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But he doesn’t remove it or loosen his grip.
“Aidan!” I struggle to get out from under him, and he finally releases me and pulls away. I twist around to see him to try to understand what’s happened, but he’s already out of bed and making a beeline for the walk-in closet. He slams the door, and I hear the lock click into place.
I look down to find a harsh red mark in the outline of his hand where he gripped me, and I’m sure I’ll have a bruise by tomorrow.
I get out of the bed and take the sheet, wrapping it around me. I knock on the door. “Aidan…”
“Just go,” he says. It’s an inhuman growl as though some force beyond his control has shifted him from mild-mannered Jekyll to the hideous Hyde, and now he must conceal himself in the shadows for my safety as things inside him bubble and twist and contort into something dark and misshapen.
I consider knocking again or trying to reason with him, but even if I can get him to talk to me, I feel severely underdressed for this. Everything is still too new between us for that. I hold the bedsheet around me as I cross back to my room. I get raised eyebrows from my door guards. What a boring job, guarding a room I’m not even in. The only time they ever leave the door is when I go into town, and then they flank me as though I’m someone important.
Once locked behind my suite’s door, I get dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slip into some tennis shoes.
I return to the locked closet door and try knocking again.
Twenty-Eight
Aidan
“Aidan, let me in. You can trust me.”
Can I trust her? How much can I tell her? How much should I tell her? Can I trust her with the truths about the younger version of myself? Will I tell her everything? Not just the parts that might make her feel bad for me and like I’m some stray puppy she’s rescuing, but the parts that will fully reveal what a broken monster I truly am? I’m not sure I know how to tell part of this story without telling all of it.
I get dressed. There’s no way I’m telling her any of this naked. It’s too exposed. Those fucking fireworks! I’d forgotten what day it was. I never forget this day. But Maddie being in my home is an adjustment.
Usually on July 4th I stay as far away from other people as possible and as far away from fireworks as I can get. I usually go off into the wilderness and go camping outside the range of the normal festivities.
I know if I tell her this, there’s no going back. She won’t look at me the same way again. The more bodies I stack up, the more and more I look unsafe and unstable. She won’t be able to ever trust me again. But the truth is, I don’t think I can keep this from her. I don’t think it’s enough just to have her here.
Some fucked-up part of me needs her to know the worst of it, so we can go back to the normalcy of her rejection. Except this time she won’t be calling me weird. We’re well past weird and into evil, psychopathic, monstrous.
Finally I unlock the door and go back to sit in one of the chairs in my closet. There’s no need for her to know I was huddled naked in a ball on one of the thick dark green rugs only a few minutes ago—when I thought she’d left me in peace to be with my pain alone.
I’m not sure if I’m upset that she’s back even after I told her to leave, or if I’d be more upset if she’d done what I asked.
Whereas the closet in her quarters is bright with full lighting and white painted shelves and walls, mine is as cavelike as my bedroom—dark wood paneling with all clothes tucked away inside large walnut cabinets. I have a couple of dark green leather chairs in here, a round table, and a side cart with drinks. I swear I’m not an alcoholic, I just like this small dark place sometimes to think or to read.
There are several well-placed wall sconces around the room with old-fashioned antique lightbulbs that give off a warm amber glow. A floor lamp sits just beside the chair. I don’t have a mirror in this room. I use the mirror in my bathroom.
There’s a stack of books on the hardwood floor beside my chair.
Maddie sits in the empty chair and scoots it closer to me. She places an encouraging hand on my arm. “Please. Talk to me.”
I sigh. I want to fight her on this, to resist, but an equal part of me wants to tell her everything, even knowing how it will end if I do.
“The summer before I met you, I went with my father to a big meeting he was having on the Fourth of July on the top floor of the Stryker building. I felt so grown up. I was going to work with my dad. He was going to show me all that I would inherit someday. I was excited because it was past my bedtime and because of the parade going on below. I had the perfect vantage point to watch the fireworks with the floor-to-ceiling windows in the conference room.
There were some important people there, and I realize now they were discussing criminal business, but as a five-year-old kid I didn’t know what their code words meant, and I wasn’t paying attention anyway. I just wanted to watch the fireworks.”
So far her expression is open and encouraging. It’s not going to be that way for long. Still, I press forward.
“You remember meeting Brian and Mina?”
She nods, warily.
“They rolled into that building like death was a fashionable celebrity and took out eighteen people that night. Guards, my father’s associates, and my father. Right in front of me. I locked myself in the conference room and hid under the table. I was the only one they spared.”
She gasps.