Page 7

Seven

despair

chapter-seperator

D espair was more than a feeling; it was a state of mind, a constant companion, the closest thing I had to a real friend for so many years. It wrapped around me like a lover’s touch, familiar and toxic.

Not feeling any sort of kindness or even mere compassion could permanently alter even the strongest person, so when Jace picked me up like a baby into his much larger arms, I froze solid. My body remembered both safety and danger in his embrace.

He noticed. “Whatever’s going on with you, kitten, I promise I will fix it or fuck up whoever caused it. You know you don’t have a thing to be afraid of when you’re with me, don’t you?”

If only he knew he was the monster I needed protection from.

My lack of response, due to my paralyzed vocal cords, didn’t distract or faze him at all.

“Tell me who hurt you and it’s done, you know that, right?” His lips brushed against my forehead as he walked us back inside, each gentle touch a mockery of the violence I knew he was capable of.

Deep inside, it felt like whatever was left of my blackened soul was being torn apart.

By his kindness.

If there ever was a more perfect dichotomy in actual living tissue for Jekyll and Hyde, it was Jason French. He was both the devil and an angel, but only with me. The demon who wore an angel’s face.

It had been so long since he held me, I forgot what his skin felt like against mine, simmering warm, like dangerous velvet. So long since his heart beat so close to mine, since I felt his breaths or could hear them. Each touch a reminder of what he’d taken from me.

I broke down. Whatever tenuous fragments of myself I’d clung to as I fled only moments before were gone, shattered like the girl I used to be.

Hysterical sobs racked my torso as he picked up his pace and squeezed me closer.

Back to where this mess started, in his room, he kicked the door so hard it not only didn’t close but bounced back and left a dent in the wall. Violence always followed in his wake.

By that time, he was settling his more-than-fine backside onto the less-than-plush mattress. The frame groaned a pathetic acknowledgment of its burden, the abomination of human flesh and the amnesiac man who held it. The devil cradling his broken toy.

Jace could never know any of the things that happened to me, the vile things that would make monsters of men and nightmares of once-innocent dreams. Hope was lost long ago to me, and yet here he was, trying to give it back. But he wouldn’t bother if he knew the truth. If he remembered what he’d done.

It felt like I was perched on a high wire stretched between two skyscrapers, just waiting for a gentle breeze to tilt the world and me with it. The balance was practically nonexistent, so I held onto what I knew was true. If I stayed, even to indulge the masochistic side of me that always loved this very bad man, he would remember that night. If that happened, I didn’t know what would matter more—my silence or his love for me.

I could hear my mom’s chastising voice, always admonishing most of the things I attempted. “Don’t pick that scab, girl. It will never heal right if you do.”

It was a misconception most citizens had that just because something bled, it hurt. I remembered very clearly over the years something along that sentiment being told to me when I was too young to understand. Pain only hurt you if you let it. What ached the most were the scars, because those bitches never faded.

Jace was my scar. He was the seeping, pulsing wound over my heart. The reason I knew was because never once in all those years we were apart did I feel it at all… until now. Until his hands reminded me what it was to feel anything at all.

As I struggled for enough air to inflate my lungs, to make some sense of things long past that couldn’t, in reality, ever be righted, I almost fell again. Honey eyes anchored me more than his arms and fierce hands. Those same eyes that had watched while they broke me.

The first time I saw Jace, the first time we looked into each other’s eyes like this, something shifted in the world—something irreparable, something terrible and wonderful and unmistakable. Something that would eventually destroy us both.

Up until that moment, I operated on the idealistic notion that I was a good girl. I tried very hard to be, even in light of my mother Nadine’s insistence that I was the devil’s daughter, rotten to the core. Maybe she saw the darkness in me even then.

When those honeyed whiskey orbs searched mine, they found me. The Naomi I was always too afraid to be. How could one look free a girl? Jace’s did. It was an acceptance of everything about me, both good and bad, but mostly the bad. He saw the monster I could become.

“Kitten?” His hands smoothed most of the salty moisture from my flushed cheeks. “Do you want a shot?”

I misunderstood his meaning, immediately tensing, and the worst part of all, my veins began to itch like they had ears of their own and misinterpreted his offering too. The familiar call of oblivion sang in my blood.

I shook my head, huffing out a “No” that sounded far too weak and timid to be convincing.

“Fuck it, I’m having one,” he grunted, “or six.”

Carefully placing me beside him, he crossed the room swiftly and grabbed the whiskey bottle off the dresser, the predator momentarily distracted by his own demons.

Jace necked it with a great guzzle, eyeing me like I was a dangerous animal the entire time.

Maybe a sideshow freak.

“You’re going to have to start talking to me, Naomi. Like where the fuck have you been for the last fifteen years?!” He swiped his mouth with the same hand that still held the half-empty bottle while his stare pinned me down, like I was prey he’d finally caught.

A predator’s look.

Was I always his prey?

How was I ever content to be that?

I operated under the wrong assumption that Jace would never hurt me… until he did. It was the same type of delusional thinking that plagued owners of dangerous, exotic, or venomous animals or reptiles—they will never bite the hand that feeds them. The lesson is often learned the hardest way, but isn’t that what they wanted all along? To dance with death until it finally claims them.

To die for their obsession, to convince everyone theirs was the greatest.

Is that what I had done?

Was I obsessed with Jace, even now after everything? After every scar, every nightmare, every violation that started with him?

The answer gnawed at my guts, scratched at my already raw conscience until it bled.

In the past, his volatile temper would have surfaced by now due to my muteness. Jace was not a man who liked to be kept waiting for anything. It probably made him a good president, an efficient killer, definitely made him an exciting, phenomenal lover, but also a deplorable human being. A monster wearing a crown.

“Knock over any armored trucks lately?” Those words slipped past my lips before I could retrieve them. They were both a threat and a memory of the events that led up to his father Luke’s incarceration. The beginning of the end.

One blonde eyebrow shot up as a smirk slightly lifted one corner of his devilish mouth. He set down the bottle abruptly before moving swiftly to me.

“Can you imagine doing one thing in your stupid youth, in a drug-fueled mania, and never being allowed to live it down? I like it when your claws are out, kitten.”

“That’s bullshit! Why did you do it?” I meant to ask—How could he do it? Hurt her like that night. Kill the only person who ever truly loved either of us.

His hands balled into fists so hard I could hear his knuckles pop as he dropped down onto his haunches to look me in the eye.

“I didn’t just do it for more drugs. I did it so we would have the money to run away together. To get the hell out of this damn bayou like we wanted.”

Something about that confession rang too true to my burning ears, even if it was a lie. Why he still lied to me I couldn’t begin to fathom. Maybe part of him was still infatuated with me after all these years. Or maybe the monster just missed his favorite toy.

“On a list of colossal stupid, that choice would be at the top!” I didn’t want to feel what he made me feel, the way I did years ago for him. To know it never went away. I had just forgotten. Like a wound that never truly healed.

“You think I don’t know that?! It cost me every damn thing!”

The timbre of his voice, along with the yelling, made me shudder, and upon seeing it, Jace stormed out of the room, locking the door after him. The sound of the lock clicking was like a death sentence.

He was wrong about everything. It made him president, and he still had that.

At least I could breathe and think without him in the same room.

But that was another lie.

Because even alone, his darkness still lived inside me.

It always would.