by V. Theia
A chill raced down his spine. Sweat gathered on the back of his neck. Hawk popped up from his chair and paced the length of Gia’s kitchen, he ended up in front of her. Tears glistening her eyes. His belly hurt so fucking much. He didn’t want her to know any more.
But how could he move on, how could he try to make a fucking life with Gia if he wasn’t honest, if he didn’t vomit his past out on the floor to let her decide if he was still worth it?
“Gia.” His head cranked down to rest their foreheads, she gripped the back of his neck, twinning fingers in his hair. Her touch welcome. So, fucking welcome. “I wish so fucking much that I was stable enough for you.” So, fucking much.
It was never her father’s threat that stopped him pursuing something with her. If not for the sordid shame he carried he would have easily seduced her. Even at seventeen. He knew this. He would have been the big fucking bad wolf and took her when she was too young.
If anything was a cancer inside Hawk, it was the love he felt for this woman. It never quit. It roared through his heart until he could scream wanting her.
He breathed and wished he’d met her sooner, wished he was born in some other life.
“I want you just as you are, Hawk. I swear it. Just you. This is for you as much as it is for me. I think you’ve held onto all this bad inside you for too long.” Tentatively her hand came up and brushed his cheek.
There was never any revulsion when she touched him.
He needed the strength to go on.
Just a minute, his obsession whispered. Just a minute of her first.
He wanted a kiss before …
He agreed and swooped down, nuzzling her lips, asking silently for her to open for him.
She opened instantly on a whimper and gave him what he needed.
Harmony in the form of a disruption from resurfacing memories pouring out from wounds long since glued shut he was now slicing opening again.
The kiss drowned him.
It soaked him deep, her fingers scratched the side of his face lightly, reminding him he was alive, he wasn’t that person no more. Not a scared, defenseless kid.
He was strong and more than capable.
Once his mouth was full of her flavor, he raised his head as if drunk on his own legs.
The sense of suffocation no longer pressing on his chest.
“You’re so perfect.” He whispered backing up a step.
“No, I’m not. I’m human. I make mistakes, Hawk.”
“You’re perfect to me.” And that’s what mattered. To him she was pedestal worthy. The untouchable goddess.
People who should never have been allowed to bring a child into the world made him into an animal. They piled him with so many neuroses to guarantee he would never be afforded a normal, happy life.
None of it was his fault and still he was trapped in a web of darkness yanking at him, trying to pull him under.
Did he want the same for Gia? Did he want to invite her into the dark with him?
She needed the light.
Fuck. She was the light. Wasn’t he gravitating towards her like she was everything to him?
“Hawk. Please, finish it.” She implored wiping under her eyes. “You can do this, baby. Let it all out.”
Grabbing at his hair he heaved in air like a dying man.
All the words he needed to say were there. Right. Fucking. There.
And he was choking on them.
His knees creaked as he paced. “I can’t do this,” a pneumatic drill played in his head.
“You can,” softness at his back was when he snapped. She took a step back when he rounded on her.
“I can’t do this! I can’t fucking do this. You don’t need an animal like me, Gia. Jesus. You must be crazy. They made this, Gia! I’m disgusting! You don’t even know.”
But the quiet rage wouldn’t quit. Heartburn in his chest. Hawk went down on his haunches, head bowed, he warded Gia off when she made to come to him.
“You can tell me anything. I don’t care, Colton. Don’t you get that? You sharing this isn’t for me. It’s for you, baby. It’s to set you free before it eats you alive.”
Sweet and kind was his Gia. He loved her until he wanted to die from it.
Hawk laughed, and it was a short, tortured sound. An animal caught in a trap and accepting its death.
“I’m trash, little bit, and I can’t have you. They made me into this. I don’t know how to be anything else.”
“Why? Why, Hawk? You know that isn’t true. I can’t change how you think about yourself. But I don’t think that of you. I love you endlessly.” Her voice cracked, and he couldn’t raise his head, couldn’t bring himself to drag his insignificant piece-of-shit-self up off the floor to see her beauty. Because if he did he’d go to his knees and beg this little bit of a thing to love a monster. To accept him as he was. What they made him into before he had a real chance at life.
To please love him, cracks and all.
“Because, sweetheart,” he’d mastered numbness long ago. Casting his head on a slant he looked up at her and saw every piece of hurt and love she had for him. It was easy to put coldness in his voice. “The first pussy I was ever inside was my own mother. That’s not the kind of man you invite into your bed for the rest of your life.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Suffering.” - Gia
He wouldn’t let her near him.
She tried to go to Hawk. To wrap her arms around him and he shrugged her off by pacing the length of the kitchen until a chasm of space was between them.
She felt his detachment in the way he locked his arms around his chest.
Why did she make him talk? Look what it had done to him. This was the Hawk she knew. The aloof, closed off, dangerous, unbalanced man. The one who would stare at her and dismiss her with a blink like she meant nothing.
Only she knew different and he’d grown into someone more open the more time they’d shared. Until she’d stupidly thought it was a good idea to know everything inside his head.
It was for his sake.
Don’t fucking lie to yourself. You wanted to know everything about him.
Her heart cried for him.
For the little boy he’d been. Alone and uncared for. Mistreated every single day of his young life. Making your own child sick to gain sympathy… what kind of monsters raised him?
Over the years gleaning only snippets about Hawk like an obsessive fangirl, feeling his cold animosity as well as his heated stare that gave her mixed signals. He’d felt something for her. She was young then, she grabbed his attention however she could. Even emotionally destructively, she’d derived a thrill from that negative attention from him and though in her profession she could claim it was dysfunctional to a point to rely on that kind of devotion to fuel her heart, she’d lived for those short moments with him. They’d been everything.
She loved a broken man.
Luck had been on her side, along with a lot of tenacious energy on her part and here they were now, on the cusp of something real.
She tasted his love. She didn’t need the words to know how he felt.
And her heart was torn into a million pieces for him. She was screaming inside to help him, to protect the small boy, he’d been and guide the man he was today.
“Hawk, come and sit down, baby.” She approached him the same way she would a skittish animal and when he let her take his cold palm to lead him into the living room her heart hiccupped with relief. Her man was in there somewhere behind his closely guarded cold armor.
His confession was spring boarding through her mind.
Hawk had pulled her into his gray world. There was no way she was leaving it now.
On the couch she tucked her legs under her, his hand still surrounded in hers, she stroked with her thumb. Khaleesi Stormborn, hated being left out, that little drama diva and she whined to climb up, too. Once Gia lifted her up she settled on Hawk’s lap.
“Do you know why I hate that guy from your o
ffice?” Hawk spoke suddenly. His free hand circling on the puppy’s belly as she shamelessly laid there with legs in the air for attention.
Leo. He’d taken an instantly disliking to him, much to Gia’s delight to witness his jealousy She was devoted to Hawk in every way that no other man could ever penetrate through.
“Why, baby?”
“He’s everything I’m not. I watched him smile at you and hated his fucking guts because in that second of him walking into your house, I could see you with someone like that. Having a normal life, with a happy guy who isn’t fucked up in his head.”
“No one is like you, Hawk.” She told him. “No one could be you. And I don’t want you to be anyone else.”
His blues looked on like he thought she was lying. Her poor sweet man, more broken then she’d suspected.
“You know you shouldn’t love me.”
“I do. Infinitely. Majestically. Forever.”
He snorted, and a cocky blond brow lifted towards his hairline. “Majestically?”
“Yes. You’re my unicorn.” She smiled sheepishly. “So, you’re stuck with me and you know how stubborn a half Greek woman can be. Plus, I’m a Marinos and your stalker. That’s a trifecta, baby. Might as well just give up now.”
“I thought I was your stalker?”
“With forbidden love came great stalking, Colton.”
Silence drifted into the room and settled over them. The pup fell asleep from all her belly rubs and Gia sat quietly holding Hawk’s hand.
And then.
“I found out why I’d been blacking out and losing blocks of time around my fifteenth birthday.”
Oh, god. Her heart beat like a hammer, every crack and crevice filled with a little boy’s pain carried into adulthood. She knew she had to listen to his story, but her belly twisted into hard, painful lumps, she needed to keep it together for her man.
“Maybe she didn’t drug me with enough. Maybe she wanted me to wake up. I don’t know. Didn’t stick around to ask. By that time, she’d become unhinged. She’d accuse me of conspiring with Xavier to take me away. I hardly ever fucking saw that man so where she got that from is something only she knows. I began rebelling against her strict ruling. I was tired of being at home, never having a life. I went to a skate park this one day and she went ballistic, a total freak out. To calm her down I told her I was sorry, and I wouldn’t do it again.”
Slow, methodical, Hawk’s thumb brushed her palm.
“I could have understood better if she’d beaten me. She was just … odd. Unstable, highly erratic and heavily into her bible, it got worse the longer Xavier stayed away with his other families. Overly possessive, but she’d change into a whole new woman if Xavier stopped by. Some fucker did me a favor and killed him around that time. His church said he’d been sent on a sabbatical, but I heard things. It was years later the truth about his crimes came out.”
“What happened, baby?” Placing her free hand on his chest, his heart was rapidly thumping. She leaned in, kissed his ear, whispering. “I’m right here with you, Colton. I’m not going anywhere. I swear it. This is for you, let it out.”
“It might have been months after she’d last seen Xavier.” His voice turned robotic, almost as if he were not recalling his past and reading from a menu. Gia swallowed and squeezed his hand. “As I said I don’t think she gave me enough whatever drug she was slipping me to keep me under control. It was a strange, heavy sensation. I usually woke with no recollection of my black outs, just a throbbing headache and nausea grabbing at my belly. The seizures, she said. The reason I had to stay inside so I didn’t have one when she wasn’t there to help me.”
Silence. One breath. Two breaths.
“It took only seconds for me to realize I was in my own bed. It was dark, and I remember the shadows made weird patterns on the wall. She was on top of me, Gia. She had me inside her fucking body.”
Expecting it, but the moment he said the words Gia’s heart stuttered like a bomb had been ignited inside her chest and she forced her sob back down her throat.
To feel such instant hate for a woman she didn’t know rising within her, it was strange and very fucking real to know if she saw Hawk’s mother she would stab her, hurt her, claw her fucking eyes out, just like she’d hurt Hawk.
Biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, she tried hard not to outwardly react, fearing he would put her feelings above his own. And Hawk needed to expunge this. Hate and bile collided inside her.
“Even now, it’s odd to swallow she was fucking her own son. It was a nightmare I’ve never woken up from. I want to believe that was the first time, but from the timetable of my blackouts she’d been doing it for a year or more. I lost my virginity to that cunt of a mother. I don’t remember any of it apart from that one night. I felt like I was outside my body. It felt like days until I became unglued from my own mind screaming. How the fuck was it even happening? She was my mom. A fucking nutjob, but my mother. I remember hearing screaming until the rawness in my throat told me it was me doing the screaming. She’d tied my fucking arms to the frame. I wondered for a long time did she tie me every night? So many fucking questions about how and why have plagued me. I’d never seen her so petrified when she realized I was awake.”
Hawk fell into silence, his gaze on their hands locked together. She squeezed them tightly. “What happened next, Hawk?”
“Jesus. Fucking hell. It was crazy, Gia. She climbed off me like it was nothing, untied my wrists and left me there stunned and disgusted, told me to go back to sleep. To go back to fucking sleep.” He laughed harshly. The tick working furiously in his jaw. “Like it had been no fucking big deal she was screwing her unconscious teen son like a fucking whore. I was still so stoned out of my mind, couldn’t hardly stand. I puked on myself, puked on the floor while I tried to get myself dressed.”
Pressing her face into his shoulder, Gia slipped her arms around his waist, sobs trapped in her chest. “I called her every vile name I could think of. And you know what’s laughable? She acted like I’d done something wrong by waking up. You should be asleep, Colton, she kept saying. I’d never wanted to kill anyone, but I could have easily strangled her right there. She tried to stop me from leaving, begged me to stay. I shoved her off me, threatened her with the cops and I didn’t see her again until years later.”
It was worse. His past had been so much worse than ever imagined.
“Hawk … I.”
“So, that’s all there’s to know about me, Gia. The reason for the man I am.” An exhale gusted out of him like he was relieved finally.
“What happened to you afterward?”
“I lived on the streets for two years,” she frowned. “Those were some hard days and nights. I stole most days. Got beat up a few times. Dark shit happens on the street. But I was living. For the first time in my life I was truly living, and I loved being free. I loved it more that I was away from that house and her.”
For his bravado he’d still been a boy. He must have been terrified the entire time of living rough.
Thank god for Ambrosio finding him.
When he’d finished talking she was sobbing quietly until tears soaked her shirt and dripped onto their clasped hands. “No one will ever hurt you that badly ever again.”
“Gia…”
“I mean it, Colton. I will kill them.”
“Gia… “
“I will kill them.” She vowed into another sob before she flung herself into his chest, wrapping her arms around him she held on and wouldn’t let go, just let him dare try, she wasn’t letting go. “No one will hurt you again, sweet man. Not on my watch”
“Is this your watch?” He asked soberly. Her arms clutched him to her, his warmth soaking to the soul.
“Of course, it is. You’re mine. I will put your pieces back together.”
“Gia…” it was the third time in a matter of minutes he’d said her name and each time sounded like a strangled prayer.
“Why is she
calling you now?”
He sneered, marring his beautiful face. “She crawls out from under her rock several times a year for money. It’s easier to pay her off than it is to deal with her.”
“Does Ambrosio know any of this?”
“He knows what happened to me. Not that I pay her off.”
“I need a drink.” Gia staggered to her feet, made it to the kitchen and leaned her head over the sink trying to breath and regather herself.
Feet alerted her to his presence. Turning, his eyes burned into her and Gia cleared her throat, grabbed the bottle of scotch and poured him a hefty glass. She hated hard brown liquor but considered downing it all in one gulp.
“I’m so fucking full of fury, Colton. I can’t think past how angry I am for you.”
“It’s done and over with now, Gia.” He scowled. “I didn’t tell you, so I’d upset you.”
“I can be upset!” She fumed. “Those fucking assholes. Disgusting bitch. Where does she live? I’ll go there and show her what I fucking do to a piece of shit. Are any of those basement people still living? I’ll kill them too.”
Madly, she paced and grabbed the scotch out of his hands and gulped a good mouthful. Regretting it the moment it hit her throat. Oh shit, it burned so badly. Hawk rubbed her back through a coughing fit.
Realized he was laughing. “Fierce, little warrior.” He kissed the top of her head, took the glass from her, and crying again she flung arms around his middle, not letting go. “Every person I could find is no longer breathing.” He announced seriously.
She looked up at him through her wet lashes and told him truthfully. “Good.”
“Good? You’re glad I killed?”
“Yes. Fuck yes. I’d kill them all.”
Composed minutes later, she looked Hawk square in the eye. “You won’t ever say you’re worthless again, Colton. You won’t ever again call yourself a derogatory name. I mean it. None of that was your fault. That’s not who you are now.”
“I’m not lily white, Gia.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a criminal and a former man-slut with a list of heartbreak a mile long.”