“Yes.”
She crosses the room in her slippers.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “I’m worried about you. The way Daddy made it sound…”
She sits on the bed and looks at me in the dark. She’s silent for so long it scares me.
“I didn’t want you to come home,” she says.
My stomach sinks. Whatever was left of my heart burns to ashes. “I’m sorry. I know the way I left, running away like that –”
“No. I mean, you shouldn’t be here.”
“But why? Daddy said you need me.” I put my hand on her arm. “He told me about Michael, Mom.”
Her body goes rigid. “When?”
“Tonight at the party.”
A muffled cry escapes her. “Oh, Grace. I never wanted you to know.”
“I wish I had. I’d have understood so much more.”
“What would you have understood?”
“Why you and Daddy couldn’t…I don’t know. Love me the same way.” I can barely mouth the words. They come out as a whisper.
She takes my hand and squeezes it hard. “Listen to me. What did your father say?”
All of the tears I couldn’t cry in front of my father spill over. “That Michael died of cancer when was three. He said Bram knew. You called him and asked him not to tell me.”
“Yes, I did,” she says. “I wanted to protect you.”
“Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry.”
Her eyes are dry, her voice eerily quiet. “That’s all your father said?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Of course,” she says, in a sharp whisper. “He wouldn’t tell you he fought with Michael’s doctors about his treatment.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“He resisted them from the day we got the diagnosis.”
“He was probably upset. I bet a lot of parents don’t understand –”
She shakes me silent. “Grace. Be quiet and listen. Your father understood perfectly. He thought he knew better than the oncologists. He thought prayer would save my little boy.”
My little boy. I’m so confused, so whipped by emotions I can’t think. “Of course he prayed for him. I’m sure you did, too.”
Her eyes burn through the dark and into mine. “He took him out of the hospital and brought him home. To this room. For two weeks while I watched Michael suffer in that corner, I begged your father to bring him back to the hospital. He wouldn’t.”
I’m stunned, desperate to understand. “But why would he do that, Mom?”
“Because he had to be right. He had to be in control. Not because he was strong but because he’s weak. He was too afraid to feel anything.”
Turning my head, I look into the corner. I can see a beautiful day in the distant past with the sun shining over my brother’s bed. The sweet little bed where he died. “Would he have lived?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I try not to think about it. I focus on being grateful for you.”
“Me?”
She pulls her hands away and balls them in her lap. “Oh, Grace. I’ve never been – free to love you the way I wanted to. I was afraid of upsetting your father. I was afraid of –”
“What?”
She sighs. “How can I say it? Being disloyal to Michael, I guess. Of not loving him the way I always promised I would. I was stupid and selfish.” I don’t know she’s crying until a tear splashes onto my hand.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“No,” she whispers. “It’s not. It will never be okay.”
I sit up and hug her. She hugs me back, but there’s a stiffness in her body. A worry that I can feel.
I pull back. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not safe for you here. First thing tomorrow, you’ll go. Promise me.”
“But it’s all right. Daddy said he won’t make me live with Isaac.”
She gasps in a quick breath. “They prepared a room for you. They’re bringing you there together.”
My tears dry in an instant. “I won’t go, Mom.”
“No, you won’t. I won’t let them take you.” Her thin lips turn up into a sad smile. “I was happy for you when you ran away.”
“You were?”
“I didn’t want to report you missing. I was proud of you for leaving. You have the strength I never had.” She suddenly looks old and tired. “I should have left twenty years ago. I should have left when I found out about Destiny.”
I flinch against the sound of her name. I tell my mother everything I saw on the video, and at the party. I leave out nothing, even though I know it will hurt her.
But it doesn’t hurt her. She doesn’t even seem surprised. “Destiny’s with him every day at the church,” she says. “She works there now. She idolizes him, and that’s what he needs.”
My stomach turns. “Are they…?”
She shrugs. “If she isn’t sleeping with him yet, she will be.”
“How do you know?”
In the twenty-one years I’ve lived with her, I’ve never seen my mother look so strong. “Because I’m divorcing him. She’ll be the only person he has left.”
It’s still dark when I wake to voices. My parents, arguing.
When my mother left my room two hours ago, I thought everything would be okay. She was determined. Nothing would change her mind.
But I hear it in her voice through the floor. She’s bending. He’s making her weak again.
I pull the pillow over my head and try not to listen as she crumbles. As he steals her away from me one more time.
Go to sleep. When you wake up, you’ll escape. You’ll never come back again.
I’m on the edge of dropping off, into a dream so terrible it feels like darkness swallowing me up.
But I can still hear my parents’ voices. This isn’t a dream. I’m not asleep.
My mind splits open and the memory is there. Isaac, pressing my face to the wall in the church office. His hand gripping the back of my neck. His other hand clawing at my skirt and panties.
“Not a fucking sound,” he warns.
And there, in the distant shadows of the room, my father’s face. At first, I don’t believe it. I must be hallucinating him, calling him to protect me.
I blink, but he’s still there. I hear ripping as Isaac tears my panties. My favorite panties, the ones with the polka dots. The fanciest ones I own. I feel them drop in a torn heap onto my shoe.
My father is watching. Isaac unzips his pants.
His thick lips are all over my neck. “Filthy fucking tease,” he mutters, saliva spraying against my ear.
My father doesn’t blink. Does Isaac know he’s here? I try to scream for him but only a sob comes out. I’m helpless. I gasp for breath but my throat is frozen shut. This must be what drowning feels like.
Am I going to die? I can’t. I’m only fourteen.
Help, Daddy, I mouth.
I try to reach out for him, but Isaac forces my arm behind my back. I’m choking on my own tears. Like the devil in a nightmare, my father slips around the corner and out the side door that leads to the vestry.
A hard breath jolts into my lungs. Suddenly I have air to breathe and the power to scream. My voice pierces the walls.
Isaac slams a clumsy hand over my mouth. I bite his fingers, aiming for the bone. I taste blood and hear his guttural grunt of pain. I bite again. This time I get his pinky along with my own lip.
I don’t feel the pain, but my blood is warm as it runs over my chin. I spin around, legs flailing, screaming, the demon child my father always feared I was. Reaching for anything, I grab a corkboard off the wall and it smashes to the floor. I hear women’s voices in the hall. So does Isaac.
“One word and your family’s church is done,” he says. He zips his pants and vanishes through the same door after my father.
I grab my panties off the floor and shove them in the pocket of my skirt.
As the voices get closer, I tell myself a quick, terrible story. Something bad happen
ed, but it wasn’t what you think. It was a mistake. A mistake can be forgiven. You can make it go away.
I remember the women wiping the blood from my face and trying to calm me down. They thought I’d fallen and cut my lip on the broken corkboard. I couldn’t tell them what was wrong. I didn’t understand it myself. I only knew that Isaac would ruin us if I talked. I’d be sent away from the only family that wanted me.
I forgot as much as I could. And I never saw my father’s face in the shadows again.
But I see it now.
My shattered strength is like a broken mirror sliding back into place. I pull the pillow off my head and breathe. I’ve never felt so calm.
I get out of bed. I find my flannel robe in the closet and slip it over my arms. Opening my door, I follow the sound of my parents’ voices to the kitchen.
The fluorescent light is on. The both look up when they see me. Neither of them says a word.
I look my father in the face. “Get out,” I say.
He stares at me. I feel my mother’s eyes on me, but she says nothing.
“Go back to bed,” he says, in the cold voice I’ve been hearing all my life.
“No,” I say. “Get out or I’ll call the police.”
He looks at me, and he knows. His features change. His eyes are different. He’s not my father anymore. He’s the man in the shadows, the man who let my brother die.
He has no power over me or Bram. I’ll never be afraid of him again.
He pushes his chair back and stands up. “Scott?” my mother says, with an edge of hysteria.
As he walks by, I step in front of him. “Tell me why.”
Just once I want to see real feeling in his face. Feeling for me. “You know why,” he says. “If that had gotten out, it would have been the end of the church. We made a sacrifice, you and I.”
There’s the feeling, but it’s not the one I wanted. “No, I made a sacrifice,” I say. “Now it’s your turn.”
My mother stands up. “What are you talking about, Grace?” she says, wringing her hands. “What’s happening?”
“It’s okay, Mom. Let him go.”
My father walks upstairs. He packs while I stay with my mother, and a cab comes to get him. He doesn’t even say goodbye. He just walks out and closes the door.
We watch him through the front window. He goes down the sidewalk with his suitcase while dawn breaks over the street. The cab pulls away. My mother slumps against me, but neither of us cries. I help her upstairs and into bed, then go back to my room.
I sit and text Bram from my old phone. I love you. I’ll be home soon.
I get under the covers. The birds are starting to sing as I lie down. I close my eyes and breathe.
I thought vengeance would be different. I thought it would be louder, more violent, like the world splitting in two. It turns out it’s just a door shutting, and someone I once loved driving away.
Epilogue
Two months later…
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m supposed to be letting her work. I’m not supposed to be popping in here every ten minutes to say hello, or kiss her, or ask if she wants a snack.
This may be her office now. It may be filled with upscale new furniture and a custom mahogany desk. I may have blown out a wall to make the room three times bigger, and give her a beautiful view over our acreage. I may have decorated with the prettiest weapons ever made, including an antique pistol with a jeweled handle. There may be a framed picture on the desk of her and Stephanie, and one of Michael’s grave after she spent the afternoon tending it.
But this is still Grace’s room to me. It’s still the place where I first spanked her and made her come. It’s where she hated me, loved me, and became mine.
I stand behind her chair and slide my hand into the V of her shirt. “Bram!” she whines, and swats me away. “The party’s next week. If Miriam’s husband’s birthday is a fail, I know who to blame.”
“Wouldn’t be the end of the world,” I joke. “I’m head of her company now.”
“Except that she’s paying me,” Grace says, eyes wide. “A lot.”
I kiss down the side of her neck. “It’s almost Christmas. Fiancés need attention at the holidays.”
“As I remember I gave you a lot this morning,” she says, a sexy throatiness in her voice. “On my knees.”
“I’m talking about attention for you.”
I pluck her left hand off her keyboard and kiss it. I love seeing my mark of possession sparkling on her finger. It looks so big on her small, slender hand. I could give her three rings just like it and it wouldn’t be enough to show her how I feel.
She pushes back her chair. “I guess I can spare five minutes,” she says, biting her pretty little scar. “Or an hour.”
She stands up and follows me. I love listening to her high giggle as we run down the hall to the master bedroom.
Every time I see her like this, happy and free, I’m grateful that her father can’t hurt her anymore. I’m glad he sold his church and moved four states away to live near his brother. I’m glad Destiny refused to go, and they’re both alone now.
I’m glad Isaac’s wife Kathy got a letter from Grace describing what happened to her, and I’m glad she protected her children and left him. I’m glad that Grace knows all my secrets, and that I finally know how she got her pretty scar. I love her even more for it.
“Don’t forget we have dinner at your mother’s tonight,” I say, whipping off my jeans.
She peels off her shirt and sweatpants. “You’re making the salad, right?”
“Already washed. I just have to throw it together.”
She bounds into bed and I yank her naked body against mine. My cock is already rock hard, the tip slick and ready.
I suck her lower lip into my mouth and slowly let it go. “You know,” I say. “You’ve been keeping me in suspense these last few months.”
She smiles. “I already told you I’d marry you. I only made you wait, like, two seconds for my answer.”
“This is something else. A story you were supposed to finish, remember? About a man and a woman, and how they met.”
She lifts her eyebrows. “Oh, that’s right. I thought you’d never ask.”
“Well, I’m asking.”
I roll on top of her. As soon as she spreads her legs, I see how wet and needy she is. Even after months of fucking, the novelty hasn’t worn off. She’s still as excited by my cock in her pussy as she was the first night.
“So this man and this woman,” she says, wriggling her hips under me. “Everything was against them. They were never supposed to be together.”
“Never?”
“No,” she says. “They were star-crossed. Like Romeo and Juliet, only worse.”
Pinning her arms above her head, I smile. “Worse than Romeo and Juliet?”
“Yes. Much.” She sucks in a breath as I thrust all the way inside her. It feels so good I forget to breathe.
I hold my cock inside her and pulse lightly, letting her feel my thick length. “So how did these star-crossed people get together?”
“Well, he was afraid of her. Or so he said.”
“Yeah?”
She wraps her legs around my back and squeezes. I’m so far inside of her I can feel her heart beating. “And she was afraid of him, too.”
“Mmm. Sounds like trouble.”
“It was. But sometimes fear just means that…” Her pretty eyes angle toward the ceiling. “…something really matters.”
“I see.”
“And we don’t want to lose it.”
Never, ever. I take her wrists and loop them around my neck. “Right. So what happened?”
“He put his life in her hands.”
“Really?”
“Even though he didn’t know her, and she seemed a little crazy. Because he knew she needed that to feel safe.”
“And then what?”
I pump her hard, and though I make her moan, I can’t throw her off her
story. “She put her life in his hands, too. She was afraid he’d break her, and he did.”
“He did?”
“Yes,” she gasps, her nipples like tiny pebbles against my chest. “But when he broke her, the person she really was came out.”
“And then he asked her to marry him.”
She frowns and smiles at the same time. “Hey, this is my story.”
“I thought it was ours.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, losing her breath as I thrust harder. “Since it’s our story, you can have the last word.”
“Just one?”
“Okay, two.”
I cradle my hand around her head. I love you has too many words, and forever has too few, and besides, I know something she likes better than both of those.
Eyes on hers, I lean close and whisper to my sweet Grace.
“Good girl.”
About the Author
Rose Devereux writes shamelessly dark romance. In her other life, she is a traditionally published author whose books have been translated into five languages. Reviews of her novels have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, and the Associated Press. She loves animals, sleeping late, and alpha males, and would drink Prosecco every day at lunch if she could. She lives in Boston and New Hampshire.
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Also by Rose Devereux
Unraveled
The Red Blindfold Series
Breaking Grace Page 27