by Finn, Emilia

  “You know what I’m gonna find in there. Don’t you?”

  He pauses for a long minute. His silver eyes flicker between mine. Then he nods.

  I turn back to the door and step inside the freezing apartment. My arms ache, and my fingertips fumble with the light switch. But I step in and close the door, then I go to the thermostat and pump it right up. I’ll toss my tips onto the counter to pay for the heating bill I’m about to accumulate.

  The kitchen remains as I’d expect. Clean table. Four chairs. A newspaper tossed into the center, and a coffee mug beside that. He doesn’t come into the diner anymore, so he needs to get his coffee and paper hit elsewhere. I guess he does it at home.

  Nobody runs along the metal stairs outside. No police sirens wail in the distance… yet. I have just a matter of minutes to find what I need to find, then to make peace with my world.

  I slide my fingertips along the stupid hat that Eric always wore and wonder, with a hitch to my breath, why now, when the weather is appropriate, he’s not wearing it. Stupid man can’t get his seasons straight. He’ll sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter, and I really shouldn’t care, but I can’t seem to find it in my heart to stop.

  I move through the small kitchen and stop at the entrance to the living room. Blindly groping the wall, I locate the light switch, but I take a moment before switching it on to prepare myself. It’s like I already know what I’m going to find. I know what he’s been hiding all of this time. And I know whatever strength my heart had regained the last two months of silence will now be irreparably broken.

  Holding my breath and squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, I flip the switch and open my eyes to smiles. So many photographed smiles. I walk into the living room and see stars. Not the good kind, but the kind that predict I’m about to fall on my ass. I move to the TV stand and pick up a family photo. Eric. A woman. And a child who is the perfect half-and-half blend of the adults who hold her.

  “Oh God.” I walk backwards until my legs hit the couch, then I drop. “Oh my God. He has a whole family.” I sit forward with the silver-framed image in one hand, but I rest my elbows on my knees and press my fingers into my eyes. I need a minute. I need to breathe.

  I need a whole new fucking life.

  “I’m so sorry I never told you.”

  I drop my hands and meet his eyes as he stands in the doorway. I didn’t hear him on the stairs. I didn’t hear the door open. But it doesn’t matter, because my heart still leaps for him, even while I hold a framed portrait of his perfect white picket fence family.

  “What the fuck, Eric?”

  27

  Eric

  I haven’t looked straight into Katrina Blair’s beautiful eyes in thirty-four days, seven hours, fuck knows how many minutes, and far too many seconds. Our separation has been like a permanent stretch of suffocation. I can’t breathe without her, but losing her because she knew me would be too much to bear. I wouldn’t be able to survive that. Katrina was my drug of choice for almost two years straight, a dependency that raced past tipping point the night her ex came to the diner and wanted a little of her attention. She was the hit I craved when I was jittery, but I’ve been without for so long, you would assume I’d detoxed.

  I can’t. I tried. I cannot detox from her.

  I can’t get over her.

  It’s almost as though time has sharpened my senses. I see her now, sitting on my couch with puffy eyes and a bouncing knee. Her chest expands and drops, and fat tears sit on her swollen lips.

  Tears that I caused.

  This was never supposed to bring her pain.

  She wears those sinful blue jeans, white sneakers, and a tight top that displays her perfect shape. Her scarf is missing today, her hair tied up high. She wears mascara that runs with her tears, but her lips are bare and pale, her cheeks warm. Her eyes are both cutting and hurt, straight, but insecure.

  My secrets have hurt her. My truths are making her bleed.

  “Katrina.” I take a step forward, loathing the way her name on my tongue makes her tense up. I hate that her shoulders tighten, that her hands shake, and her lips firm. I hate that my taking a step forward forces her to sit back, as though to maintain the space between us. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You need to explain this to me.” She turns the framed photograph and pushes home exactly what I lost. I lost them. I lost her. “Explain to me your little love story, Eric. Because there’s no way I can spin this in my head and still come out thinking what we did was okay.”

  “I was married.”

  “No fucking shit!” she snaps. “Gemma and Callie. The names on your body, so fucking obvious and right there for me to see, but I was the dirty whore who pretended they weren’t inked on for all eternity. I saw their names, but I was too cowardly to ask. But here we are, at the end of a fucking affair, a secret affair, mind you, a secret I somehow suggested. Did you laugh at how stupid I am? When you went back to your buddies at Checkmate, when they knew you had a wife and kid at home, but you were fucking the waitress in your spare time, did you joke about how you didn’t have to convince me to keep us quiet, but I suggested it?”

  “No, of course no–”

  She stands as fury burns in her eyes. “I must look so stupid to you. I encouraged the secrecy. I demanded it! I came to you. I was the idiot coming to you in the middle of the night like a desperate loser. It was the easiest affair you ever had! And it was all initiated by me.”

  “No, Katrina.” I take another step forward, but when she brings her hands up as though to beat on me, I lift mine in surrender. “I swear it wasn’t like that. I’m not married anymore. I didn’t cheat on my wife.”

  “So what then? Explain it to me! You’ve been here for years, but I have never seen this little girl around.” She thrusts the photograph forward. “You’re a deadbeat too? Make a baby, leave it with the mother and continue on with your life like it doesn’t bother you to miss out on the best thing you ever created. How dare you invite Mac and me into your life when you can’t even take care of the child you already have! How dare you do that to us!”

  “Katrina…” My voice cracks, and my arm smarts when I catch her hands before she beats me with the photo frame. “Katrina! Stop.” I snatch the frame away and toss it to the couch so it lands with a soft plop. “Stop! I didn’t cheat on my wife, okay? And I was as involved with my daughter’s upbringing as I could be.”

  “This sounds like a cunning prelude to a but. But her mother kept her from me. But her mother is a bitch. But her mother remarried and moved to Australia. You’re speaking to the wrong woman, Eric. Deadbeat dads are my specialty.”

  “Gem and Callie died.” I pull her against my chest when my callously dropped words turn her ghostly white. “I’m so sorry, baby. I swear I didn’t desert them. Not in the way you think I did.”

  “Oh God,” she whimpers. “This is so much worse. Somehow, this is way worse.”

  “Yes.” I breathe in the scent of her hair, if only to strengthen myself against what’s coming. “This is way worse. An affair is a choice, a shitty choice that I could make and own and maybe one day earn forgiveness. But this isn’t that, and it hurts so much worse. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t a dirty secret I was trying to keep, but more of something I was trying to protect you against. It was selfish of me,” I rush out when she tries to pull back. “I get that now. I made the selfish choice to keep my secrets, but in my mind, I was doing the right thing.”

  “What happened to them?” She leans into me for a moment, dries her eyes on my shirt, then pulls back, tearing the air from my lungs as she goes. “What happened to them, Eric? When?” She swipes a hand beneath her eyes. “Why? You need to explain it to me.”

  I made a point of never having Katrina here in the daylight, but even though the sun is almost all gone outside, she’s already switched the lights on. She sees what I see. I swallow the painful lump in my throat, then extend a hand as though in invitation to look around at the dozen o
r so pictures I still have on display. Her eyes flicker from my wedding portrait, to prom, to candids while on vacation, to others while I wear a uniform and I’m presented with medals.

  I step away, hating the way she stumbles back and drops to the edge of the couch. She’s wounded, winded, and it’s all my fault as she picks up the photo I tossed on the cushions a minute ago. I move back to give her a moment to look, go to the kitchen and pour two glasses of water, then I silently set the glasses on the coffee table in front of her.

  Stepping to my television cabinet, I take my wedding photo and hold it out so Katrina can take it in her shaking hands. She does nothing but stare. She doesn’t even look away when I sit down and our thighs touch.

  “She’s so beautiful,” she whimpers. “I wanted to find her flaws, to lay some of my homewrecking ways on her shoulders, as though her looks could be a reason for your wandering eye. But that’s dumb, and she’s so beautiful.”

  I sit forward on the couch and stare into my glass of water. I don’t have to look at the pictures anymore. I know every minute detail. I’ve done nothing but stare for a decade. “You’re not a homewrecker, Katrina. I swear you’re not, just as confidently as I can swear Gemma was neither horrible nor ugly. She was kinda perfect in her own way. She was my high school sweetheart, so we were together for years, and we married just as soon as they handed over our diplomas. We wanted it all, and we were willing to dive in head first.”

  “You have her name on your chest.”

  “Yes. I do.” I run my fingertip over the rim of my glass and think back two decades. “We were the same age, our birthdays were just a couple months apart. We were each other’s firsts. Everything. Kiss. Virginity. Date. Everything we did, we did it together, we experienced it together.”

  I sit back against the couch and blow out a deep breath. It’s time to tell her everything, because it was selfish to keep it to myself. It’ll scare her, but she deserves the truth.

  “What Gemma and I had was special. And it was different than what I feel for you.”

  I hate that she scoots away from my words. It hurts her to place that foot of space between us, but she rejects me anyway. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s not about my feelings anymore. It’s not about my fears. It’s about telling her the truth, and letting her make her own decisions.

  “Um…” I clear my throat. “Gemma and I were young; we were naïve, and we were never given a reason to be scared of what may become of us. We literally never considered a life where we wouldn’t be together. Dating. College. Marriage.” I pause. “Baby.”

  I close my eyes and absorb her strangled cry.

  “It was straight out of a ‘How To’ book, ya know? And we did it all in the exact right order. If anyone wanted to create a course on perfect relationships, they could have used us for a case study, and we would have graciously accepted the role, farting rainbows all over the place without a care for the people who didn’t have what we did.”

  I’m going to apply to work for the feds. I really think I can make a difference.

  Oh cool! she’d reply. I think that’s a great idea. It’s noble, and… she’d blush. And kinda sexy, too.

  “She supported me when I said I wanted to become a federal agent.” I chuckle. “She told me it was sexy. And it was…” I shrug. “For a little while. It was sexy while I studied. It was sexy while I spent time in weapons training. It was even sexy when I was working cases and making the difference I was so determined to make. But as I worked my way up the chain and the types of cases I was given changed, sexy became you work too much. It became we never see you. It became why can’t you tell me about your work?”

  “Did you…” Katrina’s voice cracks. “Did you divorce first? Were you separated when she died?”

  She knows the answer already, but it doesn’t stop her from asking.

  “No. We never divorced. Gemma knew I couldn’t talk to her about my work; she knew why. She knew all that, and even if she got lonely, we were still very much in love. We were living and working through the stress, the exhaustion, even the time apart. It hurt us, but still, we worked at our relationship, and when I was at home, Gem and Callie received my undivided focus.”

  “Oh God,” she chokes. “Callie? Hurry and say it fast. Tell me quick.”

  “Callie was my daughter.” I climb to my feet and leave Katrina to take her moment in private, while I move to the TV cabinet and bring back yet another photo of the three of us. We were vacationing in the mountains that year; all three of us had red noses and bright eyes. Callie had frozen boogers under her nose and a lost pink unicorn glove. So she wore one of mine. “Callaghan DeWhit, named for both of us, was my greatest accomplishment in life. She was wild and silly. She was beautiful and brave.”

  Katrina can’t stop sobbing. If you’d told me an hour ago Katrina would cry beside me and I’d do nothing about it, I would have called bullshit. But that’s what I do. Nothing. Because she needs to be able to process without my interference. She needs to process without worrying about me.

  “I can admit now, long after the fact, that I was a great husband. I was the perfect father. And I was a dedicated agent. I excelled at everything I did. But…” I pause. “Not all at the same time. I couldn’t be all of those things at the same time.” I sit back and stare at the ceiling while Katrina holds my framed photos and her thumb strokes my daughter’s chubby cheeks. They’ll never not be chubby. She’ll never outgrow her baby fat. “Most of my work kept me close to home, which meant I got to live a kind of nine-to-five work day. Sometimes I worked overtime, but everyone does that, even regular guys with regular jobs. But the harder I worked and earned better titles and pay, the harder my cases became.”

  “They got more dangerous,” she chokes out. “The higher you go, the more secret it becomes.”

  “Yes. Some cases were easy, open and closed, and still allowed me to eat with my family at seven. But some others required I change my name; they required I pretend to be someone else, and for the girls’ safety, I was to pretend they didn’t exist.” I continue to stare at the ceiling, because I don’t want to see Katrina’s face when I admit my faults. “According to Gem, I did that a little too well. But according to those who ruined my life, I fucked it up and left too many clues.”

  I glance down when I feel Katrina move on the couch. Climbing to her feet, she tucks my photographs under her arm and starts walking my living room. I have a dozen or so images framed and displayed. To remind me what I had. To remind me what I lost. She leans closer to some, strokes others, cries at the photo of my baby just days old when she had her first bath.

  “Go on. Finish it, please.”

  I drop my head back and nod. “Derrick Ireland was a bad dude who liked to sell drugs to pay his bills. He was middle management, similar to Abel Hayes – another case we worked not so long ago. But even middle management makes a fuck load of money when you’re selling blow, and when that income is threatened, dudes tend to get pissed.” I brush a hand over my stubbled chin. “I was working inside Derrick’s club, placed as a goon. I did nothing more than watch doors, then report back to my people with the information I’d gathered or overheard. I thought I was careful. Well,” I scoff, “I thought I was smarter than them. I thought my marriage was more important than my work or Derrick’s, so I’d call home all the time, even though I wasn’t supposed to. I had no clue I was found out, so when I was called into Derrick’s office, I figured he was asking for an update, like he’d done a bunch of times before. I stood opposite Kane Bishop.”

  Katrina turns to me with a wildness in her eyes. “Kane was there?”

  “Yes. He was undercover too. We’d known each other for a couple years already, but in that club, Kane and I didn’t know each other. He was smarter than me, better at his job, faster, sleeker, whatever. But we both started as door boys, and he sailed ahead of me and became an inside soldier.”

  “Was he a bad guy?” she whispers. “Was he a real bad gu
y?”

  “No. He was never dirty. He was never not on my side. He was just that good at his work. I walked into that office and kept my eyes off him, since we were supposed to be strangers, and since I figured it was a regular meet, I started spouting off my shit like it was a normal day.”

  Carefully placing Callie’s baby picture back down, then the other two beside it, Katrina comes back with red-rimmed eyes and shaking hands. She sits on the coffee table in front of me so her legs wedge between mine. “What happened?”

  “Kane was ordered to grab me.”

  Her eyes widen. “Did he?”

  “Of course. The barrel of his gun rested against my temple, and I swear, I nearly dropped a load on my shoes. I wasn’t scared of Bishop, because he’s my brother. I didn’t doubt him for one second. But the order for him to grab me was bad.” I sit forward and drop my head. “It was bad news. Derrick pulled up video of my…” I choke on my words. “It was a video of Gemma. They’d beaten her to hell and back. They hurt her bad, and to this day, I still go to sleep thinking of what happened to her. If I’d been better at my job, they would never have found her.”

  “Eric…” For the first time in two months, her gentle hands come to my hair and cup my cheeks. It’s nothing more than her maternal side caring for someone who is hurt, but I can’t stop the fire that races through my veins at her touch.

  “Derrick showed me this video of my beautiful wife, and it’s only because I knew her so well, that I had known her for so long, that I recognized her. She was beaten so bad, she was barely Gemma anymore. They’d tied her up and tortured her for information.” I meet Katrina’s eyes. “This is why we’re not allowed to tell our wives anything. This is why we’re encouraged not to have a wife at all. Kane held me still while they showed a fucking video of her crying, and then Callie ran into the frame and threw herself on her mom’s body.”

  “Oh my God,” Katrina cries. “She was protecting her mommy.”