Page 33 of Sin (Salvation #1)

Sin

The truck’s windows are fogged, and the air inside Betty Jo is steamy, but I still clutch Cassidy to me as our hearts and breath both slow to normal range.

I fondly pat Betty Jo on the dash. “Good girl,” I praise the truck. Cassidy giggles beside me, and we settle back into each other, and for the first time in my life, I feel comfortable in stillness.

I don’t have to race through the moment to feel alive or wonder if the next thing will be better. I don’t want to be anywhere else, and I’m not sure anything could be better than this.

Cassidy, here. Like this. With me.

“Can I ask you something?” Cassidy asks, his head resting in the perfect place between my neck and my jaw.

“Sure,” I say, wanting to give him anything he asks of me.

“Since Oliver isn’t your lover, who is he? Every time he calls or texts, you drop everything to talk to him.” He drops a quick, sweet kiss on my neck. “He must be important to you.”

It’s not a tricky question to answer. All I have to tell Cassidy is that he is a private investigator I hired.

I could probably kiss him afterward and distract him from asking any more questions —tonight anyway.

Then tomorrow or next week, he asks another simple question, and I either give him another simple answer, the less I say, making it more of a lie, or I give in and tell him the truth, which terrifies me.

Then I remember the sight of Cassidy getting in his truck to leave me, and I realize the catalyst for that wasn’t just a jealous misunderstanding, but the web of secrets that pervades my life that he knows nothing about.

Oliver’s words come back to me: Revenge is a possessive bitch, Sin, and once it gets ahold of you, it will seek out everything you ever loved and take it away from you.

He feels me tense beneath him. He looks up at me, his eyes full of concern. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I need to tell you a story.”

We clean up and put our clothes back on, and I sit for a minute staring at my hands, unsure how to open up after a lifetime of keeping everything locked down.

Cassidy seems to recognize my struggle. “Whatever you want to share with me doesn’t have to happen tonight if you’re not ready.” He leans over to give me a light kiss against my cheek. “It’s enough that you’re willing to share yourself with me. It can happen on your timeline.”

His totally agenda-free nature amazes me. If I hadn’t been watching his genuineness up close for three years, I wouldn’t believe him or his kind of goodness existed in this world. His support sets me free.

I begin with an old memory.

“I was five,” I tell him. “One night it was storming so badly the lights had been knocked out, and I decided to sneak out to the third-floor veranda to watch it roll in. I’ve always loved severe weather.

The quiet pause between the lightning and the thunder.

Seeing the bolts electrifying the sky, then total stillness and the eerie quiet filling the air until a huge, house-rattling boom shakes the sky. ”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Though I’m not looking at him, I can hear the smile in his words. “You’re all about the big show.”

“Maybe so,” I agree with him. “I was so caught up in it, I fell asleep on the porch swing. My mother found me out there and picked me up in her arms and was taking me downstairs to my room. My father stopped her on the landing and they began to fight.

“I didn’t really understand what they were fighting about, but I remember her telling him she knew what he’d tried to do to her.

He hit her and told her she was delusional.

She turned to flee. I was wrapped around her, and I watched him put two hands on her back and push her so we went flying down the stairs.

I remember thinking it was just like the storm as we were falling.

There was that surreal quiet where everything paused, and then there was the loud crash as we hit the hardwood floor.

Agonizing pain shot through me, the impact shattering my right arm in three places.

I started crying for my mother, but she didn’t respond.

I crawled out from beneath her and tried to wake her up, but—” It’s been fifteen years, but I still have a hard time saying the next three words. “But she was dead.”

“Sin,” Cassidy holds out his hand to me, and I clutch at it, desperate to be grounded in the here and now of being in this truck with him, rather than being stuck in the memory of that night.

“Why isn’t he in jail?” Cassidy asks softly.

I let out a bitter laugh. “My father has a different story of that night’s events.

He told the police that I was having a tantrum and I’d caused my mother to lose her balance and fall to her death.

He hammered his version of events into my brain, calling me a mother-killer and replaying his version of the fall over and over again until I began to believe he was right.

That I hadn’t wanted to be brought in from the storm, and my violent fit had caused her fall.

I thought I deserved the corrections he devised for me each night in his study for causing my mother’s death. ”

“Corrections?”

“They were punishments my father devised for me. Some physical, some psychological—all meant to banish the sin out of my blackened soul.”

“It was child abuse!” Cassidy says, anger clear in his voice.

“I survived it.” I hesitate to look at Cassidy because I don’t know what I’ll see there. I don’t want anyone’s pity, but especially not his. I couldn’t stand it. I force myself to look up at him, and all I see is his goodness shining through tears, and it almost acts as a salve for past scars.

“Do you remember when I told you how much I loved the pool house?”

“Of course, I do,” he says, a crease on his brow because he doesn’t understand the change of subject.

“It was my mother’s favorite part of the estate. We spent a lot of time there. I think it was probably a place she could avoid my father because he has a phobia of water and always avoided it. My best and clearest memories are of her there.

“But after she was gone, I couldn’t make myself go in there.

I felt too guilty since my father had convinced me I was the reason she was no longer alive.

One day, though, when I was ten, I was missing her so much that I went there just so I could feel close to her.

That’s when I found several journals she’d kept.

“I began reading them, hungry to know the mother that I had too few memories of.

They chronicled her college years, meeting my father, and giving birth to me, but it was the last journal that was different.

Instead of recording cherished memories, she began to chronicle her growing certainty that my father had married her for her money, and her growing realization of what a dangerous man he was.

She writes accounts of his abuse, cheating, and toward the last six months of her life, she writes of her growing suspicion that my father was poisoning her.

“After reading them, my memories from the night of her death came back in full, panoramic view. I promised myself that I would punish my father. That I would live, breathe, and die with no other goal in mind. That there wasn’t a line I wouldn’t cross, a rule I wouldn’t break, a person I wouldn’t hurt, to make sure my father paid for what he did to my mother.

” I squeeze Cassidy’s hand, which I’m still holding, in a vice-like grip. “Then I met you.”