Page 33 of Whips and Chains (Saint View Murder Squad #2)

His tongue demanded entrance to my mouth, stroking my lips. He tasted of salt and sweetness, and I sucked in deep breaths through my nose, each one imprinting his scent on my brain until I knew I could never forget it, even if I lived to be Grandma Ruth’s age.

God, I hoped he was still kissing me like this when I was in my eighties. I hoped he was kissing me like this until the day I died. My head spun, my body all feeling and no thought. Light and breezy and so blissed-out I wanted to stand like this, kissing in his arms forever.

Somebody cleared their throat nearby, and we both jumped apart like we were high school kids who’d been caught making out behind the bleachers.

Heat rushed to my throat, and I wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment at being caught by his mom or if it was because he’d been squeezing it while we’d kissed.

I rubbed my hand over the spot absentmindedly, and X’s gaze narrowed in on the movement, his teeth clenching.

I quickly dropped my hand and smiled at his mother. “Your garden is beautiful.”

She chuckled. “Not sure the two of you have seen much of anything but close-ups of each other’s faces, but thank you. It’s a lot nicer in the sun. I hope you’ll come over one day for lunch, maybe? I can show you all my plant babies.”

X chuckled. “We just had a regular old plain backyard when we were kids. Nothing but grass and a pool. Then we all grew up, and Mom replaced us kids with her plants.”

He grinned at her, letting her know he was just teasing, but clearly she had already heard this mock complaint from him or his siblings before.

She smacked his arm. “I didn’t replace you.

I just…landscaped. I no longer had five little boys running around, needing a backyard football field.

” She turned to me. “Can you imagine if I’d tried to have nice gardens when they were kids?

They would have been digging in them to find caterpillars and making forts beneath bushes or trampling the flowers when they kicked the ball into them… ”

X squinted at her. “How is that any different than when we play football out here now?”

She gave him a dirty look. “That’s not an everyday occurrence anymore, so I can live with the odd occasion one of you dropkicks a pigskin into my rose bushes.”

A fond affection passed between them, one that told me everything I needed to know about their relationship. She loved her son with her whole heart. And he loved her right back.

This was not the dynamic I’d been expecting from X’s family. Not even a little bit.

I gazed around the darkened yard and then frowned at X. “You said you had a pool when you were kids. Did you get rid of it?”

An awkward silence settled over us. Jeanie glanced at X, biting her bottom lip. He was staring off into the darkness again, his entire body locked up tight.

I instantly knew I’d said something wrong. I just didn’t know what. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

I couldn’t continue because I didn’t really know what I was apologizing for. Only that I’d made the two of them uncomfortable and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

Jeanie caught my arm and squeezed it. “No, it’s okay. You didn’t know. Knox brought it up. It was an innocent question.”

She glanced at her son; her teeth pressed into her bottom lip. She was clearly concerned by his reaction, and I was too. When he didn’t say anything, she glanced at me.

“We had it removed about a decade ago. It just…it held some not very nice memories, and none of us had used it in a very long time before we decided to pull it out.”

X snaked an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into his chest again.

I wrapped my arms around his middle, hugging him back, wishing I hadn’t brought up the topic at all. It had killed the mood completely.

His mom walked away without any fanfare, leaving the two of us alone again.

X rested his head on top of mine. “It’s my fault they had to get rid of the pool.

I can’t swim. Not well anyway. They tried to teach me every summer, but I would just sink like a stone until someone yanked me back up.

They never gave up, but I remember my father always being so baffled as to why I was so bad.

My brothers all picked it up and were swimming laps around me while I was the eldest and forever stuck in the shallow end. ”

“You don’t have to tell me any of this,” I said quietly against his chest.

He gazed down at me. “I don’t get to tell anyone anything.

Those people inside that house? I love them with everything I have in me, but I can’t tell them who I really am.

They wouldn’t believe me even if I did. And if I showed them…

” His body gave an involuntary shudder. “That’s not even an option.

I don’t want to think about them knowing what I need to do just to function. ”

I couldn’t even imagine how hard that had been for him over the years. Never being his authentic self with the people closest to him.

“What about Levi and Whip? And the rest of your group?”

X scoffed, “We can talk about cleaning up a scene or dumping a body, but I can’t talk about anything personal because we have rules against that.

They can’t know about the people in my life and I can’t know about theirs.

Do you know how superficial that makes a relationship feel?

We aren’t friends. You can’t be friends with someone you know nothing about, other than they prefer guns to knives. ”

My heart broke for him. I could hear in his voice how isolated he felt, how the desires and urges inside him that he couldn’t help had defined his whole life and left him feeling like he didn’t truly have anyone.

“You can tell me,” I whispered. “You can tell me all of it.”

I wanted to know him. Wanted to know this version of him, who was quiet and open and not hiding behind chaos and violence and humor.

I wanted to know Knox. Not just X.

He shrugged. “I think I was about seven. It was an unbearably hot day, and the air conditioner inside had stopped working. I remember that specifically because normally Mom wouldn’t have let us all in the pool when it was just her at home to watch us.

There were too many of us, you know? Xavier and Felix could swim, but the other two were still in floaties, and I could stand in the shallow end but couldn’t go any deeper.

It was just too much for one person to watch over, so normally we only swam when our dad was home as well.

But this day was so miserably hot, and there was no relief, and Xavier and I pestered Mom to go swimming until she eventually gave in and said we could. ”

I already had an idea where this was going. I didn’t need him to say it. “You nearly drowned that day.”

He nodded. “Hendrix got stung by a bee, and the last thing I remember was him crying and Mom grabbing his hand, trying to remove the stinger, the bee floating in the pool. Xavier was screaming it was going to kill us all. One minute I was standing in the shallow end while my brothers all splashed around me, trying to escape the bee. The next minute, the waves had pushed it closer to me, and I lurched back. But I was too close to the deep end and couldn’t find my feet.

The water was over my head so quickly, I don’t even know if I flailed around.

Even if I had, it wouldn’t have caught my mom’s attention.

My brothers were all doing the same thing. ”

“But you were the only one who was drowning instead of swimming.”

He swallowed hard. “Yes.”

My chest felt tight, like I was the one who was being held in an underwater prison.

The thought that he could have died that day messed with my head.

If he had, I would be dead now. I would have been raped and murdered by Paul Jeddersen in that house on Olympic Drive, instead of standing here in X’s arms in the moonlight.

I twisted my fingers in the back of his shirt and pressed my head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat beneath my ear. “How long were you out for?”

“I don’t know. I just remember searing pain in my chest and then everything going black.

When I came to, I was on the side of the pool and there was chaos around me.

My mother screaming, my brothers all crying.

And there was blood.” He touched his eyebrow.

“This happened when my mom dragged me out of the pool unconscious. She still can’t remember exactly how it happened, but the paramedics guessed I probably hit my face on the edge of the pool when she was trying to get me out because I had some other scrapes too.

But this was the worst one. It needed a couple of stitches and scarred. ”

I pushed his hand aside to run my finger over the scar through his eyebrow. “It’s interesting that this cut is what you remember. But I guess you don’t remember being unconscious…or whatever they had to do to bring you back.”

He rubbed his hand over his chest absentmindedly. “I don’t remember the CPR. Only the ache in my chest for days afterward while I was in the hospital…”

I cocked my head to one side. “Sounds like there’s a but at the end of that sentence…”

He nodded. “But I remember being in that pool. Remember how it felt to be suffocating.” He stared down at me.

“Remember feeling…interested.” He shrugged.

“I don’t know how to explain it. But it was the first time I remember feeling fascinated by death instead of scared of it.

” He smiled, more X again than Knox. “And that’s the story of how I came to be a psychopath.

Think the newspaper will want to do a feature on me? ”

“Knox…”

He sighed. “I don’t know if that day triggered something in my brain or if I would have been like this anyway. All I know is I won’t even take a bath, let alone go in a pool.” He grinned. “Even a puddle is pushing it.”

He was smiling and joking, but I didn’t miss the pain in his eyes.

He clearly didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and that was okay.

There was nothing left to say anyway. He’d suffered something traumatic that may or may not have changed the hardwiring in his brain permanently.

We would never know one way or another, unless he admitted to someone what he was really capable of, and they hooked him up with wires and machines and studied what made him tick.

And the thought of that was horrific.

Because it meant he’d been caught.

And he was probably in jail.

I didn’t know why it hadn’t really occurred to me before now that these men could be arrested at any minute. I could be okay with what they did, fall for them, be living out my fairy tale, only for it all to be snatched away by the cops or a knife or a bullet.

Getting involved with any of them was setting myself up for a heartbreak I wasn’t sure I could recover from when my heart was already so broken over Toby.

X had opened up to me tonight, and in the process, I suddenly felt like I was shutting down.

I didn’t want to lose him.

I didn’t want to lose any of them.

But I didn’t know how to keep them either.