AllFreeNovel
Share Us
With her, he didn't have to use it to fight. He could use it to serve. It might be fleeting, but in this moment, she saw he understood.
Coming down was like being on the tail end of a summer storm, the air still crackling with electricity and distant rumbles of thunder. He was braced on his arms, but she brought him down to his elbows, cupping both hands over his skull and pressing a kiss to his forehead, then to his lips when he raised his head. His own hand curled around the back of her neck, holding her as the kiss deepened, as he adjusted his hips to make another firm push inside her. She offered a soft moan against his lips that had his eyes sparking.
"Like that, do you?" He did it again, and she met him with squeezes of her internal muscles, a mutual giving that kept those quiet spasms coming, their bodies rocking together as if they'd always known how to move with that synchronicity.
She slid her hands around to his face, thumbs caressing his lips. He kissed her fingers, then he dropped his head, pressing his face hard into her neck. The shudder that ran through him now was something different. She stroked his back, his wide shoulders. "What is it?"
He shook his head and eased out of her, moving back up to his knees. He gazed down at her, much as he had in that portentous turning point at the beginning. Shadows were gathering, reminding him of what had brought them here. She could see their grasping hands trying to pull him away, and they were faster than hers. Before she could hold him, he rolled off the bed and moved away from her, disappearing into the bathroom.
Cold without him, she pulled the blanket over herself, a dissatisfying substitute for his body. She reminded herself it wasn't a setback. He'd just gone farther with her than he ever had before. She pillowed her head on her hands and studied the bathroom door. He hadn't turned on a light, but she heard running water. When he emerged, he picked up his jeans and pulled them on. He righted the lamp and side table before taking a seat in the easy chair. She studied his shadowed features.
"I miss your heat," she said. "Come back to bed."
He didn't say anything. Despite the darkness, she sensed he was drilling her with that trying-to-figure-you-out stare, which was fine, but she was concerned other energies were closing in on him.
"Why did you ask me to join you at the prison?" she said.
"I had a weak moment."
She didn't respond to that, and kept her gaze leveled on him. He slouched down in the chair, stretching his legs out, his hands resting on the arms. Now she could see his moody eyes were fixed on her, but on no particular point. "I asked because of the way you are with me," he said gruffly. "How I feel when I'm with you...I thought you'd come, and I wouldn't feel so alone with it. Stupid."
"No," she said. "No, it wasn't. I wish I could have gone inside with you."
He shook his head. "That was the last place I would want you to be. It didn't matter anyway. He didn't look at me. Didn't even seem aware of any of it. Stoned, or his mind's all gone now. He didn't want to say anything. They just did it, and it was done."
She thought he might fracture the polished arm of the chair with his grip. Rising from the bed, she picked up his shirt, donning it, and came to him. A hand on one of his knees, her foot against his, and she'd pushed his feet apart. Under his brooding gaze, she sank to the floor, drawing her knees up as she used one of his legs for a back brace and laced her fingers over her bent knees. She didn't ask for anything. Just waited and looked at him in the darkness, only broken by that filtered light through the drapes. With it, she could see the shape of his forehead, the strands of hair over it. The broken line of his nose. The roundness of one broad shoulder.
"He wanted me to be like him. He'd bring in animals he'd caught and..." He paused, and his voice became so flat and dead she thought he'd had to go somewhere far beyond where his personality and soul resided, the things that made him Marius, or Duncan. "He'd torture them, make me watch. I wouldn't help, so he'd beat me."
His gaze came back to her, and so did the full force of his personality, so fast it was as if he'd slammed back into his own body. Seizing her by the shoulders, he dragged her up to her knees, bringing her eye to blazing eye with him. "I never helped. Never. He'd throw them in this dumpster, and I'd sneak out at night, go get them, bury them."
"Okay," she said softly, putting her hands on both his knees. "It's okay. I know you didn't help him."
He stared at her, and something in him crumpled up like paper. "How could you know?"
"I've been inside you, remember? You can tell me as much or as little as you like, but I know who you are. What you are...and aren't...capable of doing."
He nodded, a quick jerk. He didn't let her go, his touch still bruising, as if he didn't realize how hard he was holding her. "Every time, I hoped he'd kill me so I wouldn't wake up, so he couldn't do it again. Thought that maybe if I was dead, he'd stop. He didn't want a partner. It was never about that. I was just one more way to torture something weaker than himself. There was no sense to it, no reason for why he was the way he was."
His voice was raw, but strong, unbroken, like he was being beaten now and defying the one hammering him to break him. He would never break. She had a flash back to him in the fight ring and suddenly all of it made sense. And if she hadn't caught up, he added to it with his next words.
"He didn't get it. I'd take the pain, take the beating a hundred times, just so I didn't have to hear their cries or watch him do what he did to them." He released her, dropping back into the chair with a dull thud.
"I learned to fight. Even after he was put away, I kept learning, getting better and better at it. I needed to be ready to fight, to not be helpless, if ever he tried to do that to me again, tried to do that to anyone." He chuckled harshly. "My dad was never getting out, even if he beat the death penalty, so it didn't make sense. It didn't get through my thick skull until the lawyers told me the final appeal was likely to fail. Then it hit me, how futile it was. He was going to be beyond any retaliation, beyond anything, and I'd be left here with all of it in my head, inside me. The way it had always been. I'd been kidding myself, thinking there was a way to get past that."
He'd been forced to face all the feelings he'd been bottling away, instead of focusing on being prepared to fight. That was your trigger, baby. That was what had switched up the game for him, made him start to act out with the Mistresses far more aggressively. The more the truth had sunk in, the worse it had become. Regina would bet on it.
"It didn't make any difference. It didn't..."
"Yes, it did." She gripped his face in gentle but inexorable hands
, making him look at her. "You never let him win, Marius. He was after your soul, and you never gave it to him. You were a child, and you let him beat on you instead of doing more harm to innocents. There are grown men who don't have that kind of courage. You weren't weaker than him at all."
"It wasn't courage." His face folded up in anguish. "I couldn't stand to hear them cry. I still can't, it tears things loose in me..."
Volula Jones thought he didn't like cats. Animals picked up distress signals, and those that came off him when he was around them were probably so strong they sent up alarm flags. Particularly when the cats started to plaintively meow for food or attention.
It wasn't that he disliked animals. Far from it.
