Lover Arisen, page 32
“I want to know what happened June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
There had only ever been one part of Erika’s past, it seemed. And that was not merely true from an outsider’s perspective, whether the questions from other people were generated out of pity, compassion, or morbid curiosity. For her, too, there was only one thing.
A single night, on June twenty-fourth, fourteen years ago, had wiped out all her birthdays and holidays. Her summer vacations. Good grades, bad grades. Best friends and frenemies.
Afterward? Nothing else had particularly mattered. Or would.
She’d been eliminated with the rest of them.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Balthazar repeated.
“It’s okay. I’ve run through the story a hundred times.”
Yet she struggled with where to start, which was a new one—and that was when she realized that she had a down-pat speech she gave people. The recitation was a rote A-to-B-to-C of it all, and she was prepared for the peaks and valleys of emotions that inevitably arose in her audience. She knew the places she had to steel herself against the reflexive, unsolicited empathy that would always come back at her.
And she braced herself not because such displays of human connection would make her get teary or something. It was because she really wanted to tell whoever was pulling the soppy bit to fuck off. If she could suck up the pain of going through it, they could leave their stupid compassion at the door when they merely heard the story.
“I shouldn’t have pressed. I’m sorry—”
“Dispatch called me the night before last.” He immediately stopped speaking when she interrupted him. “Dispatch is how detectives find out about cases and get assigned them. In the homicide division, we have a rotating schedule and whoever is covering a given night gets whatever comes in. You ever heard of that TV show Forty-eight Hours? Every second counts in the beginning, if you want to find out who the killer is, so you have to be quick about getting to the scene, finding witnesses, gathering evidence.”
She took another draw from the mug and didn’t taste a thing. “My partner, Trey, he starts lighting up my phone. He doesn’t want me to go over to Primrose. He tells me to stay away, he’ll handle it. I refuse to listen to him, and that was my first mistake. See, when dispatch rings, they’ll let you know basic details. Number of victims, status of victims, location, any preliminary suspects who may have been apprehended. There were four victims at the house. A man, a woman, and two teenagers. So I knew…”
As her voice trailed off, she had to clear her throat. “I knew why Trey was calling me and why he was probably right. That I shouldn’t go to that scene. That I wasn’t going to be an asset.”
A slideshow of images flickered through her mind’s eye, and with them came a hopelessness that fit her like a hand-tailored suit of clothes, covering the contours of her body as a second skin.
“I threw up in their bathroom. After I went upstairs to the girl’s bedroom. It was pink. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend raped her before she shot him. He’d murdered both her parents before he went upstairs to get her. She shot herself after she put two bullets in his chest, while she was on with nine-one-one.” Erika felt her brows lift. “Their bathroom was blue, now that I think about it.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“If the parallel is not obvious to you, the same thing happened to me. Except I survived.” As her heart rate sped up, she felt as though she were living through the actual events, for some reason. And she let her mouth go. “I’d forgotten it was my mother’s birthday and I was late for dinner. I stopped at a CVS and grabbed the first card that had the word ‘mother’ on it. I didn’t even bother to look at the message inside.” She shook her head. “That’s among the things that hurt the worst, by the way. Her last card, which she never read—and I didn’t even give a shit when I picked it out.”
Horrible, too-clear images assaulted her. “I parked outside the garage and walked to the front door. It was open, which was weird. As soon as I stepped inside, I smelled the blood. I ran back to the kitchen—and I slipped in the pool that was under my father.” She frowned. “I’m pretty sure I started screaming then.”
It was a while before she could continue. “Just as I was going to go for the phone, he dragged my mother in from the garage. I think… I think she’d been trying to run out. He had a knife to her throat.”
“Who was he,” Balthazar asked tightly.
“My boyfriend. Ex… I mean.” A lump in her throat made it difficult to speak. “He killed her in front of me. Disemboweled… her. He said he wanted to destroy any place I had ever lived and that meant he had to cut out her stomach. My mother… screamed and fought and… the next thing I knew… he was on me. With the knife.”
As her hands went to her collarbones, and then drifted down in between her breasts, she felt the white hot spears, the sting, the sudden sense of gurgling suffocation that had come when the stabbing had started.
“He told me my brother was dead upstairs in his bed. Johnny was nine.”
“How old were you?” Balthazar said in a rough voice.
“Sixteen. It was… right after school got out for the summer. I was going to camp out of state to be a counselor. He didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want me to leave him. He thought—well, in the end, it didn’t matter what he thought. He was crazy.”
“What happened to him.”
“He slit his wrists with the knife he’d used on me and my family. And when that didn’t go far enough, he took out what turned out to be his father’s gun and shot himself in the head.” She touched her eyelid as it started to twitch. Then rubbed the thing to try to get it to stop flickering. “He thought he’d killed me, and I played like I was dead. He was… utterly distraught. He didn’t want me to live, but he didn’t want me dead, either.”
“Here,” Balthazar said.
Erika glanced at him, and found that he was holding out the sweatshirt she’d given him from her dryer. When she just stared at the thing in confusion, he leaned in and blotted at her face with it.
“Am I crying?” As he nodded, she was surprised. “I don’t cry over this, you know. Ever.”
Well, if that wasn’t a stupid statement, given the tears he was mopping up.
“Can I tell you something I’ve never told anybody before?” she whispered.
“It would be my honor to hold your secret here.” He touched over his heart. “And keep it within me.”
She took her sweatshirt from him and moved up a little higher to a drier place on the sleeve.
“I just stood there.” Erika began to cry openly, the tears streaming down her face and dropping onto the blue bathrobe. “While he killed my mother. I just… fucking stood there as he cut into her and she screamed. She held her arms out to me, her eyes… they locked on me… she called my name…”
And that was when the snap happened.
She just broke in half. It was as if the composure she had maintained was a hard shell, and with enough force exerted on it, it lost its structural integrity—and what was inside, all the horror and regret, the poisonous self-hatred, everything so pressurized, just exploded.
Strong arms wrapped around her, and she went with them as they brought her against a broad chest.
Erika cried so hard, she made no sound, could draw no air, lost track of everything.
Even herself.
But she knew who was holding her. That, she remained clear on.
* * *
All Balthazar could do was hold on to his female. As she released her pain, he reflected that the secrets buried by shame were always the most poisonous ones, and the destruction they wrought was the insidious kind, under the surface and mostly hidden.
And he was honored that he was the one she’d chosen to reveal herself to.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered against her hair as he stroked her back. “Oh, God… I’m so sorry.”
To be that young, that innocent… and to have your childhood ripped away from you by that sort of violence. He had been through a lot in his life, but nothing that came close to what Erika had endured.
That she had gone into homicide made sense. She was trying to do right by others like her family. But he also knew that she never got away from death; it no doubt haunted her at night as well as stalked her during the daylight hours at her job. She had not healed over the last fourteen years; she was stewing in tragedy.
Although could anyone really heal from something like that?
With a push against his pecs, she moved away from him. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
She was steady on her feet as she walked over to the utility bathroom, and when she closed the door, he rubbed his face with his hands.
There was the sound of water rushing—for a while. Then a toilet flushing. Then more with the water. When she emerged, she carried a pleasant scent with her as she wiped her hands on a paper towel, which she pushed into her robe’s pocket.
He expected her to make a pronouncement that that was done. She wasn’t talking about it ever again. But she didn’t.
She came directly over to him, standing tall and much more composed, even though her face was red and her eyes bloodshot.
Her hands were steady as she went to the tie around her waist, and when she removed the robe from her shoulders, she just let it drop to the floor. The t-shirt underneath was a fresh one of the same kind she’d had on throughout the night, plain, white and loose, the creases from it having been folded while warm from the laundry making a pattern down the front.
She lifted it slowly, the hem going up over her belly, her ribs…
Her breasts were beautiful to him, her nipples peaked from the chill—
And there were the scars.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then focused on the healed wounds.
She had been stabbed repeatedly by a right-handed assailant, the wrinkled and knobby pattern located under her left collarbone. He was well familiar with those kinds of injuries and he knew she had to have been penetrated by a blade at least ten times, because there were satellite punctures around the main impact zone.
Her hand lifted, and as she ran her fingertips over the uneven texture, he had a feeling she did that a lot.
“I can’t fix it, you know,” she said in an absent way. “I mean, plastic surgery won’t really make it go away.”
“Why would you?” When she recoiled, as if he’d shocked her, he shook his head. “The scars are not ugly. They don’t detract from how beautiful you are. And what happened is always on your mind anyway. Besides, you probably needed surgery afterward. A couple of times. You’re done with operations, aren’t you.”
She nodded, as if in a daze. “I can’t make it go away just by… you know, trying to get rid of this.”
“We can’t run from our pasts. We shouldn’t even try.”
There was a long silence, and he worried that he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe he needed to—
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Now it was his time to be surprised. “For what?”
“You’re so… accepting.”
I love you, he thought to himself.
“But you’ve been in war, haven’t you,” she said. “This is… what you’ve seen before.”
“It’s true. It’s a part of life. I don’t want you to have gone through what you did. I hate it. I fucking hate it—and if that asshole weren’t under the ground already, I would hunt him down and bring him back to you in pieces. I would ahvenge you and your dead to honor you and your parents. I would see that it was done in the proper way, in the painful way. I would have him suffer under my bare hands and breathe in the smell of his blood and the stink of his cowardly fear.”
He had to stop himself before he got too far into all that. And then he bowed to her from his sitting position on her blue couch.
“Verily, it would be my honor to ahvenge you and your bloodline.”
When he looked back up, she had put both her hands over her mouth and her eyes were shining.
He couldn’t tell whether he had offended her or scared her or—
Erika came forward, came to him. And as she dropped her hands, she whispered, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Is that… good? Or—”
She settled on top of his lap, one knee on each side of him. As her eyes roamed around his face, she ran her fingers through his hair.
“It’s hard to talk about my past,” she murmured. “Because people are interested for reasons of their own and they get emotional for reasons of their own. I lived through it. I don’t want to help others manage my tragedy.”
He ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders. “Makes sense.”
“You’ve been through war,” she repeated. “You’re different.”
Balz focused on her breasts. “May I touch you?”
“Yes.”
Just as she had during the night, she took his hand and moved it onto her tender flesh. And as the weight of her breast filled his palm, he moved his thumb back and forth over her nipple. In response, her hips rolled against his, her back arching, her chest rising up.
Slipping his hands around her waist, his mouth brushed over her sternum, her heart. Then he kissed her scars, gently, reverently.
“You’re so beautiful to me,” he said.
He glanced up. Her eyes were luminous as they watched him—and the fact that she was so open, so vulnerable… told him she believed him. She knew what he was telling her was true.
Balz took his lips farther down onto her breast. It was hard for him not to think of all her pain, but she was right. He wasn’t going to ruin this moment with her with his own emotional response to what she had had to endure.
Instead, he was going to show her how desirable she was. How absolutely perfect. How sexy and alive she was.
He worshipped her, sucking at her, stroking her, nipping and licking. And she felt exactly how he wanted her to. She was liquid on top of him, fluid in her hunger, aroused in her anticipation of what he was going to give her—and then her hand was in between their bodies, encircling his erection, standing him straight up.
Erika positioned him, holding him in place, and then her core took over the job, encapsulating him with a tight, hot hold that he knew he was never, ever going to get enough of: They could spend an eternity together, and still, entering her was going to be a revelation.
As she sat all the way down on him, their sexes joined, she pulled back a little.
Their eyes met, and neither of them moved.
And that was when it happened. Somehow, her thoughts and memories became his own. He didn’t mean to get into her like that, but he did, the connection between their bodies so seamless that it melded their minds as well.
What he saw consumed him, and he opened his mouth to speak.
But then she started moving, her hips riding his pelvis, his cock going in and out of her to the motion she set.
That was all it took. He tightened his hold on her ass, cupping her, squeezing her, moving her up and down on his shaft. There was so much to see where they were joined: His erection glistened every time she lifted herself up, and each time she sat back down, the visual of him disappearing inside her body made him crazy with lust.
He started coming. He couldn’t help it, didn’t want to.
Things got a whole lot more slick.
And then he couldn’t see anything anymore because his eyes closed on their own. That was okay. He could hear her moan and then feel her go tight. After that, the rhythmic, milking grip of her sex on his cock teed off another round of orgasms for him.
It was all so perfect.
Just like her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
By the time Erika left her townhouse, it was past eleven a.m. She knew that Balthazar was not a fan of the departure, but she had to get her unmarked back and she wanted to check in at headquarters: The former was because the sedan was municipal property and she’d left it by that bookshop in an iffy part of town. The latter was because, as much as she had loved the time she’d had down in that cellar, as close as she’d become to the man—male, she meant—she felt the need to keep a foot in her own reality.
The silver Honda was where she’d parked it, grill-in to her closed garage, and as she got in behind the wheel and drove off, she was on autopilot. The traffic wasn’t bad, except for getting on the Northway, and as soon as she was cruising at a smooth sixty-one m.p.h., her thoughts returned to Balthazar.
She told herself she wasn’t falling in love with him.
“You’re just not,” she said as she hit the directional signal and changed lanes to get around a slowpoke eighteen-wheeler. “I mean, you can’t be.”
Yes, they’d been through all kinds of crazy stuff together, and yes, they’d had some incredible sex.
Reaaaaally incredible sex.
And yes, she had revealed the deepest part of herself, a part that she didn’t even visit, and he’d handled it in a way that she hadn’t known she’d needed.
But that wasn’t “love.” That was sexual attraction fulfilled. A sensitive moment shared. A surprising compatibility.
It wasn’t love. People like her didn’t fall in love—unless she thought that shrink she’d gone to her senior year in college had been lying about the attachment disorder diagnosis? And to think she’d gone to the guy herself, not because a roommate or school administrator or professor had made her go. She’d known that she was out of sequence compared to her peers and she’d wanted to know why and he’d told her.
She still was out of sequence.
For chrissakes, the fact that she was sleeping with a vampire was actually right up her outlier alley, wasn’t it. Everybody else was engaged, married, married with babies, or married with children. She was seeing Dracula.
“Stop it,” she muttered as she got back into the middle lane.
Balthazar was so much more than that. He had accepted her scars. He hadn’t judged her darkest secret, the thing that stung her right to her soul. He had cherished her and held her, and when they’d fallen asleep together for a half hour, he had kept a gun right under their sofa in case he had to protect her.
