With that last confession, I can feel my resolve disappearing. This is exactly why I have kept men at a distance, because once I let my heart be shared with another, I’m doomed. Right now, Wes is taking a part of my heart and I’m willfully letting him.
I turn around and face him. I place my cheek on his chest and I wrap my arms around his waist and squeeze, letting him know I give in and that it isn’t easy.
“You go first.” I tell him.
He sighs and wraps his arms around and squeezes back. “Deal”. He drops his arms and grabs my hand, leading me back to the bed. We both climb on and sit cross-legged, facing each other.
Wes takes a moment and then begins. “I loved my father. I looked up to him like any son would to their father. He would play catch with me in the back yard. Take me to work with him and sit with us at dinner every night. It was the ideal father-son relationship. He ran the business during the day and was home by six every night. He was the same way with Jesse. His mom is my mom’s sister. Jesse’s parents were low life junkies who bought a bag of chips and a jug of juice to keep him fed on once a week, while they spent all their money on dope and liquor. Jesse was taken from them when he was young and we took him in, though my drunk, pill popping mother, didn’t give two shits, my dad did.
“My father appeared to be the all American dad. He had Jesse and me both fooled. Every evening after he put us to bed, he would go down to his study on the main level of our house to work as he claimed. He had only two rules that we really had to follow. One; don’t get out of bed and two; don’t ever come to his study.
“We never questioned him and we never left our room. Well, we did leave our room, but it was only for little things like sneaking snacks and getting batteries for our flashlights. One night, we were doing just that. We had to pass my dad’s study every time to reach the kitchen. His door was always shut and always locked, but not this particular night, it was cracked open. Jesse and I were curious and didn’t hear my father in there, so we cracked the door open even further and went all the way in. I had never been in my dad’s study before, so we stood there, looking at everything until we heard a scream. A type of scream that would make your blood run cold. The type that had made Jesse and me stop in our tracks.
“At first we thought it might have been my dad and mom fighting, but it wasn’t. My mom was passed out cold from her dinner of vodka and pills, which was a nightly routine.”
Sitting here and listening to him talk about his mom with so much hate, makes me so sad. He practically spits when he mentions her. My mother was amazing, so I can’t even imagine what his life with parents like that was like. We have covered all sorts of topics as we have grown to know each, but he never once mentioned his mom and barely his dad. Even when I had asked, he had somehow manage to skirt around it.
Which is oddly familiar. Just like me.
“Then we heard it again. It was definitely a woman’s scream and sounded like it was coming from the bookshelf behind my father’s desk. We started to walk closer and pressed our ears against some old books. As soon as we did, the shelf itself started to move. Jesse and I both had moved like hell and went and hid in his coat closet. We watched through the vents of the door as my father emerged looking sweaty, covered with droplets of blood all over his shirt.”
I placed my hand over my mouth to contain the gasp coming from it. Wes hasn’t even finished and I don’t know if I want to hear anymore. I can see the struggle he’s having telling it and I know it’s about to get so much worse. I place my hand on top of his and he flinches. “Sorry,” I whisper. He shakes his head and grabs my hand, holding it and giving it a light squeeze.
“There was so much blood. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw my father walk through some sort of hidden passage way. I didn’t even recognize the man standing only a few feet away. His facial expression was blank and his eyes were black. He looked like a monster, breathing heavy and covered in blood.
“Jesse and I had to wait in that closet for hours, while we watched my father transform from monster to man as he sat at his desk to do paperwork. Luckily for us he eventually got up and went into his office bathroom, I’m assuming to clean up. And that’s when Jesse and I got the hell out of there.
“I spent all night lying in my bed, trying to figure out what I had to have just seen. It was later on the next day, after my father had gone to work, that Jesse and I both agreed to try and go back and attempt to pick the lock to my father’s office. It took hours for us to finally get it picked with one of my mom’s hair pins.
“Once we got in, we shut the door and headed straight for the bookshelf. We thought it would be like in the movies, where you pull a book from the shelf and it would magically open, but that wasn’t the case. So next we tried the desk. We checked all the drawers but one, the one that was locked. I remember wanting to give up. My father would be home shortly and I didn’t want to spend all that time trying to pick the lock, but flashes of what we had heard and witnessed the night before, kept me determined. I got the lock picked and in the drawer there was only one item, a small, grey, remote, with one red button. We pressed the button and the shelf started to open. I put the remote into my pocket and started to walk down a dark narrow set of stairs. I didn’t even hesitate.
“I remember feeling cold as I walked down the steps that were made of wood and walls made of concrete. There was no light to lead our way, until we reached the bottom. Small lights lit a long corridor with doors on either side. It was dead silent as we approached the doors. Each door had a small opening above with bars across them. Jesse and I were both too short to see through them. I jiggled the door handle of the first door we came across. Nothing. It was locked. Same with all of the others. We didn’t think anything was down there, so we started to walk away when we heard it.”
He pauses and I can’t help but ask, “What?”
“Quiet cries coming from one of the doors. I yelled hello, but got no response. I looked around for something to stand on so I could look through the doors. I knew I had heard crying, but it had stopped as soon as I spoke. Jesse had found an old bucket at the end of the hall and tipped it upside down. I got up on it and peaked in. What I had seen terrified me and confused me. There, inside one of the small rooms, was a naked woman chained to the wall, covered in filth and blood.”
“Oh my god,” I say out loud, without meaning to. “Do you want to stop? You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”
Wes shakes his head and looks away. I can tell he hates having to live this over again. I understand it. I don’t like the idea of it myself. “I want to you to know it all. I’ve already started. No point in stopping now.”
I nod my head, silently letting him know he can go on.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes. She looked so sick, like she was dying. She had these huge gashes covering her entire body. I couldn’t even determine the color of her hair it was so filthy. She was too scared to even look at us, but we were determined to find out what she was doing down there like that. Eventually with some patience, she spoke. Her voice so small. Her words we barely audible. She was struck with too much fear. I think we were able to convince her we weren’t going to hurt her, because she began to tell us what had happened. I grew angrier and angrier as she went on. She told us my father had bought her at an auction full of woman like her. Women who were stolen from their homes to be sold as slaves for men like my father. He used her for things I didn’t really understand at that age. She wasn’t the only one down there either. There were two others, but they remained quiet. We sat there for at least an hour talking to her. She told me her name was Alta and that she couldn’t remember how long she had been down there. It was so long, she had stopped counting the days.
“It was coming close to the time my father was going to be home and we had to go. I hated that I had to leave, but I promised her that I would find a way to get her and the others out, if she promised not to mention to my father we were down there. She agreed
, but I could tell she didn’t believe me either.
“Three weeks had gone by before I did anything. Three weeks of pretending everything was fine. Three weeks of anger and disbelief that the man I idolized so much could possibly do something like that. Three more weeks of torture those women had to go through because I didn’t know what to do. I knew something had to be done.”
He stops speaking and takes a deep, long drawn out breath.
“How did you do it? How did you free them?”
“I woke Jesse up one night after it had finally hit me. I told him we had to kill my father. It was the only way to make sure those women and any other women would be safe from him. Jesse didn’t even bat an eyelash when I told him. We spent the rest of that night and the next day forming a plan. We wanted it to look like a break in. We watched everything we could at the library about break-ins and how people get caught. It pretty much boiled down to not leaving any sort of evidence that would link the suspect to the victim.
“Three days later we figured we had a full proof plan. My mom was at one the many rehab facilities she often vacationed at. We didn’t have to worry about her. I had grabbed a knife from the kitchen block on our counter and crept up the stairs in the middle of the night to my parent’s room. I remember standing there, crying over my dad’s sleeping body as I held knife up high above his chest. I went back and forth so many times standing above his body, debating on whether or not to do it. But images of Alta and the other girls down there, prevailed over my hesitation. I plunged the knife deep into his chest and watched my father die. I stood there for the longest time watching the blood seep from his lifeless body. Once I was able to stop crying, I had become thrilled that it was finally over. I felt happy that I just saved those women, and future women, from another beating from my father. I didn’t regret it one bit.
“We left my father’s room and started taking valuable things from around the house. Money from his wallet, some of my mother’s jewelry and anything else we could think of. I took a hammer to the door handle and broke it off. Then we gathered everything and put into a bag and set to the woods to bury it. It took about three hours to bury it all deep into the woods behind our house. We returned home and washed all of our clothes and put them away into totes labeled, ‘winter clothes’. After that, I grabbed the house phone to call the police.”
Wes stops talking and laughs to himself like he’s sharing some sort of inside joke with himself. It’s a loud booming laugh that kind of scares me a little.
“What?” I ask, because he is almost hysterical at this point.
“I was such a good little actor when they had arrived, Jesse too. I bawled and acted like I was so heartbroken that our house had just been robbed and that my dad was dead. Jesse and I worked well together then, just as we do now.”
“What about the women? What happened to them?”
Wes stops laughing and becomes serious. “Jesse and I opened the door to my dad’s office and to his secret little dungeon and let the police find them. We couldn’t just free them. They needed help, medical and mental. I went and visited Alta in the hospital and gave her the exact coordinates of where I had buried a bag of cash. I wanted her and the others to have it. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I walked out of the hospital that day and never saw her or them again.”
TWENTY-TWO
WOW. ALL I CAN PICTURE IS a little Wes being braver than anyone should have to be at that age. Any doubt I had about the kind of man he really is, just completely vanished. I uncross my legs, turn onto my knees and reach up and kiss him. A slow, steady kiss, and when I pull away, I just stare at him. He reaches up and swipes tears falling onto my cheek. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.
“Sorry,” I say to him. I don’t want him to see me cry.
“It’s okay. Why are you crying, though?”
“Because I’m sad, Wes. Sad for the two little boys that had to go through that. Sad that even at my age, I would never be as brave as you and Jesse were when you did that.”
He brings me in close and holds me. “You are brave, Marlie. Last night, you were brave. I never in a million years would have been able to drive like that and get us out of there that fast. You’re brave every day. You are living with a difficult past and putting a smile on your face at the same time. You watched me kill a man and yet you came with me and let me explain. If those things aren’t brave, then I don’t know what is.”
I nod into his chest as I think about last night. “I was trained to do that.”
He pulls back and looks at me. “To do what?”
“To drive like that.”
I shake my head and take a deep breath. I’m going tell him. I have to. After what he had just told me, I need to. We need to get everything out in the open. So I might as well start now.
I pull back from his embrace walk over to the window and look out, while running my fingers along the drapes. “I told you about Carter and our relationship, but I haven’t told you the middle.”
He nods his head and I continue on. “His and my relationship was fine as long as I allowed it to be. He introduced me to a world I never even knew existed and I loved it. Finally, for the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere, or so I thought. He had introduced me to his Uncle Olin and I found him be nice, but a little… off.
“At first, nothing bad had happened. I think I was sheltered from a lot of it, but I wanted more. I wanted be a part of that life. Carter started letting me in little by little. I knew that racing was a huge part of it, so he taught me how to drive. Not just how to pass a driver’s test. He taught me how to race, drift and everything else that goes with it. I loved it. I loved it so much, that every chance I got, I practiced. They never let women race, but it didn’t matter because Carter would race me. Of course he beat me every time. One time, though, I had gotten close and he didn’t like it. I stopped racing him. It was odd that he got upset over it and now that I think about it, I think my coming so close to beating him might have cracked something in our relationship. But not enough for me to notice it much. I just stopped racing him and that was that.
“As I was introduced more and more to the life, I realized racing wasn’t the only thing that they were into. Drugs, women, and guns. I was okay with it all, but the women. I’m still not entirely sure, but I don’t think most of them were there of their own accord. They were always so skinny, too skinny. Their faces always so blank, but I knew it was the drugs. That’s what made them so compliant.
“Towards the end of our relationship, I had become friends with a girl named Lena. She wasn’t like the other girls and drugs weren’t really her thing. She was Carter’s Uncle’s woman and no one was to touch her. But she didn’t love Olin. She was in love with another man from the warehouse. I was the only one who knew about it.”
I stop to take a moment. What I am about to say next hurts me. It’s the one thing at makes me hate myself so much. It’s what makes me like them.
“Olin found out. I don’t know how he did, but he knew and he knew everything. He knew that I knew and was furious. In his world, you don’t fuck him over. We were all ambushed. Carter was out of town and I had received a text from who I thought was Lena, saying she wanted to talk and to come to the warehouse. When I got there, Lena and her lover were kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. Olin was there standing behind them, seething. He untied Lena and made her choose her life or her lover’s. She chose him and Olin shot the man anyways. It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen, but it wasn’t over.
“He walked over to me and handed me the gun. Olin said I had to shoot her if I wanted to live. I refused. God, did I refuse. He gave me no choice and I had to do it. I choose my life over hers and I have to live with it every day.” I stop and bury my head into my hands and try to hold back the sobs I have been trying to force away since I began the story of my past.
I back up and lean against the wall and slowly slide down, pulling my knees up to my chest. I place my arm
s over my knees, then look up at Wes. “I killed her. I killed my only friend there just to save my own sorry ass. How selfish am I?”
I look down after that, ashamed. Wes comes down to my level and kneels there for a few seconds silently, but I can feel him starring me down. “Look at me.” he tells me, even toned.
I can’t do that right now, so I don’t move.
“Look at me!” he demands harshly this time, making jump a little.
I whip my head up at him and see anger in his features. “You’re not selfish, Marlie. If anything, it was a mercy killing.”
“How the hell could that have been a mercy killing?” I snip back at him.
Wes shakes his head in disbelief, like he can’t comprehend how I don’t get it, “Because, by the way it sounds, he would have killed her anyway.”
I think about what he said and he’s right, I betrayed Olin’s trust, but she deceived him in a way that no matter what, he probably really would have killed her eventually. And if not, would have tortured her until she begged for death. The thought of that makes me feel like a huge weight on shoulders has been lifted. I still murdered my friend and the guilt and memory of that will never go away.
At my realization, Wes’ eyes soften. “Is that when you decided you wanted out?”
I laugh at his question. “No, there is only one way out of that life and Lena was forced out. The only reason I was left alive was because I was Carter’s. That is the only reason.
“Things changed after that. I changed after that. The carefree girl was no more. I became harder and colder. I embraced the life because that was the only way. I helped with the gun trade and the drugs. Though, I never did any of them. Carter and I had grown, but he was changing too. Call it my hard love for that monster, but I was blind to the things he was doing.
“He started cheating and getting into the drugs. Gemma had seen it, but I didn’t want to hear any of it. I always chalked it up to being stressed, because Olin was teaching him how to run the business. She stayed away from Carter and them, but there were times she couldn’t avoid him. Like when he would stay over at our place. She knew and I never listened to her concerns. I should have listened, but I was in too deep with him. Until one day I found him with…” I trail off because I don’t want to have to repeat all of it again, it’s too much.
Underground Secrets (The Underground #1) Page 22