Page 8

Eight

flayed

chapter-seperator

“ W here the fuck is Edge?” The voice was deep and burly enough to denote its owner even if I had only ever heard it once before, in the hallway yesterday when Jace accosted me.

Was that yesterday? I didn’t even remember falling asleep, but it sure as shit felt to my brain like I had pulled an all-day sleep crash. The familiar fog of forced unconsciousness.

“You ask a lot of questions.” Someone accused that huge bearlike motherfucker.

One of my eyes cracked open to see Jace standing in his doorway. His back covered in tattoos blocked most of my view, but the tension in his shoulders spoke volumes, like a predator ready to strike.

“Fuck off out of here, bitch,” he snarled. “Did you hear back from your informant? I need to know what the fuck is going on now.”

“Why don’t you try asking her…in a non-threatening way?” That deep baritone rumbled again.

“Bitch, my kitten ain’t talking,” Jace growled. “Now I don’t know how well you know your ladies, but mine ain’t gonna tell me shit that’s the truth, and I’m running out of time and patience!”

Jace’s hand threatened to crumble the door jamb, his knuckles white with barely contained violence.

“We burned her clothes, found this in the pants pocket,” the bear of a man spoke one final time.

Oh shit, they burned my clothes! Was I next? Another thing for them to destroy and discard?

But that thought only lasted until I glimpsed my phone in Jace’s hand. The phone I had recorded my confession on! The truth that would get me killed.

I couldn’t let him find it and listen to it, not until I could figure out a way to escape. I couldn’t gamble on the very real chance he would kill me if he realized I knew the truth of what happened that night. That I knew what kind of monster he really was.

Just thinking about it set my brain to throb. They say head trauma can cause migraines and headaches for years after the initial injury heals. Those were worse than withdrawals where your brain felt like it would scratch its way out of your skull. I had so many over the years, too many to count. Each one a reminder of what they’d done to me.

I fled the bed and was halfway to Jace before I even realized my body was in motion. Was that a symptom of long-term brain damage, the kind done by drugs or abuse? Or just my body’s learned response to him, still eager to please after all these years?

I think it was clear I had poor impulse control, which was why I was back inside the Mayhem clubhouse after so long. But in truth, I had always exercised impulsiveness, especially as a child if you were to believe my mother Nadine. Like a moth drawn to the flame that would destroy it.

I was terminally nosy, as she put it.

“I want my phone,” I demanded, holding my hand out, not really expecting him to give it to me.

I had only ever in my life been wrong about Jace once, that was enough, just the one time. The time that destroyed everything. This exercise didn’t change those statistics.

A smirk almost touched his fine lips. “How bad do you want it, kitten?” he taunted. Then he shoved it down the front of his pants. The devil’s bargain written in his eyes.

Was it childish? Yes. Was I going to let it stop me? Hell no.

It got hot in the bayou, even the loud swamp coolers couldn’t completely keep a body from perspiring in the sultry southern air. Jace’s bare torso had a fine sheen that my fingers easily slid across as I reached for my prize in his worn-out denim jeans. His cock jumped as my hand grazed it in withdrawal of my reward. My body remembering this dance too well.

No sooner than I freed it, his much larger hand clamped around my wrist and pushed it back inside his pants. My phone was stolen with his other hand and pitched onto the bed like it mattered nothing.

Oh god. He was already thick and hard, getting stiffer with each moment as he spoke. “Touch me, kitten,” he commanded, his voice making my knees weak.

I was grateful not to be naked in that instance; he’d dressed me in one of his well-worn and soft t-shirts. It hung down to mid-thigh and dwarfed my slight frame. I wasn’t always waifish, but that’s just what years of drugs among other things could do to a body in transforming it to something ugly…hideous. Each scar a reminder of what I’d become.

I couldn’t blame him if he hated seeing it so much he covered the abhorration.

I couldn’t think clearly, but one thing I knew for certain was that so long as Jace was distracted, he wasn’t using my phone and therefore wouldn’t find what was on it. The truth that would get us both killed.

“I’ve missed your claws,” he murmured as he nosed my neck, my hand squeezing the thick meat in its grasp. His body still knew exactly how to make mine respond.

When my response was not what he wanted, I couldn’t allow that part of myself to take over, he pulled back and looked into my eyes. “Did you really come back here just to give me shit about a mistake I made fifteen years ago? You don’t want me no more, Naomi, you are going to have to open those pretty lips and tell me that.”

How blasé was it to refer to what happened all those years ago as a mistake? Like buying the wrong brand of aspirin or cheating on the big science test in school. Just a mistake, no big deal, everybody makes them. Not everyone sells their sister’s best friend to monsters.

Oh fuck that. It wasn’t a matter of want, because if I ever could again, I would want Jace. Faking it appealed to me about as much as what happened between us in the club’s room they held church in. What we did was disgusting and beautiful and awful and should probably never happen again. That was, until I could get my head clear and screwed on straight again. Until I could find my way back onto the path I’d been on, to justice or vengeance. Were those ever the same things anymore?

“I hate what you did,” I whispered, my voice cracking even though I didn’t want it to.

I hated that I so badly wanted to forget and forgive him so it wouldn’t feel like I was being flayed alive by loving him again. Like my heart was being torn from my chest piece by piece.

The seriousness of his features could bely anything underneath; he could be about to kill me or fuck me again. I wasn’t sure which. It was a huge part of his appeal, and why every woman wanted him, tried to fuck him, whether he was single or not. The beautiful monster who could destroy you with a touch.

“Okay, kitten,” he said softly. “I’ll get you what you need to leave, clothes, car, money. But you’re going to have to kiss me when you say goodbye. That’s my only condition.” His words carried the weight of a death sentence.

I had nothing to say. How could I deny such a reasonable demand? If it meant my freedom. If it meant escaping before he remembered the truth.

Jace gave me his back as he crossed the room, any sexual notions were gone, replaced with a finality that felt almost fatal. My darkest moments never felt like this in all these years without him, hating him. Then wanting to kill him so I would finally escape that night fifteen years ago. All those years of horror between then and now? Were they just penance? Some fucked up form of karma like contrition for not doing the right thing before the irreparable damage ensued. So many lives would be different, if I were different, stronger when it came to this man who always tied me up in knots.

He was leaving!

He was always fucking walking away from me dammit!

Panic surged up furiously quick inside my chest, flipping my stomach inside out in anger and disgust. “I came here to kill you!” I shouted.

Well, I couldn’t take that back. It would be better to lock up my loose lips or bite them off than utter one more devastating truth to the man who stole everything from me, my youth, my innocence, my goddamn heart!

Your heart’s as black as your damn daddy’s, mama used to tell me. I had no idea who he was and she would never tell me. I guess I was lucky she hated me slightly less than him.

Jace raced to me so swiftly I stumbled back, his hands grabbing my head and neck, twisting in the length of black hair down my back.

“You succeeded, kitten. You just did that!” he growled as his lips ground into mine, stealing any resistance or resolve, taking my fucking breath away when I needed it most. “I know you don’t want to know this but you’re gonna. I know I hurt you, I was high all the time back then and I know I fucked up a lot. Losing you fixed me, I’ve been clean everyday we’ve been apart and I would never ever fucking hurt you again. I would die first, kitten. I would fucking bleed out first!”

A swift wind tossed my hair as he sped out of the room in a rush to get away from me. Running from the truth neither of us could face.

Amid the sound of various objects being broken and shattered down the hallway, in the main room of the clubhouse, another sound joined it. The sound of my sobs, horribly loud and empty to my ears. The sound of a heart breaking all over again.

Jace didn’t hold a patent on fuck-ups. I was quite capable of my own…like coming back here. Like thinking I could face the monster without becoming one myself.

A fool believes he can accomplish anything until he or she learns otherwise.

I was tortured and abused for over ten fucking years, but none of it hurt as much as what I’d just done to Jace. Nothing ever hurt as much as this. Not even the night he sold my soul to the devil.

It felt like something scratching inside my brain was calling me a liar, trying to make me remember something that probably never should be. It was all worth forgetting, every kiss and every touch, every lying I love you, I need you, I can’t live without you. All worth erasing from my brain, every second we spent together, but like a strong poison I would never purge it entirely from my veins. His darkness had become part of me.

How stupid was I?

I thought I could kill him when in reality, in the gritty, dirty, nasty real world the only person who would perish if I did that was not who you would presume it to be. The victim becoming the monster.

I shot up so much dope, filled my guts with enough narcotics to numb a perpetual insomniac forevermore, but it never erased him. Some people in your life were like that, impossible to get over, to get past after you crash together and fuck everything up. They become the scars you wear on your soul.

My mind knew it made sense to never see the man again, the outlaw destroying the other room and trying to tear down the clubhouse single-handedly. It sounded like a terribly cruel bayou ballad. The saddest one.

I just wished someone could explain it to my black heart why I still loved the monster who’d destroyed me.