When I look into his eyes, they, too, are familiar and not. Shadows lurk in their depths, an icy darkness that wasn’t there before. But there’s also an unmistakable glimmer—a magnetism that triggers six years’ worth of longing and heartache.
I have to be dreaming.
“Liam?” My voice is no more than a breath.
A sliver of a smile curves his lips. “Aye, it’s me. I daresay the years haven’t been kind to either of us.”
Laughter. Insane, inappropriate laughter gurgles out of me. Liam’s smile widens minutely. My back spasms and I groan, my humor wiped away by pain.
He moves to stand. “I’ll get you something.”
“No! No, please. Don’t go.”
After a pregnant moment, he nods and settles back into his chair. I wish he’d touch me again, but he doesn’t.
“How?” I ask.
His brows lift. “Care to narrow it down?”
I look for signs of teasing, but there are none. Shifting a little, I wince at the odd tugging sensation on my back. “How did you find me?”
He taps his temple. “Finder, remember?”
“No jokes,” I whisper.
“I’m not joking.” His expression tells me it’s the truth. “It wasn’t fucking easy, I can tell you that much.”
It’s not really an answer, but I leave it be. I don’t know if he feels guilty or not—I’m beginning to realize I don’t know this man. Did I ever?
I stare at the wall beside the bed. “Did you kill Chris?”
“No. He was gone when I found you.” A pause. “My approach wasn’t exactly subtle. I’m sure he was tipped off.”
“He left me to die,” I whisper, closing my eyes.
He grunts. “He could have easily killed you before I arrived. Frankly, I’m not sure why he didn’t.”
I flinch at the lack of concern in his voice. The bland curiosity. Feeling angry, lost, and so, so broken, I drag my eyes to his face.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why, what?”
“Why fucking bother?”
He stills. A predator in repose, no longer wearing the mask of humanity.
“I made a promise.”
Tears spill from my eyes; I have the nebulous thought that I’m not thirsty anymore, that my body is hydrated. Odd, to not crave water. So odd.
“How long?” I ask, not bothering to mask my tears. Almost, I wish Chris had finished the job.
Liam looks away, across the bed. There must be a window there, but even the thought of lifting and turning my head is exhausting.
“Nearly six weeks.”
Silence. Minutes pass. Or seconds? Time bent its own rules in the dark. Drip drip.
I was there forever.
“You get used to it,” says the man who used to be Liam. His gaze veers back to me. “And it gets better—the nightmares and flashbacks, the panic attacks and aversions. As with all things, it takes time. But I promise, you’ll get through it. You’re going to be okay.”
Okay. That word is nearly incomprehensible. I blink slowly, then shake my head.
His eyes flare with emotion. “I’m going to kill them all. Every person who knew what was happening to you. Your father, his lieutenants, and your sister.”
“No,” I gasp.
He laughs; it’s a horribly cold sound, like breaking dreams and hearts.
“Time to wake up, little dove.” I flinch at the word; his eyes harden. “Alexis is Maddoc’s second-in-command. Has been for seven years, since the day she turned twenty-two. She’s a ruthless savage and a psychopath.” He shakes his head. “I fucking tried, Eden. I tried to keep you safe. Hell, even Christopher tried to warn you away. He loved her once, before she changed. Crazy bastard thought by saving you he could save her. Like there’s anything left to save.”
She’s not worth it.
I stare.
I breathe.
I blink.
“Get out,” I rasp. Aqua eyes narrow, glinting dangerously. I point at the door, ignoring the ricochets of pain in my back. “Get the fuck out, Liam!”
He nods curtly and stands. At the doorway, he pauses. “They’ll die for what they did to you.”
“Why?” I cry in agony. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It was all for nothing. If Alexis—if she really… Goddamnit! I would have told her about the fucking diamonds. She didn’t have to—I would have told her…” I trail off, spent.
Something shifts in Liam’s eyes. For a moment, he’s the man I know. His fingers clench on the doorframe.
“I can’t make this right, Eden. I would if I could. I would give anything, everything. Not to ease my guilt or your pain, but for us. For us…” He bows his head. “We’ll talk more later.”
He’s gone before I can formulate a response.
57
The woman who lives here is Maria Alvarez. I doubt it’s her real name, but I don’t doubt she has medical experience. She changes my bandages every few hours like clockwork, her movements gentle and precise. On my second day awake in her care, she makes me stand up and start moving.
Even knowing how important it is that I regain muscle as soon as possible, I call her every name in the book. She just laughs, and I keep grumbling until she guides me into a bathroom. I’ve never been so glad to see a toilet in my life. Or a bathtub. It’s not pretty, but together we manage to wash my hair and scrub away the grime that my previous sponge baths couldn’t.
Day three and four follow the same pattern. Bland gruel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Exercise in the morning and evening. We make it down the hall on day three. On day four, we reach the living room before my legs give out. As she helps me into an ancient wheelchair, Maria tells me I’m pushing too hard.
I tell her she needs to push me harder.
She tries.
By the end of my first week of rehabilitation, I can walk unassisted to the living room and back. I’ve also had her taper me off painkillers. Whatever was in the pills she routinely gave me, it packed a hefty punch. And I need my wits. I need my mind, splintered as it is.
On the eighth day, I take the new splints off my fingers. I’ve been putting it off, but I need to ascertain if there’s nerve damage or any complex fractures.
Perched on the edge of my narrow bed, sunlight blankets my back. Through the open window I hear the distant roar of surf. I can’t see the ocean from my room, but Maria told me it’s not far. My goal is that by the end of the week, I can walk far enough to glimpse it.
When I finally take a break, I’m sweating from fatigue and opiate withdrawal, my hands aching badly. Just as I’m debating whether or not to give in to the tears pressing against my eyes, a shadow fills the doorway.
Liam.
This is his first visit since the day I woke up. He looks slightly better; like he’s slept, at least. Although I don’t want to feel relief, I do. One of my frequent nightmares during the last week was that he wouldn’t come back. That he would leave me here, broken and alone.
“How do you feel?”
I shrug, wincing as my back twinges. “Where did Chris learn to break bones? He’s pretty good at it. Clean breaks. They should be healed in another few weeks.”
Liam leans against the doorjamb, crossing his arms over his chest. “Do you actually expect me to answer that question?”
I glance up, my expression neutral. “Not really. I do have a question, though—who’s Maria?”
“She works for a local cartel. Used to be a nurse before her husband got caught up in a bad business deal. Now she’s paying off his debt.”
“How did you find her?” Even as I ask the question, I know his answer.
“It’s what I do.”
“Where’s her husband?”
“Where do you think, dove?”
I flinch, lifting my hands as if I can block myself from that word. From him.
“What’s wrong?” he demands.
Shaking, I lower my hands. “You can’t call me that ever again. Never. Ever. Again. Do y
ou understand?”
He’s across the room in seconds and kneeling before me. Fingers grip my knees, but lightly, as if he’s afraid to break me. Too late. I stare at his strong hands, dotted now with small scars, and remember them bruising me. Remember loving it, begging for it. Exulting in it. I long for the ecstasy of surrender like a lost limb—it’s never coming back, but it still aches.
“Eden, look at me, please.”
No command in the tone, just pleading. I look up. When our gazes clash, it feels like the air is sucked from the room. I want so badly for him to erase the pain. To erase everything. To become the sun again, blotting out my darkness. But there’s too much darkness now.
“I can’t,” I gasp, pushing his hands off my knees. “I can’t talk about it.”
There’s death in his eyes—Chris’s death.
“He called you that. How did he—” He stops, shakes his head. “You don’t have to tell me.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “It’s okay. I told Alexis. When I stayed with her in L.A. I still can’t believe…” I shake my head helplessly. “I was so wrong about her. I ignored all the signs. The drug use, the erratic behavior. I wanted so badly for her to be someone she wasn’t. God, I’m an idiot. I fell for it. For all of it.”
A maelstrom of pain whips against the steel cage around my heart. A little slips free, shortening my breath and misting my eyes. After all that happened in the basement, I’d truly wondered if I’d ever cry again. If my capacity for suffering had been reached.
Wrong.
“I’m sorry, Eden. For the way I told you. You didn’t deserve to hear it like that.”
My eyes closed, I focus on my breathing and rebuild the barriers around my heart. I straighten my spine, ignoring the immediate burn. When Maria showed me my back for the first time, I could hardly believe what I saw—how such small wounds could cause so much pain. It’s no fucking wonder that flaying people is such an old, effective torture.
He’d taken my skin three times. Three strips, roughly an inch wide and three inches long. Parallel to each other, in a neat little row right between my shoulder blades.
I give myself a shake and open my eyes. “Have you ever been flayed alive?”
Liam’s brows lift. “As opposed to being flayed dead?”
My lips twitch. Morbid amusement, it seems, is our primary defense mechanism. At least we have something left in common.
“It’s not pleasant.”
“No, I’d imagine it’s not. How are the painkillers?”
I snort. “You mean the heroin?”
Liam smirks. “Yes.”
“I’ve been off it for a day now. Hence the sweating and shivering.”
His gaze tracks over my damp neck. Deep down, past the darkness, I feel a frisson of awareness. A feeble flame that gutters and dies from lack of oxygen.
“Why are you here, Liam? What do you want from me?”
Surprise briefly lights his eyes, mellowed the next moment by anguish. “Where else would I be?” he whispers.
58
Day fifteen. I’ve seen the ocean—well, the Gulf of California—and I’ve learned where we are. About twenty minutes north of Los Mochis, a coastal city in northern Sinaloa, Mexico. Granted, I haven’t seen a map, so I have no idea where Sinaloa is.
Honestly, I don’t care. All I care about is that we’re a good five hundred miles from a certain basement. When Liam told me the distance, I believed him. Funny, that. How trust is harder to kill than a person.
But though he’s lied to me plenty of times, we aren’t the same people. He’s not trying to protect my innocence anymore. Nor has he made any efforts to charm me, to draw me in, to touch my barricaded heart. He speaks frankly. No sugarcoating. No teasing banter or secret smiles.
We are changed, both of us.
Maybe someday we’ll get drunk and tell each other our stories. Maybe we’ll part ways or die first. I don’t know how this story ends—for either of us—but I’m sick of reading. I’m restless. I want power back. Control. Freedom.
Choice.
“I can’t kill anyone. I won’t. But I don’t want them to have the money.”
Liam looks up from his hand of cards, eyes narrowed beneath lowered brows. “I have plenty of money.”
“I don’t want your money. I want what belongs to me.”
He drops his cards on the table and leans back, crossing arms behind his head. He’s still beautiful to me. More beautiful, even. Hardened and refined by the force of his world—smelted and polished to his utmost potential. A killer.
The notion no longer bothers me.
“It doesn’t belong to you,” he says mildly. “I seem to remember your mother stole its source from Maddoc, who might have stolen it from someone else.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually. Enlighten me.”
I toss my cards beside his. I was losing, anyway. “I want what they stole from me. I want my life.”
“Your old one?”
“Yes—no. I’d like to know that my parents are safe, but I can’t go back. I can’t be a doctor again.”
It’s the first time I’ve mentioned it, but he doesn’t look surprised.
Liam’s eyes catch the sunset, flaring like flames on water. “Can’t?” he asks softly. “Or won’t?”
“I’m not looking for psychoanalysis,” I snap. “I want to know if you’ll help me. I want the money.”
The old Liam would have made a graphic suggestion about how I might earn his help.
The new Liam merely nods. “All right.”
“That’s it? All right?”
He looks out the window at the darkening sky. “Yes, Eden. Of course I’ll help you.”
An aching part of me asks again, “Why?”
He stays absolutely still, a statue of lethal beauty. After a long minute of silence—wherein I watch the sun fade from his face—he turns his head and meets my gaze.
“Until you tell me to stop, I’ll follow you. To hell and back if necessary.” A ghost of a smile graces his lips. “I serve at your whim, Eden Sumner.”
“Out of guilt,” I whisper.
He sighs and stands. As he passes me on the way to the door, his fingertips graze my shoulder. For the first time in two weeks, I don’t flinch at the casual touch.
“You know it’s more than that,” he murmurs, and leaves me to the shadows and at the mercy of my tortured mind and heart.
There’s only darkness. No light. Squeak. I’m still in the basement. Liam was a dream. He’s dead, like Chris told me. I’m alone. A monster defeated, a woman sundered.
Eden.
Without choice, there’s no surrender.
There is only defeat.
“Eden.”
Memory tempts me. Snatches me in its gossamer clutches, paints me in watercolor. Too many colors together… I am mud.
Sparks of pain in my scalp. Fingers squeezing the column of my throat. He’s back… finally.
I will him to finish me.
“Fight, damnit!”
No surrender.
Only defeat.
Cool air on my naked breasts, then weight and heat. Light cocooning darkness. I’m smothered, wrapped tight and aching for release. Freedom. Can there be freedom here? I wonder…
“Come back to me! Now, Eden!”
The command jerks me awake with a gasp. A hard male body rests atop mine. Fingers press against my throat. More are clenched in my hair.
“Do you feel the difference?” he growls. “Do you feel the power?”
I do.
But I can’t surrender anymore.
With a hoarse cry, I buck and flail my arms, beating his head and back with every ounce of my strength. White-hot rage burns through me, all my weeks of impotence flooding through my limbs like a drug.
My nails find skin, dig and tear. Like a banshee, I wail in an unearthly pitch as I conquer. Somehow, I maneuver atop him. I find his neck with my hands.
/> I squeeze. Hard. Harder.
Gentle hands cup my face. “Yes,” he whispers. “Yes.”
The monster is soothed by his touch. Memory swirls and plays across a landscape of bloody red.
“Liam?” I gasp, my fingers unclenching from his neck.
He smiles, moonlight through the window revealing raw tracks on his cheek from my nails, redness on his throat.
His hands keep moving, smoothing down my arms, my hips, until I shudder, fully rooted in my body.
“You were having a nightmare.”
I scramble off him, fleeing to the window. Gulping night air, flavored with the barest touch of salt, I try to make sense of what cannot be understood.
“Why let me hurt you?” I whisper.
Fabric whispers as he shifts. There’s a soft thud as his feet hit the floor. “Because I can give you what you need.”
I turn, shivering, not in cold but fear, and meet his steady gaze. “And what’s that?”
“Control.”
I don’t pretend to misunderstand, though his offer is numbing. Mind-boggling. A man who thrives on controlling others, on manipulating pawns in games of power…
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
He nods, standing. “Not yet. Perhaps never.” In a surreal mimicking of his earlier exit, he pauses in the doorway. “But should you ask, I will serve.”
59
When Liam takes over my rehabilitation, my progress increases exponentially. Much to both his and Maria’s surprise, I was the one to suggest the change. Maria was too gentle, too sympathetic. I need to be hard. To be strong. If I can’t put myself back together from the inside out, maybe I can do it from the outside in.
I knew Liam would be merciless and aloof, and I was right. He gives me no quarter. There’s no aftercare, no encouraging words. No massages for overworked, underdeveloped muscles. No days off.
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