Darker the Release

by Claire Kent

  Despite the intensity, he looked as sophisticated and composed as ever in his dark gray business suit and shiny shoes. Except his face was more flushed than it normally was, and his eyes…

  She closed her own eyes against them and tried to curl up even tighter, as if she could somehow close him out.

  “So what have you been doing this evening?” he gritted out, his voice a mockery of the conversational words. “Anything interesting?”

  She ignored him. She couldn’t even begin to understand what might be wrong with him.

  Caleb paced over to the table where Kelly had tossed her purse as she’d come into the apartment. He picked up the stack of pages she’d printed off at the library—an article from a professional art journal—so her visit wouldn’t look suspicious.

  “Been to the library?” The words were an attempt at a silky purr, but he wasn’t in control enough to make it effective.

  Kelly blinked, starting to have an inkling about what he might be so angry about.

  “See anyone interesting there?” Caleb asked, his murmur edged with something rough and grating. He moved back over to the couch until he was looming above her again. “Do anything interesting there?”

  Kelly just blinked up at him again. Like everything else, his rage at this point seemed utterly ludicrous, and she was too frozen to even respond to it.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Caleb roared, her disinterest finally pushing him out of his attempt at bitter coldness.

  She squeezed her legs more tightly against her chest and hid her face. Not because she was afraid of his anger but because his voice was just too loud.

  Caleb must have dropped down beside her. She suddenly felt his hand on her shoulder. It was surprisingly gentle, given his mood the moment before. “Kelly?” His voice was different now—hoarse, almost tender. “Kelly? Are you all right? Did he…hurt you?”

  She felt something strange in her chest. If she hadn’t been so numb, she would have probably recognized it as a pang in response to the sudden concern in Caleb’s voice, so incongruously juxtaposed with his enraged defiance earlier.

  She should have just gone with the excuse he’d unintentionally given her. It would have given her a way out of this situation, at least.

  But for some reason she wasn’t able to. She just mumbled, “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

  Jack hadn’t hurt her. She had hurt him.

  “So you were there by choice.” Caleb’s momentary flash of urgent concern erupted into bitter resentment again. “So you liked it. So you wanted a cheap fuck in the library.”

  His anger still wasn’t affecting her. His words felt like innocuous pings against the impenetrable numbness of her heart.

  Caleb seemed to realize this too because suddenly he was hauling her to her feet. His hands were forceful and bruising on her upper arms, and her knees buckled as he tried to position her upright in front of him.

  She felt like a rag doll, like it wasn’t even worth the trouble of standing up.

  “Damn it, Kelly,” Caleb muttered, his face flushed again and his eyes blazing with the kind of pure, visceral wrath she’d rarely seen in him before. “What’s wrong with you? Was the fucking so good you can’t even stand up?”

  He was in complete control of her body—she was only resisting him through her involuntary limpness—and he ended up pushing her back against the wall in her living room.

  Her head banged back against the wall with the force of his momentum, and she instinctively tried to blink away the sharp dizziness from the sudden shift in position.

  Caleb was still gripping her ruthlessly by her upper arms, holding her up now with the support of the wall and with the press of his hard, hot body.

  “Was it that good?” he snarled, the cold, calculating man he’d always been swallowed completely by his wild, primitive rage. “Can he give you so much more than I can?” He used one of his knees to part her legs so he could push his pelvis against her more forcefully. He wasn’t aroused, though. Was just trying to get her attention. And Kelly didn’t even react to the angry push of his body against hers. “Do I leave you so unsatisfied that you have to sneak off and screw some—”

  Kelly couldn’t seem to feel anything. She was just so tired. And she wanted him to go away.

  “I didn’t—” she began, wondering why she was even bothering to explain.

  “Don’t lie to me. What kind of a fool do you take me for? You’ve done nothing but lie to me—the whole time we’ve been together—and you think you can get away with it. And now you can’t stop yourself from cheating on me.”

  Kelly just blinked at him. She wondered if you could cheat on someone you were never really in a relationship with.

  “They sent me pictures,” Caleb went on roughly, taking hold of her chin with ungentle fingers. His eyes crawled almost cruelly over her face. “You tried to slip away, but I had more than one man following you, since I knew you couldn’t be trusted. And now I can see for myself. I know how you look after you’ve been fucked.”

  The ironies were coming thick and fast today, but Kelly didn’t have it in her to appreciate them.

  “What does it matter?”

  Caleb made a strange sort of choking sound, and his face almost twisted with the intensity of his emotions. “What does it matter?” he repeated, loud, violent, uncontrolled. He hauled her up so that she was higher against the wall, since her knees had been buckling again. “It matters because I have been faithful to you. I haven’t fucked anyone but you since we got together. Even after I found out who you are and what you were really doing with me, I still didn’t…I thought we were…” He cut off his words, giving his head a brief, jerky toss. “I haven’t even thought about cheating on you. Why the hell shouldn’t I be angry?”

  The part of Kelly’s mind that was still working beneath her blank haze recognized that Caleb wasn’t just angry. He’d been wounded and was lashing out instinctively, like a bleeding animal.

  She would have been pleased by this sort of victory, had she been capable of feeling anything at all.

  It seemed like she should be experiencing a whole storm of emotions, like her feelings should be burying her alive.

  But she wasn’t. They weren’t. They must be there inside her somewhere, but all of her feelings were somehow sealed off at the moment, with a blankness as hard and unyielding as stone. And not all of Caleb’s rage or jealousy or pain seemed capable of breaking through to her own.

  Not even the faint realization that he somehow seemed to know who she was.

  She weakly tried to shrug Caleb off, not in anger or fear but in empty annoyance.

  He wouldn’t let her go. Gripped her harder. “Look at me, damn it!”

  And that did it. Kelly snapped.

  “Bastard!” she hissed, unable to find a word that came anywhere close to expressing the depth of her hatred. Her limp body suddenly tightened into fury, and she shoved Caleb with all of her strength away from her.

  He stumbled back. Stared at her in astonishment.

  She didn’t give him enough time to process the shift in dynamic. Advanced on him a white-hot rage barely held in check by the cold momentum of her will. Suddenly slammed with the entire weight of her grief, hatred, betrayal, and confusion from the last seventeen years of her life, Kelly lashed out—with both her hands and her voice.

  “You’re mad at me for lying to you! You’ve lied about everything every moment of your life!” Her voice was shrill and raspy, and she was frantically pummeling Caleb with her fists until he grabbed her forearms to hold her off of him. “Nothing about you is real. You fuck me, act like you care for me. When you have no heart to begin with. Why the hell should I be faithful to a monster like you?”

  She hadn’t been planning to confront him like this—as it would put her in a very dangerous position—but at this point it didn’t really matter. She didn’t care, and she was incapable of stopping herself.

  Caleb’s expression was incomprehensible. It
was twisting with effort and surprise and something far deeper as he tried to contain her flailing arms.

  “I was starting to believe you…” She was almost strangling on the furious words. “Despite everything. Everything. I was starting to…I knew better. I knew better. But still…”

  At the horrifying realization of what she’d almost started to believe—about this man who had murdered her father—her vision actually whited out.

  She lashed out again, this time with her leg, since Caleb had imprisoned her arms in an iron grip. She tried to knee him in the groin, but he’d somehow predicted her attack, and he was able to deflect her raised knee with an awkward swing of his leg.

  “You’re angry with me?” she choked out, giving up on striking out against him with anything but words. And it finally all came out. “You killed my dad. You don’t get to hate me for anything.”

  Chapter 9

  Caleb hadn’t expected it to hurt as much as it did.

  He’d thought nothing could hurt as much as when he’d discovered Kelly’s real identity. He’d stupidly believed that was as bad as a betrayal could be.

  He’d been wrong, though. This was even worse. Not only had Kelly lied to him and manipulated, deceived him in the most intimate way, but he’d actually started to believe that she’d grown to want him—to have feelings for him—in spite of herself. He’d started to believe that her feelings were real, even if nothing else about her was.

  But he was wrong. All of it had been a lie, even the way she’d seemed so emotionally torn with him lately. She couldn’t really have feelings for him, not if she was screwing another man.

  And that hurt even more than the first betrayal.

  He’d never experienced anything like it. Not even when Mallory died. Then, the trauma and devastation had been spread out over more than a year, and so he was empty and numb at the end of it. But this loss was all at once—and with more anger and shock and pain than he’d believed himself capable of feeling.

  And all of it slammed over him like a tidal wave as he stared at Kelly, who had just spit out those words as if they were the deepest expression of her heart.

  “You killed him,” she repeated, now in a hoarse whisper. Her hair was hanging down all around her like a tangled veil. Her face was dead white, and her eyes were like bleeding wounds. “You killed my father, and he was innocent. And you’re mad at me because you think I fucked someone else? You think that would be anything close to what you’ve done to me?”

  Caleb couldn’t move. His emotions were churning with too much strength. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He just stood like a statue trying to process the feelings.

  He was helpless in the face of them—no power in his mind or his body capable of facing the force of his emotions at the moment—and they were so conflicted he couldn’t even name them.

  “You don’t get to be angry with me for anything. You don’t get to hold a grudge against anyone else. Not after what you’ve done.”

  Caleb still couldn’t consciously decide what to say. He didn’t think he was capable of saying anything at all, but then he heard words come out of his mouth. “I didn’t kill your father.”

  She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be visibly holding herself back from attacking him again. “You hired someone, but that’s a distinction that means absolutely nothing. You’re as guilty as if you pulled the trigger.”

  And that hurt too. So much he had to close his eyes against her face.

  She believed it.

  He’d fallen for her like a boy. He’d believed she really loved him. And then, even after he’d found out the real truth about her, his feelings still kept pulling him toward foolish, impossible ideas.

  She didn’t seem to be lying all the time. She seemed to mean most of what she said to him. No matter how hard he tried to be cold, he still couldn’t believe she was faking everything. The afternoon they’d gone hiking had felt so palpably real, even as he’d been trying to break her. In the end he hadn’t been able to bring himself to intentionally hurt her anyway.

  So he’d talked himself into believing she had feelings for him after all. That no matter what game she was playing, it simply wasn’t working the way she wanted. Maybe she loved him, despite her best efforts.

  But now he knew she couldn’t love him. Not really. Not if she believed he was capable of cold-bloodedly murdering an innocent man.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said again, his voice a little clearer, although he didn’t know how he’d managed it. “I didn’t arrange it. I didn’t know anything about it until afterward.”

  “You expect me to believe that? I have evidence. I have concrete evidence that leaves no doubt. You expect me to believe some story you make up now?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.” It was a lie. He did care. But he didn’t want to, and saying it was the first step to making it true. “You’ve done nothing but lie to me, so I don’t owe you the truth in this or in anything else. But I didn’t kill him. You were wrong from the very beginning.”

  For the first time something cracked on her face, like something in his words or tone or expression had gotten through the intensity of her anger. “I’m not wrong,” she rasped. She rubbed her face like she was trying to wake herself up. “I saw proof. I saw the letter Sean Moore wrote Tom Earnest, naming you.”

  He knew what letter she was talking about. It was the one piece of evidence that he’d not been able to get his hands on. Earnest had kept it as insurance, as a weapon to be used in case Caleb ever decided to do something with the evidence he had against him.

  He’d thought once Earnest had died, the letter would be lost. Out of context it would mean almost nothing.

  But he’d been wrong about that too. He’d been wrong about everything that mattered.

  A strange sort of calm was suddenly taking him over, like the torrent of emotion was slowly freezing into chilly stillness. He was conscious of blinking twice. Then saying, “The letter is only one part of the story. You don’t know the rest of it.”

  “Then tell me.” She wrapped her arms around her belly and hugged herself. She looked small and desperate and sadder than anything he’d ever seen. “Tell me the rest of it. Please.”

  “You’ll have to come with me.”

  He didn’t know why he was even suggesting it. He didn’t want anything to do with her. Ever again. Not after all the ways she’d betrayed him. But he suddenly felt trapped in a tragedy whose plot and all of whose spoken lines had been written out more than a decade ago.

  And there was nothing left except to play them out on this stage, get through to the end of the story, when dead bodies would finally be stretched out on the floor, signaling the final gasp and applause.

  “Okay.” Kelly seemed to be trapped in it too, her intensity of before coiling into something tight and shaky. “Where?”

  “My house.”

  “I’ll drive myself there.”

  Caleb was relieved, since he didn’t want to face a long car ride with Kelly and he needed time to pull himself together again. Without another word, Kelly picked up her keys and purse and followed him out of her apartment and down to the lobby.

  There they parted, and Caleb tried to use the quiet drive to figure out what he should say, what he should do, what he should feel.

  But it was no use. He drove on autopilot, and he couldn’t remember anything about the road or the traffic when he pulled through the gate to his house. He’d been in a numb stupor the whole time, and he didn’t have any clearer sense of what to do than he’d had when he’d left.

  Kelly arrived about five minutes after him. He was waiting at the front door for her.

  She looked pale and controlled and still a little shaky as she followed him into his home office, where he pulled the latch that released the bookcase to reveal his hidden safe.

  He unlocked it, swung open the door, and reached in to pull out two audiotapes. Back then they’d been high-end equipment, small enough to fit
into covert audio recorders.

  He handed them to her.

  “What are these?” she demanded.

  “Proof. The proof you’ve been looking for.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Of who really arranged for your father’s death.”

  “Do you have something to play them on?”

  “Of course.” He still felt like he was in that strange calm as he went to his desk and pulled out an old-fashioned recorder made for playing the tapes. He reached his hand out, and she passed them back to him. He slid the first one into the recorder.

  His office was eerily silent when he clicked the compartment closed and then hit play.

  Voices from the past crackled as they filled the silence.

  “What the hell happened?” The first voice was his, and it was stretched with anger, fear, and confusion. He remembered very well how he’d felt seventeen years ago as he’d gradually seen a suspicious series of events transpire.

  “What are you talking about?” That was Thomas Earnest, the former CEO of Vendella.

  “I had things under control. I had it taken care of. Now I’ve just heard that he was killed, and Moore says he doesn’t know what happened.”

  “Moore doesn’t know. And there’s nothing for you to know either.”

  “Did you kill him? Did you have him killed?”

  “Do not ask me questions like that out loud.”

  “I want to know.”

  “I’ve made all the arrangements that need to be made. We no longer have a problem. That’s all you need to know.”

  “But I already had it taken care of—without anyone getting hurt. There was absolutely no reason for that.”

  “You know what’s at stake. You know what would happen if certain things came to light. All of us would be ruined. The company wouldn’t survive it. I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t either. I did what had to be done, and I don’t want to hear from you about this again.”

  “But—”

  “That is all.”

  The tape clicked off, and the office fell into silence again.

  Caleb stared at the recorder. For some reason, he didn’t want to see Kelly’s face as she listened to the conversation about her father.