by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose
The SUV pulls up outside the hotel and because it’s a nightmare I know what’s going to happen. Time seems to slow down. Dad turns around in his seat and finishes up the lame joke he was telling us, and I roll my eyes. Mom pokes him in the ribs and he pokes her back.
I will my muscles to respond, to stay in the car, but I can’t change the past. My hand yanks the door lever and the oven-hot desert air rushes in. One leg slides out into the sunshine. I’m in a hurry, wanting to grab my towel and trunks and get down to the pool before Mom and Dad, so I can bag a place close to (but not too close to) the blonde, if she’s there.
As I climb out, I see that Dad’s hand is on the key. The part of me that’s back in the present is screaming don’t turn it, don’t turn it, but however hard I scream, nothing comes out of my mouth. I can’t warn him about what’ll happen when he switches off the ignition.
Part of me wants him to turn the key right now, before I’m out of the car, but I know he won’t. I know he’ll listen to the end of this song—another ten seconds.
I slam my door and start to run, but a taxi beeps and I have to stand and wait while it crawls past in front of me. My back is maybe a foot from the SUV. In my mind, I’m counting off the seconds. Four, five, six. Why couldn’t it happen now, when we’re all still together?
But the taxi moves and I run across the street. Ten steps that save my life.
I hear a door open behind me and half turn. Mom’s just climbing out, smiling about something. That image of her face is burned into my memory forever.
There’s a flash of light that makes me scrunch up my face and an instant later an invisible hand picks me up and hurls me into a parked car, the window crunching against my back. White-hot pain erupts in my side, and it doesn’t ebb away—it gets worse and worse. I slump down on my ass, my back against a car.
Roiling black smoke hides the SUV for a moment, but then the wind whips it away and I see the blazing, twisted wreck. My parents are gone. I don’t understand for a second what’s happened, because I can’t see Mom and where Dad was sitting there’s just—
The burning shape inside the car starts to scream and I try to crawl towards him but every time I move, the pain in my side makes me almost black out.
I listen to him scream for another three minutes before he dies.
Chapter Twenty One
Natasha
He was asleep, but he was talking. Muttering words I couldn’t understand, asking—no, begging someone. I’d seen people sleep-talk before—Clarissa had been known to do it, when she’d had one too many drinks and crashed out on the couch. But that had been funny, hearing her mumble about some guy she liked and how cute he was. This wasn’t funny at all, because I could hear how utterly terrified he was.
As I stepped closer, I could see he was sweating, his chest glistening with it. His limbs were twitching, his eyes darting about under their lids. When I left him, he’d been sleeping peacefully. Whatever this was, it had descended on him fast.
He was shaking his head now, his breath coming in quick, panicked gasps. I put the coffee down and went over to the bed, gingerly reaching out to touch him. “Darrell?”
He didn’t hear me. And whatever he was living—or reliving—in his mind, it was reaching some awful peak. His breathing was labored, his face frozen in fear. “Darrell?” I shook him. “Darrell?” Nothing. “Darrell! You’re dreaming! Wake up!” I was panicking myself now, my heart racing.
He drew in a long, agonized gasp and then his face contorted into a mask of rage. I took a staggering step back, thinking for a second that he’d woken and was angry with me. But he was still asleep, his head locked in position now, eyes staring behind closed lids at one point in space. I touched his arm and his muscles were steel hard, every tendon straining. It was truly chilling. Whoever was on the receiving end of his wrath, in the dream, would fear for their life. And seeing it happen, seeing the quiet, peaceful man I knew change like this, was almost as frightening for me. Had this been inside him, the whole time?
And then, suddenly, he opened his eyes and stared up at me, panting for air.
“Darrell!” I could tell he wasn’t quite seeing me, wasn’t sure where he was. I started making shushing noises, trying to calm him, at the same time trying to calm my own fear.
“Darrell, it’s Natasha,” I told him. He seemed to focus on me, then, and I felt him slide slowly back to reality. The rage left his face and I slumped in relief, collapsing on the bed next to him as I watched him get his breath back.
“Sorry,” he told me at last. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“It’s okay.” I handed him a cup of coffee, but he just sat staring at it without drinking.
“What did I say?” he asked tightly.
“Nothing that made sense.” I slowly put one hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t move it away. “What was it?”
He stared at me for a second, and I thought he was going to tell me. And then he was turning away. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just—I get bad dreams sometimes, you know?”
I did know. I’d had one only that week, while he’d been in Virginia. But my dreams left me shaking with fear. His terrified him at first—and then drove him to an anger so powerful it was frightening. I hugged him close. What had done this to him, burned something so deeply into his mind that it affected him like this even today?
When we moved apart, he finally drank some coffee. “Look. Last night....”
I nodded, glad to get onto something safer.
He looked me right in the eye. “I know I said it before, but I want you to know that I know...and it’s okay. I mean, of course it’s okay. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you. I love you.”
Something melted inside me, something that had been trapped in ice for a long, long time. I’d been right. He really did understand. “Thank you,” I whispered, feeling hot tears slide down my cheeks. Hope. Hope was back. I’d finally found someone who wouldn’t judge me, who wouldn’t yell at me, I was in love, I had another shot at my audition...everything was going to work out.
He pulled me into a hug and I felt my tears wet against his shoulder.
“I’m here now, and you’re safe,” he told me. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
I froze. What?
I pushed slowly back from the hug, looking at him. The moment stretched out in sickly slow motion. “Who?”
“Your foster dad,” he said solemnly.
And all my hopes turned to ash.
“You think—” I couldn’t get the words out.
He nodded slowly, thinking I was just denying it. “I know, Natasha. What someone did to you with candles...the scars on your leg. I will never let anyone hurt you. Not ever again.”
He thought I’d been abused.
I shook my head. “No.” And I said it so suddenly and firmly he shut up. But in the silence that followed, I didn’t know what to say. I’d got it completely wrong. He didn’t understand at all. He thought he’d discovered some poor, abused girl with an evil father he could get angry at.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If I’ve got it wrong I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter who it was. You’re safe now.” He kept repeating that: You’re safe now. As if it was something external I could be saved from. He had no idea.
I shook my head again. “Why are you...why are you trying to figure this out?” Suddenly I was blazingly angry. “This is my private business—why are you....” I flailed for words but couldn’t find them.
He took my face gently between his hands. “Because I love you. I just—I can’t bear to think of anyone hurting you.”
Any remaining hope died. How angry would he be, when he found out? When he discovered what I did, and why I did it? I stood up and walked to the door. Behind me, I heard him get up.
“Natasha?”
I swallowed. “I need to go.”
And I was off and running down the stairs. He ran after me, but I had a head start and was out of the front door before he could catch me.<
br />
“Natasha!”
I kept going.
Chapter Twenty Two
Natasha
I called a cab when I got back to the main road and made it to class—just. Luckily, I kept a change of dancing gear in my locker. I really needed to talk to Clarissa, but Tuesday was the one day we didn’t have any classes together and I missed her at lunch because I went back to the apartment to have a shower and change.
When I headed home that evening, I had no idea if she was in or out. “Clarissa?” I called as I closed the door of our apartment.
No answer. Damn. I really needed to talk to her. I needed to get it all out.
I wandered through to my room and eyed the bike. Escape wasn’t what I needed, I decided. I didn’t feel like I was sliding out of control. I just felt...tired. Over the years, I’d lost all hope of having a normal life. I’d thought that was bad, but to have hope dangled in front of me, only to discover I’d been wrong...that had crushed me completely.
I threw myself onto my bed. What now? Obviously, things were over with Darrell. If I stayed with him, he was going to keep pushing and pushing, and eventually he’d discover that the monster he was saving me from was me. And then he’d hate me like I hated myself, and I didn’t think I could bear that.
Then I heard it. A hard sound I couldn’t place. I frowned.
It came again, and this time I identified it. A palm against flesh—someone being slapped. It had come from Clarissa’s room. The floor seemed to drop away, ice filling my veins.
A third time, harder than before, and I thought I heard Clarissa sob.
Her door was tightly closed. What should I do? Call 911? Burst in? Who was in there with her—Neil? He was twice my size!
I ran to the kitchen and drew a butcher’s knife from the knife rack. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears, my heart pounding as I crept down the corridor towards the door. Another slap. A sob. My fingers tightened around the knife’s handle. With the other hand, I turned the doorknob and flung the door wide.
“Stop!” I screamed.
....
And then I was back in the hallway. I’d spun back from the doorway and pressed myself up against the wall, the plaster cool against my back. My eyes were squeezed tight shut and what I’d just seen was being vividly replayed in my mind, however much I tried to stop it.
Clarissa, naked, on hands and knees on the bed, her pale ass raised towards Neil as he spanked her. She’d looked over her shoulder at me, horrified, her face as red as mine.
I could hear movement and whispers in her room. I opened my eyes and walked very calmly to the kitchen, put the knife back in the knife block and made coffee.
Clarissa joined me at the table a few minutes later. She managed to come in and sit down without meeting my eyes once.
We sat there in silence for a moment. Clarissa made a gun shape with her hand and mimed shooting herself in the head. Then she let her forehead slump to the table, her hair covering her face.
“It’s not that bad,” I said at last.
The faceless blonde head nodded. Yes it is.
“You did come home and catch me...thinking about Darrell,” I told her.
“Everybody does that.” She paused. “Well, maybe not in the lounge....”
“See?”
“It’s not even in the same league.”
I sipped some coffee while I thought, my embarrassment fading a little now that we were actually talking. “It’s no big deal. Spanking and bondage and stuff—it’s fashionable. Like in that book.”
Clarissa finally lifted her head from the table, horrified. “He doesn’t tie me up!”
“Well, then!”
She hesitated. “I think he wants to, though,” she said in a small voice.
“Oh. Well, okay. I mean, as long as you like it.”
“I do.” She looked away quickly, flushing. “I just don’t get what he does to me. It’s like he flips a switch in my brain and suddenly I’m all.... He’s so totally not my type, but he just....” She gave a groan of frustration.
I sipped my coffee and smirked. “Like in the kitchen at Darrell’s house.”
Her jaw dropped. “You saw?” She thumped the table with her fist. “I thought you saw, but you didn’t say anything!”
“I think he’s cute. I think you’re cute together.”
She shuddered. “Eww. Don’t. I don’t want to be cute. And I don’t know if I want to be some guy’s...plaything.” She finally picked up her coffee and started to drink. After a moment, she said, “And the irony is, you’re the one dating the billionaire.”
Then she saw the look on my face, and her smile collapsed.
Neil came in and kissed Clarissa on the back of the head, completely unembarrassed. We sat in silence as he made himself a sandwich. When he tried to coax her back to bed, she waved him away.
“Okay,” she said as soon as he’d gone back to the bedroom. “What’s wrong?”
“We had sex,” I said at last.
She waited.
“Then we had a fight.”
She nodded.
“He found the scars.”
Clarissa bit her lip. She’d known I cut myself for about a year. I’d been standing on a chair to put the waffle maker back on top of the kitchen cupboard, had slipped off the chair and wound up on the floor with my skirt up around my waist. Like Darrell, she’d assumed the cuts were the work of someone else, and I’d had to tell her the truth before she called the cops on my recent ex-boyfriend. The following month had been hell. She’d been angry at me, angry at herself, hurt I hadn’t told her before...all the things I didn’t want Darrell to go through.
She’d finally accepted that it wasn’t a problem she could fix, though, and that I wasn’t going to tell her the reason I did it. After another few months, we’d returned to something approaching normalcy. I knew it still bothered her but, as long as I kept myself out of the emergency room, she accepted it. It became an unpleasant little habit we didn’t discuss.
I knew that with Darrell, it wouldn’t be the same. I’d grown to understand his mind and could see the way he observed and recorded and fixed things. I knew he’d want to fix me. Cutting myself would go completely against his logical view of the world, and he wouldn’t stop until he understood why. Once we got to that point, we were lost. He’d either hate me because I wouldn’t tell him, or hate me when he found out the truth.
“How’d he take it?” I could feel Clarissa watching me steadily as I stared at the chips on my Knicks mug.
“He thought someone else did them.” I refused to look at her, but it didn’t matter. I could see her in my mind, pressing her lips disapprovingly together. “I ran.”
“You really like him.” Not a question.
I didn’t answer.
“Maybe he’d be a good person to talk about it with.” Since you won’t tell me, she might as well have added.
I shook my head.
“Nat—”
“I can’t.” I got up and walked out.
And then I went to my room and got on the bike.
Chapter Twenty Three
Darrell
Ten minutes earlier
Meeting Natasha had changed everything. I’d had the nightmare a hundred times before and my solution to the rage had always been the same. Go to the workshop and work, create something that would hurt the people who’d taken my parents from me. It didn’t make the anger go away, but it focused it...directed it outward so that it didn’t destroy me. But today....
Today, when I’d woken from the nightmare the first thing I’d seen was her terrified face. I’d scared the hell out of her. And then I’d made it worse by pushing and pushing to know about her past. When she’d left, I’d had no idea what to do and had wound up in the workshop, hammering and welding. My normal solution—only it no longer did any good. However many times I heard that glorious, metallic ringing, it didn’t ease the anger inside me or the guilt over how I’d hurt Natasha.
&
nbsp; This wasn’t something that was going to get better with time. I needed to do something. Three times I picked up the phone to call her, but I had no idea what to say. By the evening, I was going out of my mind. I knew when I was out of my depth. I called Neil.
“Uh huh?”
I frowned. “You’re breathing heavy. Are you at the gym?”
“No. Clarissa’s place.”
I heard the creak of a bed. “Should I call back? The two of you aren’t—”
“We were. Natasha and her just left.”
“What?”
“Chill, you idiot. Natasha walked in on us. Clarissa’s gone to the kitchen to explain.”
“Explain?”
“There was spanking.”
I sighed. Neil never did things by halves. “How did she look?”
“Fantastic. Smokin’ hot bod. We started out up against the wall—”
“Natasha! How did Natasha look? Did she look upset?”
“I didn’t get a good look at her.” He paused, his tone suddenly serious. “Why?”
I sighed. “We had a fight.”
“Oh. You want me to go see?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold up. I’ll go make a sandwich.”
I heard him put the phone down and then had to go quietly crazy for five minutes while he took his time in the kitchen. I strained my ears, but I could only hear a faint whisper of voices.
I didn’t understand her reaction. Someone had clearly hurt her—cut her or scratched her or something, on her thigh, and harmed her in some way with candles. Who, if not her foster dad? My gut tightened as I thought of someone, anyone, hurting her.
By the time Neil picked up the phone, I was going crazy. “How did she look?
“There’s definitely something wrong with her, man. They shut up when I came in. What did you do to her?”
I couldn’t tell him the details. “Nothing.” I sighed. “Something. I’m not sure.”
“You’re crazy, man. First girl you really like in years and you fight with her?”