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He jolted when he saw me watching him, then slid from the stool and stood facing me, the glass clutched so tightly in his hand I could see his knuckles turning white from across the room.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I couldn’t sleep. You were right. I…I need to tell you what I know. I c-can’t live with the guilt I’m feeling knowing that he took those girls because of me,” I confessed.
“None of this is on you, Evie,” he said firmly. “I’m sorry if that’s how I made you feel.”
“It wasn’t you, Nick. This is on me though, isn’t it? If I’d have come forward to the police months ago, when he let me go, maybe they’d have caught him by now. Maybe they’d have saved those other two girls before it was too late. I let him get in my head and scare me. I let him win,” I explained tearfully.
“He didn’t win. He can’t as long as you’re stood here before me.”
“Can I have one of those?” I asked as I nodded to the glass in his hand.
He nodded in reply and rounded the counter. I watched as he moved to the cabinet filled with glasses. He was still in his clothes from earlier, clearly having not been to bed at all. When he turned back my way the under-cabinet lights, that dimly lit the kitchen, illuminated his face and I noticed the dark smudges under his eyes. His hair was messy for the first and only time since I met him, as if he had been pushing his hands through it repeatedly. None of that detracted from how good looking he was though. While he was slimmer than Harris and Kailan, he was still toned and trim – like the body of a swimmer – with a slim waist and built upper body. He wore the hell out of the polo shirt he had on. I could see a tattoo peeking out from beneath the sleeve, but not enough to gauge what it was of.
“Come sit down,” he told me, the tone of his deep voice startling me in the silence of the house. He sat at the counter once again and pulled the seat beside him out for me. I moved over and took it, sitting so close to him I could feel the heat of his body at my side, and smell the musky fragrance of his cologne.
He poured me a very generous measure of scotch and slid the tumbler towards me. I picked it up and took a sip, wincing when it burned its entire way down.
“Not much of a scotch drinker, are you?” he asked with a smirk.
“Not really a drinker at all,” I shrugged. “I never needed much of a buzz to have fun before. I guess that’s different now.”
“Why do you say that?” he threw back his entire glass of scotch and refilled it again.
“I’m different now. How could I not be? Before, I was a person filled with joy. I had such an amazing childhood. My parents and my brothers sheltered me from the rest of the world, and they gave me so much love and happiness. They shaped me into a woman who knew who she was and what she wanted. I was confident and happy. I wasn’t naïve. I know that the world can be a shitty place, but I…I had plans to change that. I was going to work for the Justice Department and take down the evil in the world, one case at a time.”
“You’re an attorney?”
“I was,” I replied before I took another drink.
“You still are. What’s changed? Don’t you feel more determined than ever to get rid of that evil now that you’ve seen it firsthand?”
“I’m not that same woman anymore. He…he broke me,” I admitted as my eyes filled with tears. “I’m not confident or sure anymore. I can’t even fucking handle a trip to the store! I’m messed up. No one will ever hire me as an attorney now, and they shouldn’t. I can’t stand in a court room and fight. One slam of the gavel and I’ll be under the table rocking and shaking,” I scoffed. I downed the last of the drink and grabbed the bottle, pouring myself the next.
“You can get back there, Evie. It will take time and work, but you’ll feel strong again, one day.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that working out for you then?” I snapped back.
“Yeah, you got me there,” he laughed flatly before he downed another almost full glass of scotch.
“Will you tell me?” I asked as I looked up into his eyes. For the first time I was close enough to see they were actually blue, but dark blue, like a stormy sea. “What happened to you guys?”
“Harris hasn’t already told you?”
“No. I…I think he finds it hard to talk about and I don’t want to push him.”
“We all find it fucking hard to talk about,” he hissed.
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to.”
“I never even wanted to be in the military, you know?” he began after several moments of tense silence. “Never really wanted to do anything. The childhood I had didn’t exactly make you feel you could follow your dreams. Hell, I barely made it through high school.”
“You were in the system?”
“Yeah. Given up at birth. I don’t know who my parents are. I was adopted at first, but when I was five the mom died in a mugging gone wrong and the dad couldn’t cope anymore. He put me back into the system and from there I bounced between group homes and families. I was a shit of a kid, so no one wanted me around for long.”
“That sounds a lot like my brothers. They were all in the system before mom and dad took them in, and a couple of them had been through hell in the system before that.”
