Something in the atmosphere shifted, the weight of the air pressing against my throat much like Anderson’s hand had not minutes ago. I didn’t want to know that question. Yet I knew, deep within me. I knew. And I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t even contemplated it because it was too horrific to even seem like a probability.
I couldn’t move as I stared at him. It was so difficult to breathe, so hard to make my heart take another beat. Tears blurred my eyes and burnt my cheeks with the icy despair that rolled free with them.
And when the four-year-old little boy broke before me, I broke with him.
“Jesus Christ.” My words were whispered, choked, bound in horror and abhorrence.
His breathing was as laboured as mine, both of us struggling to hold the heaviness of the truth when his eyes finally met mine and I saw that question like it was my own.
For the first time in my career - my life - words failed me, and I could do nothing but wrap my arms around the beautiful yet destroyed man and squeeze him to me. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Using me, he clung to me, his devastated sobs breaking every fragment of my heart and obliterating it. All his life, even from the moment his mother had looked down on him for the very first time, he had been chewed up, spat out and trodden into hell itself. He’d been used so much he didn’t know how it felt to be treated any other way. Every person he’d ever relied on had failed him, me included.
My mother had loved me. Fair enough, my sad excuse for a father had left us when I was just a tiny baby, but my mother had more than made up for that. There hadn’t been one single day where she hadn’t told me she loved me, that I was her world. And it was the strength of her love that had carried me through the rest of my life.
Nothing had carried Anderson, only his rage.
“Shh,” I whispered into his ear as I rocked him.
Surprised that he allowed my compassion, I held him closer, the sound of his heartache destroying something within me.
“One thousand pounds they sold me for,” he sobbed. “I was only worth a fucking grand, Kloe. That’s all I was worth to my own parents. A – measly - fucking – grand!”
Shaking my head with anger, I framed his face with my hands and made him look at me. Softly kissing his lips, I brought his eyes to mine and made him see me. “You keep trying to push me away but I would pay with my soul to have you. I would give God my final breath for a single piece of your heart.”
He froze, his brow dipping as he sucked in a deep breath. “What… what are you saying?”
Swallowing away the ball of nerves that had built in my throat, I allowed him to see the undisputable love I had fought for so long. Wiping away his tears with my thumbs, I brushed my lips over his and whispered, “Let me love you, Anderson. Please. Open your heart and let me in.”
“You can’t love me, Kloe,” he whispered back, his words accompanied by a throaty groan when I slid my lips down the middle of his throat. “I don’t deserve to be loved.”
“Your heart deserves more than you think,” I murmured as I trailed my tongue delicately across his collarbone. “You think you’re unlovable, yet here I am, desperate for you to have faith in what I’m telling you.”
He groaned the lower my mouth paid homage to his amazing body. I traced the edges of each stomach muscle, the hard mass jumping under my tender touch.
“I see it in your eyes, Anderson.”
He dragged in a shuddering breath and fisted my hair when I placed a kiss to the head of his cock, his erection throbbing under my mouth.
“See… what?” he stuttered as his head fell back and he growled appreciatively.
Running my tongue along the length of his cock, I lifted my eyes to him as I dropped another adoring kiss to the end. “That you love me.”
My backside hit the floor with a heavy thud when Anderson pushed at me, his large hands shoving me so hard that I thought he’d squashed my heart with my breastbone.
The laugh that left him crushed me when I stared up at him.
“You stupid, stupid woman. Are you really that desperate? You think this is love? You think I’m even capable of love?” His sneer incinerated the air in my lungs and his face blurred with the swell of tears. “I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you. You’re here because I want to ruin you. I want to witness your heart shatter into a million fucking pieces. I want you to feel the pain that I felt when you left!” His anger was uncontrollable and I scurried back when he bent over me, his hatred thick in the air between us. “And by the look on your face right now…” the cruel smile I knew all too well curved the edges of his sinful lips. “…I didn’t fail!”
I didn’t watch him leave. I couldn’t see past the massacre of my soul bleeding out around me, its thick desolation taking anything I had left and annihilating it.
I sat, staring at the floor for over two hours.
Then I dragged on some clothes.
And walked out of the front door.
IT TOOK FOUR DAYS FOR Richard – or anyone for that matter - to find out I was back. He walked in quietly, sighed, and picked up the mail from my doormat. His feet were loud as they padded across the carpet and I squinted when he pulled open the curtains and light spilled into my lounge. Turning, he jumped and gasped as his eyes widened on me.
“Jesus, Klo!” I hated that he called me Klo. Hated it. “What the fuck?”
He stood regarding me quietly as if he was frightened to come any closer – that was mainly because I had a gun pointed at his head from where I sat on my sofa.
Point and click, he’d said. Point and click.
“Hello, Richard.”
He paused, his brow pinching as he tried to get a read of me. “What’s going on?”
Clicking my tongue, I smiled, but it wasn’t at all welcoming. “How did you get in?”
His eyes flashed as he tried to think on the spot. How stupid was I? “You gave me a key, remember?”
Slowly shaking my head at his lie, I chuckled. “That all you got? I gave you a key? Try again, Richard… or should we even the odds? You call me Samantha and I’ll call you Robert.”
Fear caught his breath and he licked his dry lips.
Point and click. Simple, he’d said. Just point and click.
“Where is he?”
Shaking his head, he frowned, “I don’t know…”
He didn’t say any more. His blood sprayed across my lovely cream curtains when I forced a bullet straight through the middle of his forehead.
Apparently it was as easy as just point and click.
Four days earlier
THE HOUSE WAS TOO QUIET. Loneliness crept in as soon as I slung my keys and bag onto the sideboard and shut the door behind me.
The fact that there was no mail on my front doormat after three weeks baffled me. The only explanation was that someone had been letting themselves in. But no one had a key other than me. I did wonder if Anderson had been coming round regularly, but that didn’t fit; surely he wouldn’t want to risk been seen.
Every part of me hurt, but not through physical pain. My soul was aching and my body hurt in sympathy with it. After finding my bag and phone near Anderson’s front door, I’d been checking my phone since I’d walked out. The only messages I received were ones from my friends, work and the police, wondering where I was. Oh, and a telemarketing message regarding an accident I hadn’t been involved in. Nothing from Anderson.
‘I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you.’
Tears bubbled in my eyes and I swept them away. I needed Dave, his cuddles and his fierce love for me. But Dave wasn’t here anymore, and I had to learn to suck it up.
‘I want to witness your heart shatter into a million fucking pieces.’
I should have alerted the police to my return but what would I say? I had to think of a story first and my brain wouldn’t work, my mind unable to process anything but Anderson’s cruel words.
‘You’re here because I want to ruin you.’
Well, he’d succeeded.
The coffee tasted bitter in my mouth and I shovelled another heap of sugar in, needing the sweetness to break me from my thoughts.
Checking the food stock in the pantry, I sighed in relief when I found it full, and then carried my coffee to the kitchen table and sat down.
‘Jesus Christ, have you learnt nothing?’
Obviously not. Although what I was supposed to have learnt was beyond me. Other than Judd Asher haunted Anderson Cain every single fucking day. Much like Samantha Rowan haunted my days – and nights.
‘One thousand pounds they sold me for.’
Closing my eyes when my stomach twisted, I gripped onto the cup in my hand and forced back the vomit that burnt my throat.
‘I can’t move on until it stops. For twenty-five years all I have breathed for is vengeance, to watch their faces when I come back, and for the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
The question being ‘why’. But they had both died a year after selling their own son, and now Anderson couldn’t get an answer to that question.
‘I can’t move on until it stops. For twenty-five years all I have breathed for is vengeance, to watch their faces when I come back, and for the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
My heart beat stuttered.
‘For the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
‘Can.’ ‘Can.’ Present tense. He still thought he could get an answer. But why, how?
‘To watch their faces when I come back.’
My skin prickled with goosebumps.
‘Jesus Christ, have you learnt nothing?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this! Everything is changed, wrong!’
The cup slid from my hand and the air froze in my chest before it reached my lungs.
Fuck!
FUCK!
Why hadn’t I seen it? How could I have missed it?
‘You were supposed to help me finish this…’
My knees rattled against the table when I shot up and ran through to the lounge. Grabbing the laptop, I fired it up, my fingers drumming impatiently as I waited for the damn icon to stop spinning.
‘“Do you remember your parents?” I asked.
Tension poured from him, suffocating me in its potency. It swallowed the air in the room, so caustic that it ate at my breath like acid, and I shrank back into the bed when he sharply spun around.
“Get some sleep,” he barked before he took off up the stairs at a velocity that left me swaying.’
Google fired up. My fingers hovered over the keys, my hands shaking so violently I wasn’t sure I could type in the words. I wasn’t sure I was even breathing.
Bringing up various newspaper clippings from the time Anderson had been found, one jumped out.
‘Twenty-one years ago Judd Asher, aged four, was snatched after playing in his front garden. The largest search in the history of Derbyshire police was finally called off after three years, the mysterious disappearance of the young boy one of the police forces most heart-breaking unsolved crimes.
In a shocking discovery by South Yorkshire police in the early hours of yesterday morning after being called out to a routine inspection about animal cruelty, Judd was found alive, living in the basement of an isolated farmhouse belonging to Mary and Hank Dawson.
According to locals, the Dawsons were a very private couple, and segregated themselves from the neighbouring community. Many residents in the quiet rural town of Deenslow said that they were a ‘strange couple’, but had no clue as to what was actually going on in the privacy of that small and rundown farmhouse.
The police have yet to issue a statement, but it is believed that Judd has suffered serious abuse, both mentally and physically.
An inside source told us that two bodies were removed from the Dawson’s property, along with numerous neglected animal cadavers.
But even more heart-breaking is that Judd’s parents, Janice and Terry Asher were both killed in a hotel fire in 1992, a year after Judd’s disappearance. At this time, it is unknown whether Judd has anymore living relatives.’
Samantha Williamson, reporting for The Star.
Praying I was wrong, I once again clicked on the search bar.
Terry Asher.
An old article from the hotel fire he and Anderson’s mother had been killed in sat at the top of the results.
“Please,” I choked out to the empty room, and my sanity, as hesitantly I clicked the link.
Attached to the article were the photographs of the seven fatalities that had been victim to the arson attack on The Grande Hotel in London in March 1992.
My world fell apart. Every single day of my life from the age of seven was now wrong. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. My head shook as vigorously as the rest of me when my eyes landed on Terry Asher’s photo…
And Brian Smith stared back at me.
Brian Smith had been dead for eight months when he had married and moved in with my mother.
He had been dead for thirty months when I had stabbed him in the stomach and ran.
And the worst thing – Anderson knew he was still alive. He also knew he was my step-father, hence why he needed me to ‘finish it’.
Every single emotion flooded me.
All this had been for revenge; for Anderson to drag me into his vengeance. To use me in his selfish retribution. He had lied to me from the very beginning, or at least since he’d come back into my life four weeks ago. He’d used sex to get close to me. Fair enough, that hadn’t been his original plan, obviously that was kidnapping me. Seems it ran in the family then.
Anger I hadn’t expected poured into my veins, filling every element of me with rage and disgust. What I thought had been a connection between Anderson and me had suddenly become so much more. His father was my step-father. The man who had sold my step-brother, then carried it off as an abduction, had locked me up, killed my mother and then proceeded to haunt my dreams for over twenty years.
Since I had moved to London I hadn’t made many friends, mainly due to the fact I was a closed off person and after being stabbed in the back by James and another work colleague – most probably Paula, I found it difficult to trust anyone. I had met Trudy at work; she was a nurse at the hospital’s mental health unit and we had hit it off straight away. Of course, I had met Richard through Dave. Dave had always been accident prone and Richard and I had quickly established a friendship after Dave’s many visits to the vet.
And although I hated relying on anyone, right then I needed a friend. I wouldn’t allow myself to wallow in the hurt or the fury, and Richard didn’t have to know I’d slept with Anderson, even if it didn’t have anything to do with him, but I didn’t want to hurt him either.
I should have phoned him first. I knew he would have been going out of his head with my disappearance, but because I needed a shoulder to cry on I was already in my car and on my way to his before I’d even thought about it.
I was also debating whether to adopt a new dog. I knew no dog in the world would replace Dave, but he’d left a gap in my heart and a silence in the house that I didn’t think I could cope with. Richard was the obvious choice to go through; his contacts with breeders would prove invaluable.
Richard didn’t live far from me and I pulled onto his street within a few minutes. Whereas I lived in a pretty decent housing development, Richard lived in the more upper-class area of London. I’d always been envious of his property. The few detached houses were well secluded by row after row of trees and the neighbours were a damn sight quieter than mine.
Richard’s driveway was cordoned off; a gas company had dug up the pavement in front of it and a square of red tape prohibited access for cars but provided a small space for pedestrians. Noticing Richard’s car parked on the roadside behind a large 4X4, I pulled up behind him. Because the houses were pretty spaced out along the street, I figured
the 4X4 was a guest of Richard’s with it being so close to his house, and for a moment I wondered if I should just go home.
However, when Richard’s guest strolled out of his driveway and climbed into the 4X4, I couldn’t move as my lungs gave way. Shock, horror, rage all stormed me, taking my ability to process anything. I swore my ribs collapsed, crushing my heart for the second time that day.
I sat, frozen, with my hands still on the steering wheel as Brian – or fucking Terry Asher – pulled away. I couldn’t look away until his car vanished around the corner at the end of the street.
“What the fuck?” I breathed.
I was struggling to breathe, the air in the car seeming to turn to fire and burning my lungs.
Just when fear caught me, that perhaps Terry had hurt Richard to get to me, Richard appeared at the end of his driveway with three mugs of tea. Handing them to the workmen, he laughed at something one of them said before he turned around and disappeared back towards the house.
Numbly, I sat in the same place for hours until dusk set in and my tears had subsided. If Richard had come back out he would have spotted me, yet fate that day decided I was worthy of a lucky break – for a change.
What was Richard’s connection with Terry? And was that why he had worked his way into my life, because of Anderson? Or that after finding out about my connection with Anderson, was Terry scared I would make the link between us and alert Anderson and the police to the fact he was still alive?
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