by K. M. Scott
Every day, I secretly prayed Robert would give me the order to take care of that fuck, but every day came and went and he never said a thing about whether he knew who had attacked Serena or not. And every day, Oliver continued to exist in the same world our child didn’t.
Tilting her head, Serena looked up at me and smiled that gentle smile I loved. “I love you. Please don’t forget that, okay?”
I pressed my lips to her forehead and whispered against her soft skin, “I could never forget. It’s the only thing that gets me through most days. That and the dream of us getting away from here.”
“We’re going to be okay. I believe that, Ryder.”
Closing my eyes, I tried to believe that too. I wanted to. I did. But sometimes when I sat alone thinking about her just a few doors away in that apartment with him, I wondered if we’d ever find that happiness we’d promised one another.
Serena backed away from me even as she held my hand. “I better get back in there. I’m sure my father is wondering where we are.”
“I’m sure Janelle is keeping him busy. She’s in rare form tonight. When we were dancing, she told me we could have gotten together one night right after you left for Italy, but she said I was too busy being lost without you.”
“I’m surprised,” Serena said with a chuckle. “I thought she didn’t like you. It never occurred to me that she might make a move on you while I was gone.”
“Me neither. She’s convinced she knows that I’m in love with you, but she isn’t sure if you feel the same.”
Serena brought my hand to her lips and kissed it. “As long as you know how I feel, that’s all that matters. I’ll come to your place if I can tonight. If not, I promise I’ll come as soon as I can, okay? I better get back now.”
As much as I wanted to wrap her in my arms and make her stay, I knew she had to leave or risk us being found out. I watched her walk away from me like always and hated it, even though I knew it had to be this way.
At least for a little while longer.
Chapter Five
Ryder
The darkness of my apartment swallowed me up, just as I’d hoped it would when I began drinking an hour earlier after it became obvious tonight would be another night without Serena. After spending an entire week driving her to and from the soup kitchen on Federal Street and enjoying those hours more than any others in my days, I craved her touch so much I was afraid I might do something stupid like go to her apartment.
So I drank. And when thoughts of her popped into my mind, I drank more. I didn’t know how much it would take to forget her, at least for one night, but I had to try.
If I didn’t, I’d go out of my mind wishing she was in my arms.
I wanted to believe what she said in the car that first day we were together after she came home from the hospital. I wanted to be strong for her after all she’d gone through. I did, but every day the chances of us ever being together felt like they shrank smaller and smaller while my need to have her at my side grew until she was all I could think about.
Lifting the whisky bottle to my lips, I let the alcohol sit in my mouth for a moment before it slid down my throat. It had been too long since Serena was in my arms. My body ached for her.
I needed to drink more. Whatever it took to stop thinking. I closed my eyes and tried to remember a time before I came to this place, but all I was then was a fighter who lived day to day to inflict pain on others.
Some would have said my life at the estate amounted to the same thing. I couldn’t count how many people I’d punished for Robert in the time since he made me one of his guards. Some weeks it was the only thing I did, and then sometimes I didn’t lay a hand on anyone for a month at a time.
But no matter if he called us guards, and no matter if my job only occasionally required me to rough someone up, I was who I’d always been. I knew that should make me feel something, but it didn’t.
I only felt for Serena.
When I wasn’t with her, I became more machine than anything else. Robert dictated what I did and to whom, and I did his bidding. No more, no less. None of it required feelings one way or the other.
I’d always been that way. When my uncle forced me into fighting, I didn’t cry or complain. What would have been the point? Then instead of me beating others he would have beaten me. I may not have been good in school, but I could figure out that equation pretty quickly.
So I did what he made me do, and when I got old enough and could make my own decisions, I continued fighting. And when I made some bad mistakes with money and got into Floyd for more than I could afford, I accepted he’d basically own me until I could pay him off.
I was the king of accepting the shit the world handed me and smiling as I said thank you for it. It’s all I’d ever been since I was old enough to know what life was about.
Then I met Serena and for the first time in my life, I let myself dare to dream. To really dream, not just look forward to a day when things would be better but to think that life had something better in store for me than the constant helpings of shit it dumped on me.
I didn’t understand how she had the strength to dream after everything her life had been. She’d had the best of everything money could buy, but when it came to things money couldn’t buy, she was piss poor.
A mother gone in the middle of the night and no hope ever given that she’d be back. A father who saw her in terms of what use she could be to him. A sister who’d stab her in the back for a kind word from him and had more than once.
And out of all of that, Serena still refused to believe things wouldn’t get better.
My phone vibrated against my leg, and I looked down to see a text from Jesse about getting together for a night out at some local bar. Shaking my head, I tossed the phone aside and mumbled, “Too late, pal. I’m half a bottle ahead of you.”
A few minutes later, I heard a knock at my door and even though I knew Jesse would be standing there with a million reasons why I should go out trolling women at some hole in the wall bar, I figured I’d answer it anyway. Maybe he could take my mind off my problems for at least a little while.
I threw open the door and saw Serena standing there barefoot in jeans and a black sweater with sleeves that hung down over the middle of her hands and made her look even smaller than she was. The look on her face told me something had happened, so I quickly pulled her into my apartment and closed the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as adrenaline pumped through my veins, instantly killing my buzz.
“I needed to see you. I can’t stay in that apartment any more. I’m going crazy and I started to think about doing something,” she said, wincing like she was in pain.
I held her by the shoulders and searched her eyes for what that meant. “What do you mean doing something? Doing what?”
Serena looked down toward her bare feet. “Don’t make me say it, Ryder. I’m ashamed that I’m so fucking weak that I’d even think about doing that again.”
A sick feeling settled into my gut. I knew what she meant. The memory of finding her naked in that bathtub bleeding to death right in front of my eyes raced through my mind, and I shook my head violently to push the thought away.
I couldn’t think of her doing that again.
“Don’t ever say that, Serena. Do you hear me? Never,” I said, my emotions spilling out in my words.
She winced again and turned her head, as if she expected at any moment to be hit. “Don’t yell at me. I didn’t want to do it. I just said I thought about it.”
I cradled her face and kissed her, loving the feel of her soft lips against mine. I’d missed that so fucking much.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t think of you doing that again. It hurts too much.”
A single tear slid down her cheek as her lower lip quivered. “I thought I could stay so strong, Ryder. I want to. I want to be the person who said all those things when I was lying in that hospital bed. I meant every word. I did. But now that I’m back in that a
partment where everything happened, I don’t know. It’s like little bits of my strength chip away every day I’m there. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one of these days and there will be none left.”
I pulled her to me and held her close as she began to cry. I’d wanted her to be strong too, even if I hadn’t wanted to go along with her plan to get revenge on Oliver.
She sobbed against my chest as I asked, “Did he do something to you? I want you to tell me.”
If he did, I wasn’t sure I could hold back from doing what I wanted to do to him.
Serena shook her head and looked up at me as she dried her eyes. “He says the same thing all the time. He threatens to hurt the two of us if he ever finds out who I was with. But he’s had some big acquisition at work to deal with, thankfully, so I haven’t had to see him much at all.”
“That’s good, at least. I hate thinking about him there with you. I lay in bed at night worried I’m going to hear sirens at any minute and I’m going to race over there and find you—”
I couldn’t finish that sentence. Every damn night I dreaded hearing those sirens because I knew she’d be dead if I heard them. And then I’d have to live with the fact that I hadn’t protected her when she needed me most.
“He doesn’t care enough about me to try again, Ryder. It wasn’t me he wanted to hurt.”
Pushing down my emotions about him intentionally killing our child, I took her by the hand and walked over to the chair. More than once this past week, she and I had cried all the way to the soup kitchen about losing the baby. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I didn’t want to think about him or her anymore.
I pulled Selena onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her, loving just having her next to me. Something about feeling her against my body made everything else in life fade away until it was just the two of us. It had been like that ever since that first night we got together years ago, and still all it took was having her with me to make my world livable again.
To make me believe in the dream.
Lightly tracing her finger along my jaw, she looked over at the half-empty bottle of whisky on the table and asked, “Why do you drink so much?”
“To forget.”
She gazed into my eyes. “Does it work? Because if it does, I want to drink too. I want to forget.”
I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t work. It just makes me think more.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Sliding my hand through her hair, I stopped and twisted a section around my finger. “Because after I spend hours sitting here alone every night thinking of how much I’d hate myself if you were hurt and I wasn’t there to protect you, the alcohol finally knocks me out and I can at least get a few hours of sleep.”
Serena pressed her lips together. “I’m sorry. If only I was as strong as I want to be or even if I was like Janelle, you wouldn’t have to worry all the time.”
Just the thought of being with her sister made me smile, and her mood brightened immediately. “What’s so funny?”
“Me with Janelle. That would never happen.”
Searching my face for more of an answer, she finally said, “I told you what she thought you were brought here to be. Remember? She thought you were here to be a stud and swore to me she’d never sleep with you.”
I slid my hands down Serena’s arms and folded the cuffs of her sleeves. “The other night she was singing a different tune, but there wasn’t going to be any way in hell I’d ever sleep with her.”
When I’d finished fixing her sweater, she placed her palms against my cheeks. “But you’d sleep with me. Did you want to before I came to your room that night?”
Thinking back to those early days when I was new at the estate, I said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure what to make of you. I just knew Janelle was a bitchy little rich girl. But you seemed different.”
Her eyebrows raised and she smiled. “Different, huh? Why’s that?”
“Your big brown eyes always seemed to be looking at me, and I wasn’t sure what you were seeing. Or what you wanted to see.”
Serena ran her finger along the collar of my dress shirt and shyly admitted, “You were so foreign compared to everyone here. I wanted to know everything about you, but I didn’t know how to do that. So I watched you whenever I could.”
“So I was foreign? What if I had been like everyone you were used to?”
She kissed me sweetly, sliding her tongue along the seam of my mouth. “I don’t think I would have cared if you were exactly like everyone here with the way you look.”
Stuffing my hand into her hair, I pulled her to me and whispered against her lips, “So that’s why you always seemed to be staring at me.”
“I wanted you from the moment I saw you in that tub,” she said with a sexy grin.
“All beaten up?” I asked, remembering how I looked all black and blue and swollen from the fight days earlier.
Serena nodded. “Yes.”
We sat there together in silence as memories of that time so long ago made me smile. Finally, she said, “I needed this tonight, Ryder. To see you and see you smile. Thank you.”
“You’re all that makes me smile anymore.”
She snuggled up to me, nestling her head in the space between my shoulder and my jaw, and I couldn’t imagine feeling happier than I felt at that moment. For as much as I loved when my cock was inside her, the mere act of holding her as she sat curled up on my lap satisfied my need for her tonight.
After a few minutes more in silence of my apartment, I said, “Tell me what it’s going to be like when we escape this place, Serena.”
Sighing, she kissed my neck and sat up, and in the dim light I saw her eyes open wide with excitement. “It’ll just be the two of us and no one else. And we’ll spend every night in each other’s arms and Sunday mornings we’ll sleep in late. There will be nobody telling us who we have to be ever again.”
“I want to believe that all can happen. I can’t tell you how much I want to believe.”
“It’s all I think of when I lie in bed at night, Ryder,” she said, gently running her hands through my hair. “If I didn’t have that future to dream about, if I didn’t have moments like this, I’d have nothing to live for.”
Even though I didn’t want to hear her say things like that, I knew just what she meant. If all I had was my life there but I didn’t have her or the promise that someday we’d be away from there together, I’d want to stick a fucking gun in my mouth and blow my brains out.
“I won’t do anything to hurt myself, though. I promise. I wouldn’t put you through that again, Ryder.”
I stroked her cheek and cupped her chin as I realized how beautiful she looked at that moment. I didn’t tell her that if she did leave me here alone, I wasn’t sure I’d live another month without her.
“I love you, Serena. Don’t leave me here without you. I couldn’t take it if you did.”
“I won’t. We’re all we have. You and me. And one day, we’ll leave this place behind and all the horrible things we saw here. We’ll go somewhere, just you and me, and make a life we want.”
Chapter Six
Serena
As much as I hated to leave Ryder’s, I had to if I wanted to still keep us a secret. So after kissing him one last time and promising him this wouldn’t be our life forever, I crept back to my apartment with the plan to be in bed when Oliver finally got home.
My blood ran cold when I turned the corner to head into my apartment and saw him leaning against his blue BMW, his arms folded and a triumphant smile on his horrible face.
I’d been caught.
“Out late, Serena? Coming from Daddy’s office? Oh, but that can’t be since I checked and he’s nowhere to be found tonight. The guards at the gate told me he left an hour ago. So where were you?”
My mind raced as I worked feverishly to construct a lie he couldn’t see through. “I went out for a walk in the garden and then went to the main house for a bite to eat since my father had
told me the cook had made lamb special for him today.”
Oliver’s gaze traveled down my body and stopped at my bare feet. Grimacing at my lack of shoes, he said in a low voice, “I’d think your feet would be wet if you went out for a walk in the garden at this time of night, but they look bone dry. Want to try again?”
I began to walk past him to get into the house, but he grabbed my arm around my bicep and squeezed it tightly, bringing tears to my eyes. Leaning in close to me, he whispered, “I can smell him on you. Back to fucking him already?”
“Let go of me!” I cried as I attempted to pull away from his hold, only to have him tighten his grip on my arm until my skin burned. “You’re hurting me, Oliver. Let go!”
“I knew that kid wasn’t mine. That’s why I had no problem getting rid of it. And the first chance I get, I’ll get rid of the guy who’s been fucking my wife too.”
The mere thought of Oliver, with his scrawny body and small hands, going up against Ryder made me laugh in my husband’s face. “Just try to get rid of him. He’ll kill you where you stand. You don’t know who you’re dealing with, dearest husband, so let go of me and accept that I’ve got you just where I want you after what you did.”
Fear filled his beady little eyes, and he pushed me away as hard as he could. Stumbling across the concrete driveway, I steadied myself and shot him a look before heading into the house. He could think whatever he wanted. If he thought Ryder was going to disappear that easy, he had no idea who he was.
That meant he didn’t know who I’d been with.
Thankful for at least that, I undressed and climbed into bed, hoping to avoid Oliver for the rest of the night, like usual. In the state he was in, I didn’t want to risk another fight with him. I may not live through a second one.
I closed my eyes and thought about that life I’d promised Ryder we’d someday have. I’d thought about it so many times I could picture it down to the last detail. We’d live in a cozy house with a yard for a dog and our kids and a white picket fence in the front. During the day, I’d take care of the babies while he worked somewhere doing an honorable job that didn’t involve fighting or hurting people. Then at night, we’d sit on the back porch and he’d hold me in his arms as we looked up at the stars, counting our blessings as we thanked God for helping us escape this place.