Chapter 28

28

Aubree

Shouts yanked me from dreams, and I shot upright, head whipping back and forth, my breaths rapid and muscles trembling. I took in the stillness of my room, the darkness that seemed undisturbed, aside from the flutter of drapes dancing in the breeze created by my cracked window.

Just a dream.

Laying back against the pillow, I settled into the warmth of my blanket —until another outcry, tortured and pained, echoed beyond my door.

Nick.

I shot out of bed and padded across the room, toward the door, placing my ear against the wooden panel.

“Lena! Lena! No! Fucking bastards! No! We’ll kill you! We’ll kill you all!”

We?

I opened the door to find Blue with his head perked, as if to say, you hear what’s going on? His whine told me he worried for his master, and he didn’t so much as snarl when I tiptoed past him to Nick’s opened bedroom door.

Clutching his doorframe, I watched the way his thrashing body had the bed pounding into the wall. The sheets lay in a white tangle across him. He arched his back, creating a perfect arc of agony, muscles so tight they looked as if they’d snap beneath his skin. His kicks and grunts clutched my heart, as I observed his sufferance in dreams.

The yearning to go to him, soothe him, had me pushing against the door, widening the crack.

No. Don’t do it.

“Don’t do this! Jay!” His bellow bounced off the walls and halted my steps.

Who were those names he called out in his sleep? Why did he sound as if he’d been immersed in something real, truly enduring some kind of pain and torment?

A glisten of sweat coated his skin, discernible in the moon’s light. His brows creased to a frown heavy with pain, and his body trembled, along with my own.

“Nick,” I murmured. The draw to lie beside him, to calm him, pulled me further into the room, as instinct beckoned me to go to him and quiet his agony.

He planked on the bed as his curses filled the air.

Backing away toward the door, I slipped out of the room the moment his eyes flipped open. My heart slammed into my ribs, and I gasped at the near miss.

From the hallway, I peeked through the crack, watching him jolt upright, to the edge of the bed, where he held his head, rocking back and forth. His rapid breaths were broken by whimpers, and I caught a glint of something he snatched off the nightstand beside him.

His arm shook as he held it outright and sliced his skin with a long blade.

An empathetic voice called out from somewhere deep inside of me— I’d had it ingrained into me from an early age to heal others, thanks to my beautiful mother. It was that which’d led me to work as a therapist, the desire to help ease someone’s pain. Staring at Nick, although he was my kidnapper, had me feeling no less compassion. An ache bloomed inside my heart as he cradled his carved arm.

As fierce and dominating as he seemed, the man was broken. Tortured by something. Wracked by some kind of pain.

What?

It was a question that plagued my mind as I padded back to my room.

* * *

Ifolded the book, laid it on the bed beside me, and sat up when Nick appeared in my bedroom doorway, nearly a dozen bags hanging from his grip. Entering, he set them down before returning to the hallway, from where he grabbed shoe boxes and a blue milk crate, arranging all the items in the center of the room.

Though it remained covered, I couldn’t help but stare at his arm where I knew a scar had begun to take form.

I slid my legs over the side of the bed, still unsure of what the hell was going on, but curiosity got the best of me, and at a slight nudge of his head giving me approval, I crawled toward the bags.

Each one carried an assortment of dresses, shirts, jeans, tanks, panties, and toiletries. There were two shoe boxes—a pair of Chucks and combat boots, exactly the style I’d worn before meeting Michael. As if he’d somehow reached into my past.

“I didn’t … pick those out,” he said.

“No, it’s … it’s good.” Gaze glued on the bags of clothes, I offered a half smile. “Thank you … for doing this. I missed simple clothes.”

So badly, I wanted to ask him about the night before—the nightmare and cutting, the names he called out. Thanks to the concealment of his coat sleeve, I caught no more than a glimpse of where thin scars lined his forearm.

“You used to wear this kind of stuff?”

“Yeah, before I became a politician’s wife, and my wardrobe changed to cashmere and linen. And pearls.” I shook my head at the thought. “Twenty four years old, wearing pearls. The only woman in my life who wore pearls was my grandmother.”

Stuffing his hands into the pocket of his jeans, Nick shrugged. “I don’t know, seems fitting for the job of stuffy politician’s wife.”

I toyed with the laces on the Chucks. “It actually wasn’t fitting at all for my job. Not exactly the kind of thing you wear to get down and dirty.”

“What the fuck were you, a mud wrestler?”

Laughter burst from my chest, the sound so strange to me. I hadn’t laughed in a long time, and by the frowned surprise on Nick’s face, it must’ve struck him strange, too. “No. I was a therapist. I only got to go once a week, and it was usually on one of Michael’s off-site meetings. Every Wednesday, I was given precisely three full hours of bliss.”

“What did you do there? Pass out pictures of your husband’s face to young, impressionable future voters?”

I dropped my gaze and my smile faded. “Seems I fooled everyone into thinking I was nothing more than a puppet.” Pulling my knees into my body, I wrapped my arms around them. “Good for me. It’s how you survive that matters most. I like to think some days that perhaps, in those three hours, I did more good than I’d ever done in my whole life.”

“So, what made you get into therapy?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall.

“Well …” A hiccup of laughter escaped me. “Inside every therapist is a patient.” I shrugged, still toying with the shoestring. “I needed to cope with a few things myself, so I thought helping others would teach me how.”

“That’s why you cut yourself? Trying to cope?”

Why do you cut yourself, I wanted to ask. It’d been a week since he’d seen the scar on my wrist, and I’d have thought he’d forgotten it by then. “You first.”

He shook his head. “No. Tell me. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“What does it matter?” A couple of days earlier, he’d asked what made mine special. “Does that put a monkey wrench in your plans, or something? Why are you stressing over it? Does that make me damaged goods to whatever bald, fat bastard you’d planned to pawn me off on?”

The twitch in his cheek confessed that he wanted to laugh, but, wisely, he didn’t, and my muscles bunched with the anger rolling through me. “I didn’t say I was stressing.” The flat, no-bullshit tone of his voice clawed at my patience. I wanted to know his secrets, not spill my own. “I said I want to know why you did it.”

No. That was a box I’d been good at keeping locked shut, and I didn’t intend to open it for anyone. Especially not him. As a therapist, vulnerability was something I’d learned to keep to myself. It was one thing to relate to a student, but another to spill a dark box of secrets. That was my box. He could have any other story, any other box inside my head, except for that. “Something else. I don’t want to talk about that one.”

“All right. How ‘bout the one on your back?” Another deeply brutal wound, though one that caused more anger than pain.

“I snuck away to my father’s funeral. Never told Michael.”

His face rumpled to a brief frown. “He scarred you for going to your father’s funeral?”

“No. He scarred me for breaking one of his rules. I failed to tell him where I was going, so he strung me up to a post in the basement and whipped me.” Scooting backward on my butt, I leaned against the wall beside the bed, next to where he’d set the bags of clothes. “He left me down there for three days. The doctor made a house visit to check on my wounds and treat me for dehydration.”

“A doctor visited you and never reported what Culling did to you?”

“To whom, Nick?” I mindlessly rubbed my thumb on the inside of my palm. “He owns the police. The doctor wouldn’t tell a soul, or risk having his tongue severed with a chainsaw. There is nowhere to run. He has all kinds of connections.” Living with Michael was like being trapped by a dictator in a foreign country, surrounded by people who didn’t speak the same language.

“What the fuck made you fall in love with this asshole in the first place? Why’d you marry him?” he asked.

“People marry for different reasons. Mine had nothing to do with love. I’ve lost my faith in romantic love. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

Nick didn’t say anything, just stared at me.

“Now you.”

His gaze fell away from mine, and I expected him to avoid the question, to be a dick and leave me sitting there with my open wound as he walked away. Surprising me, he stroked a hand across his head, over his scar. “I took a bullet to the skull. Spent a year in physical therapy, mental therapy, bullshit therapies. Still have trouble with some words on occasion, and I can’t really do shit with my right hand anymore. Had to learn to shoot a gun with my left.” As if he could anticipate my next question, he shook his head. “’Sall I’m sayin’ about that.”

Small steps. In time, I might learn what plagued him in sleep, but at that point, I knew a little more about him. He knew a bit more about me, which I’d hoped would help change whatever preconceived thoughts he’d developed from the fake persona he saw on TV. That woman wasn’t me. Hell, I’d be disgusted with her, if I didn’t know a decent person lay buried somewhere beneath.

Lowering my gaze, I peered into the milk crate and my eyes widened. Books lay stacked upon one another, and as I investigated each one, I couldn’t help but smile. Faulkner. Shakespeare. Tennessee Williams. Harper Lee and, my favorite, Poe. Even a few romances thrown into the mix. I lifted my eyes once more. “You bought me books?”

“There’s a place I used to go to a long time ago. Kingston’s Books. They have a lot of old classics.”

I reared back at that, crossing my arms. “You used to hang out at a bookstore? I’m shocked.”

His eyes fell away from mine and dimples caved his cheeks. “I wasn’t necessarily there for the books.” The smile on his face shriveled to something more serious. “It’s where I met my wife.”

The horrible exercise of trying not to stare at his ring finger must’ve had my eyeballs bouncing like a crack addict. “You’re … married?”

He sniffed and cleared his throat. “She, uh … she’s dead.”

Was that Lena? The name he’d called in his sleep? I’d never been good with words, so I locked my stare on the books in my lap, pressing my lips together, before I finally said, “Nick, I’m sorry.”

“Anyway, the owner of the store said these were some of his favorites, so I grabbed all of them.”

“I love them. Thank you.” Once again, our stares collided, and I felt something different about Nick—a curiosity that burned inside my head. Dead wife? Shot in the head? The questions had begun to mount—which meant I’d begun the jigsaw puzzle inside my mind, piecing together the edges first, in hopes of eventually getting to the center. “You’re keeping me for a while, then?”

“As long as it takes.”

Of course, his cold and distant demeanor would make it one of the more challenging puzzles I’d had to work. “For what, exactly?”

His brow winged up. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Let’s keep it on good terms.”