AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The party.”
I tilted my head, scrutinizing him. “You know about the party?”
“Everyone knows about the party.”
Though I really wanted to, I couldn’t even smile in the face of my mother’s baby brain. There was something endearing about her forgetfulness. She had never forgotten things in her life with my father. She could not forget things. It would not have ended well for her.
Yet now she was safe enough to wear what she wanted, say what she wanted, argue with Swiss when and if she saw fit and she was safe to forget.
She wassafe.
I tore my eyes from Elden. “I’ve got to go,” I repeated, willing myself not to cry.
Elden didn’t say anything. Didn’t move.
I did a last-minute check to ensure that all of my closing tasks had been done. I was half prepared to lock him inside if he didn’t move or speak, but when I tried to move past him to leave, he grabbed my wrist.
The grip was strong, bordering on painful. Exactly what I needed.
“I love you, Violet,” he murmured roughly.
All my breath left my body. I was pretty sure that my soul left my body too. I’d lapsed into one of my fantasies. One of my many fantasies that I had about Elden saying those words.
“I fucking shouldn’t,” he scoffed. “I hate myself for loving you. For you loving me, especially since you don’t know anything about me.”
My back straightened. “I know enough,” I countered.
He tilted his jaw upward, facing off with me. “I went to prison at eighteen for murder,” he said flatly, without priming, warning.
It wasn’t the information so much as the empty tone it was spoken in that made me gasp. He was trying to scare me. Trying to make me rethink the words he’d just said.
I pulled my wrist from his grasp. “That was, what? Fifty years ago?” I joked weakly. The age joke didn’t land, so I continued on. “It doesn’t change how I feel about you now.” I walked forward, holding onto the sides of his cut, looking up at him. “Tell me more. Because I want to know more. Because no matter what you tell me, nothing will change.”
He sighed. I felt tired just from hearing it, feeling the weight that he had been carrying without knowing the specifics of it. He eyed me, maybe measuring whether I could handle the truth. If he could handle telling it.
I waited, staring at him, holding onto him, trying my best to show him with my eyes that I wasn’t going anywhere.
His hands found my wrists, and I was afraid he was going to yank my hands away, but he held onto them, gently rubbing the inside of them with his thumbs. “I came from a from a nice family, probably not unlike the family of that fuck you brought home for Christmas.”
Even though Bennett was long gone and never a real romantic interest, there was still clear and radiating fury in Elden’s tone.
“My parents were a product of their parents,” he continued. “Not bad people, just bred to think a certain way. A certain, narrow way.” He grimaced, lifting my hand to kiss the inside of my wrist before stepping away.
I forced my feet to stay where they were, hating the distance but giving it to him anyway.
“Fuck, I didn’t even have a problem with it all. I would’ve been the frat boy who wasn’t near worth enough to deserve your attention.” He shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “I had a girlfriend. One I thought I loved. Some fuck said the wrong thing to her at a bar, I started punching him, couldn’t stop.” His eyes were faraway. “I have no fuckin’ clue where that anger came from. That rage. All I knew was that I couldn’t stop punching. Even with my girlfriend screaming. Even with two guys pulling me off him. Then three.” He paused, his fingers curled into his palms. “My parents had connections. Not enough to get me off completely, but enough to get my sentence reduced.”
I tried to picture what Elden looked like as an angry, eighteen-year-old boy facing prison time. I tried to picture Elden as the son of some rich family. Underneath the beard, the weathering of his face, the steely hardness in his eyes... I couldn’t envision that. Couldn’t see him without the power, the quiet strength, the ability he had to make it seem like he was unbreakable.
“All things considered, I got a cushy sentence for beating a man to death for no other reason than I didn’t like the way he looked at my girlfriend.” He never took his eyes off me. “Five years. One year longer than I would’ve been away at Harvard. Early admission. My mother had been thrilled to have the bumper sticker, the sweatshirts. To visit me. Not so thrilled to visit me in prison,” he scoffed. “It broke her heart in a way that I’m sure contributed to her death,” he added quietly.
My lip trembled at the distant sadness in his voice. A wound long scanned over but never fully healed. Like a bone that fused together wrong.
“I was a rich, spoiled piece of shit, and I was put in a maximum-security prison,” he continued. “Though I was a stupid shit who didn’t know what real struggle was, I’d watched enough movies to understand that I needed to find protection if I wanted to stay alive and didn’t want to become someone’s bitch.”
My heart hurt at the mere thought of it. Of Elden being lost, vulnerable in that way. I didn’t think about the man he killed, though I should’ve. Maybe it should’ve made me look at him different, considering my past with a man who couldn’t control his violence. But it didn’t. He wasn’t the same as my father.
“Had to prove myself.” His eyes glazed over with a coldness that seized my lungs. “And I did.”
