by Malcom, Anne
I continued staring at the door as I carried on with the story. “After I broke it off, I started seeing him everywhere. My coffee shop. Grocery store. Then outside my bedroom window at three in the morning. I got the restraining order then.”
Whatever had stopped me from reporting the initial abuse disappeared with his face at my window at three in the morning. I knew then it wasn’t going to be over when my bruises faded and my bones healed. It would only be over when Marcus had repaired what he considered I’d done to his masculinity. And men like that healed their sense of self by destroying women in all the ways they could.
The police weren’t exactly helpful, but I hadn’t expected them to be since I’d waited to report the crime. It was another ‘shouldn’t’ I was faced with in a short amount of time. The men and women that were tasked to protect us shouldn’t throw judgment and doubt in the face of a woman looking for help when walking through the doors took more strength than taking the initial beating.
The journalist in me wanted to write a story on it. But the world already knew this kind of thing happened. It was too normal for us all. And I didn’t have the strength to tell my own story.
“I should’ve known better than anyone that a piece of paper did nothing against violence,” I said, remembering how light and flimsy the paper felt. “But then again, I felt naively safe in my home, even from him. I had a sense that if anything was going to happen to me, it’d be over there, in that horrible and deadly war. Not amongst the mundane.”
My mind went to the day where I heard Liam’s mother scream from down the street. I’d been hanging out the laundry.
Mundane.
“But horrors happen among the mundane most of all,” I whispered. “He broke in. While I was in the shower. So I didn’t hear him break the window. My neighbor did. Probably the only reason I’m alive. It was very apparent he’d come to kill me.”
The police found what I liked to think of as the ‘serial killer starter kit’ when they responded to the call.
He had rope, duct tape, a hunting knife and a handgun in a backpack he’d left in my bedroom. Along with latex gloves.
He hadn’t been wearing them when he attacked me in the shower, I guess maybe he panicked, or got too excited when it became apparent how helpless, and naked I was.
I shivered, Liam’s embrace had suddenly become very cold, the air very still. He hadn’t spoken the entire time I relayed the past like it didn’t belong to me. But it didn’t. It belonged to him, even though I didn’t want it to be that way, he claimed my past, my present and whatever was going to make up my future. Regardless of what happened between us, he was a scar on my soul.
I liked that I was cold, though. Because the memories of those moments were scorching hot, with him sweaty, the water scalding, slippery. My body temperature rising with panic and terror.
The promise of rape hit me harder than he did in those moments.
And then, like in the movies, right before the deed was done, the door was knocked down, uniformed men with guns burst in, saving me from the worst of the trauma.
Or I was sure that was what it seemed.
Yes, I was attacked in my own home. Groped. Assaulted. My privacy and safety was ripped apart by a single man.
But I wasn’t raped.
So I must’ve been able to recover easier.
I was sure it would’ve been harder, infinitely so if he’d defiled me in that way, but I still felt defiled, dirty, broken.
Still couldn’t shower in unfamiliar places and it took me two years to stop having only baths.
“I saw a therapist for years after it happened, first because Mom insisted I do so, she’d been insisting for a long while before that, but now she had a more tangible, inescapable reason.”
I hadn’t been living in Castle Springs at the time, hadn’t called my family when I was first beaten, because I didn’t want them to worry, because I was ashamed and I didn’t want my father or brother to go to prison for killing Marcus, which was exactly what they would’ve done if they’d seen my face.
But sitting on my bed, with soaking wet hair, mismatched clothes and strangers in uniforms trampling through my personal space, I called my mother. And for the first and last time since losing Liam, I’d broken down. I could barely speak through my tears. But I didn’t need to, my mother didn’t need to know the specifics, she only heard my tears and she informed me she’d be there “quicker than a bull could shit.”
It was the first time I’d heard my mother curse.
The second was when she arrived at my house three hours later, with my father in tow.
She hadn’t left for two months.
“And as much as I hate to say my mother was right, she was,” I continued, it was the only way she’d leave. “It helped. Not a lot. Barely a little bit. But any kind of help after something like that is welcome.” I shrugged. “I survived, which is more than I could’ve said if my neighbor hadn’t heard the crash, if the police hadn’t responded immediately.”
I had tortured myself with the what ifs, for a long time. Until I had to stop. What ifs would chip away at a soul, whittle it down to nothing. Mine was a fractured shard as it was.
“I don’t have scars or hangups about sex,” I continued, though it had taken me another three years to have sex again, and since then it had been casual. “But I do have a thing about showers. It’s my mind telling me that horrible thing happened in the shower once so the only time something truly horrible can happen to me is when I’m in strange showers.” I paused, looking around the room that had been my prison, my sanctuary and something in between. “Which is stupid, because truly horrible things happen everywhere.” I ended on a whisper, my words emptying out like I’d used up my quota for the day within a handful of minutes of waking up.
Silence blanketed over us, I expected words, curses, death threats from Liam, that was the man I’d come to know, at least. A man that used violence as action, as a response.
But there was no violence to be wreaked upon Marcus. He’d been found to have outstanding warrants out of state for aggravated rape, stalking, and domestic violence.
He’d been sentenced to twenty-five years.
I testified.
As did three more of his victims.
We kept in touch, horror keeping us together when it had ripped pieces of ourselves apart.
Marcus was killed in prison two months into his sentence. It made me angry that he only served two months for what he did. The other women decided that he was serving a lifetime in hell, because that helped them. Just like the idea of heaven helped those who wanted to think of loved ones in a better place, hell helped victims banish monsters to a worse one.
I didn’t believe in Hell. I didn’t lend myself false comforts.
Just like I didn’t believe in Heaven.
For whatever reason, I didn’t want to believe Liam had been in a better place. Mainly because I didn’t want him in a better place. I didn’t want him watching over me, I wanted him beside me. So it helped me thinking he was absolutely nowhere than anywhere else.
Which was funny now, because he hadn’t been nowhere. He hadn’t been in heaven or hell, he’d been in a biker compound in New Mexico.
So I waited for the man, the biker to respond to what I told him. I already knew it bothered him. Even before, Liam had been protective. Not aggressively so, but enough to make it known that anyone who did anything to me would face him. He wasn’t exactly intimidating back then, he wasn’t one to get into fights, but he would for me.
Now, it was a different story. Everything about him was intimidating. Violent. The entire persona he’d created was meant to promote violence.
His body stayed taut and his mouth stayed closed while I thought on all of that. If Marcus hadn’t already been dead, would Liam have killed him?
Did I want him to want to kill for me?
I moved before I got the answer to that.
Or more accurately, Liam moved us.
&
nbsp; He was halfway across the bedroom before I actually found it in me to speak, protest. My limbs tried to move, but he’d seemingly anticipated my struggle, through his badass manly powers, no doubt.
“What are you doing? Put me down,” I demanded as he walked us into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
He didn’t answer, merely stepped us both into the stall, fully clothed.
The hot water was a shock to my cold skin.
I didn’t have time to acclimate, Liam’s lips were on mine, the water cascading over us.
My first instinct was to fight.
And I did.
He fought too.
So my second instinct was to surrender.
My body melted against his, all the ice settled over my soul shattering with his mouth moving against mine.
“I’m gonna give you new memories of a shower,” he growled against my lips as he ripped his tee off me.
Ripped. It. Off.
With his bare hands.
“I’m gonna make sure you never think of anything horrible next time you step in here,” he continued as he yanked down my leggings and ripped off my soaking panties.
I should have fought.
I really fricking should’ve.
Even if the only reason was because the first time we made love after fourteen years of thinking he was dead should not have been brutal and violent, in the shower after telling the story of how and ex-boyfriend almost raped me.
But this wasn’t about what should’ve been.
That was clear.
And this wasn’t making love.
This was fucking, pure and simple.
It wasn’t Liam and Caroline.
It was Jagger and...whoever the fuck I was now.
He entered me, without priming, ceremony, or pretty words.
I screamed as his cock filled me.
That was until he claimed my mouth, thrusting as he held me against the shower wall, our bodies slipping together with sweat and hot water.
Everything was washed off with that mixture.
The past.
The present.
The future.
The only thing that mattered was the pain around my neck and in my soul. And the pleasure at the base of my spine as he coaxed me into a brutal orgasm.
Not a single word was spoken.
Not even as I toppled off the cliff and came harder than I ever had before. Came harder than I ever had the ability to.
With anyone.
Including Liam.
And the sex with Liam had been good.
Jagger may not have been good at keeping promises, at treating me gentle, at apologizing, explaining, or not shooting people in the head, but he was good at fucking.
His entire body tightened, and he let out a feral growl from the back of his throat as the pads of his fingers pressed into my hips and he emptied himself inside of me. The pain of it, physical and emotional sent me hurtling to a release even more intense than the last.
My limbs became something other than my own.
My soul became something other than my own.
As if it was anything but Liam’s in the first place.
But now it wasn’t just Liam’s.
It was Jagger’s too.
Chapter Fourteen
It was the song that did it.
I didn’t know who put it on in the middle of a fricking biker party, but it didn’t matter how it got here, it just mattered that it was here. And so was I. Sick of banishing myself to my room every night and staring at the walls, occasionally staring at words on a page, pretending to read.
I wrote a lot too.
Of what I saw. What I was learning from the inside and the outside.
I was learning that the war was no closer to an end, that men were still going out for five days and coming back covered in blood.
That there were many times Hansen closed himself in ‘church.’
I also thought I figured out their gun transportation system. No way they were using bikes, or any vehicle registered to the Sons of Templar. Though they owned the local police, by the looks of their records, federal agencies dropped in with warrants on an annual basis.
But the Sons of Templar got their groceries delivered.
Not something surprising considering the sheer amount of mouths to feed and the fact that they had better things to do like kill and torture enemies.
This grocery delivery truck also collected food for the homeless.
In boxes.
Weekly.
I had been in the kitchen many times and had not seen any extra food lying around.
I’d seen plenty of guns, though.
But it wasn’t about the guns or the story right now. It was the song.
The song tasted like sickly sweet pink wine, smelled like a cheap and fruity perfume, felt like a youth that was encased in naïve happiness and unfractured dreams.
I lay back on the lumpy mattress, ignored the sheets that smelled of foreign detergent and closed my eyes. I let myself sink past it all and into the song.
“You know, those things will kill you.”
A puff of smoke trailed into the night, the light at the end of the cigarette flared as the smoker took one last drag, in defiance, before he crushed it under his boot.
I knew he was grinning before he turned.
“You know that I’m too in love with you to ever do something fucking stupid like die before I get forever,” a husky voice said. It floated into the air like the smoke had, but curled around me and droned out the thumping bass of whatever song Sophie had decided to play over and over again tonight.
He snatched my hips and yanked me flush with his body with enough force to spill the wine that had turned flat and totally unappetizing. Plus, I’d already had almost a whole bottle to myself.
“You love me?” I stammered.
He grinned. Easily. “Of course I love you, Peaches. Have you not been paying attention?”
The song jerked me out of the memory with ear-splitting rock.
I got up from my bed.
And headed straight to the bar.
* * *
I rested my chin in the palm of my hand, leaning my elbow on the bar. It was sticky. I didn’t mind.
“You’re cute,” I informed Hades, the man I’d sat down in front of.
Yes, his name was fricking Hades.
We’d already had a five-minute discussion about that. Well, I’d had the discussion. He’d mostly grunted and gave me looks that the actual Hades might even flinch from. But I didn’t flinch because I was anesthetized with around half a bottle of tequila on a half-empty stomach.
Because I couldn’t stomach food all day.
Not since the shower.
Not since someone had banged on the newly broken door, moments after Liam had taken himself from inside me.
The knowledge that we hadn’t used a condom was unmissable.
Luckily I had the implant, for practical reasons more than anything. Birth control wasn’t exactly easy to procure in countries I frequented. Though I always practiced safe sex. I didn’t want a kid. I never wanted them. Not in this new life anyway.
As he ran down my leg, I had a fleeting and insane hope that he’d planted a baby in me. That thought was gone as soon as it arrived when I realized he’d more likely planted an STI in me if anything.
“Hate to interrupt, what sounds like epic makeup sex, and I really do, but we’ve got club business,” Claw’s voice echoed through the closed bathroom door.
I held my breath and Liam stiffened, hands still around me.
I waited for him to curse at the man for his crudeness, tell him to fuck off, then carry me back to the bedroom, dry me off and say something.
Say anything.
Apologize.
Explain.
Hold me.
Make love to me.
Make promises.
“Two seconds,” he growled at the door instead.
I froze.
“If that’s how long you take for round two, then I feel even more sorry for Caroline than I already did,” Claw chuckled.
Liam’s jaw hardened, but he didn’t say anything else.
Nothing else.
Not as he kissed my head, slowly and tenderly, in a moment that gave me hope for something beyond what had just happened.
But then the moment cracked at the same time the small fractured piece of my heart did.
He let me go.
Stepped out of the shower, reached for a towel and handed it to me.
I took it wordlessly.
He grabbed another.
Dried himself off.
I did the same, on autopilot.
I wasn’t numb. I wished I was. Because the aroma of sex and shame was suffocating inside my brain. I felt used and cherished at the same time. Loved and tarnished.
Liam’s eyes didn’t move from mine. He held out his hand to me to get out of the shower.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I ignored it, getting out of the shower with my own strength, though it took almost all of it.
He let out a quiet sigh, his muscles etched from stone and still damp. More scars and tattoos covered that sculpted torso.
I raked my eyes over them, noticing new cuts in places I didn’t even know could get injured. Why did I care about his pain when he continued to cause me agony?
He watched me looking at the ruined skin. Waited.
Just like I waited for him to say something.
Neither of us spoke.
He turned and walked out, leaving me the view of the reaper on his back.
And that ink was the scar that cut me deepest of all.
I heard him dressing in the bedroom.
But I couldn’t move from the spot, dripping wet, his cum running down my fucking leg, my entire body bruised with him. From the inside out.
I heard him shrug on his cut. Waited for him to come in here. Say something. Even fricking goodbye.
But he sighed and his boots walked out.