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“More like they reminded him of animal-loving Romy, and how they met,” he said, lifting a shoulder. “Gotta admit, I’m not a fan of your father, but I do feel for him and all the scars he’s been carrying around inside. Whatever he had that was good in him probably died with Romy.”
“I always thought it was prison that made him the way he is. And he raised me to be the same way,” I added, and even I could hear the warning in my voice. “Don’t ever forget that at my core, I am not a nice person, Luke. I’m a killer.”
“Eden, in my line of work I’ve come to know more killers than I can count. I’ve slogged through the sewers of their minds, and I’ve felt their terrifying lack of conscience and gleeful depravity. Sorry, love, but you’re not even in the same category as a petty thief. Remember, I know that you couldn’t handle the damage you created when you lifted some rando’s wallet.”
“You don’t know what happened.”
“So tell me. Tell me how you came to be the terror of Gobbler Gulch, Kentucky at the tender age of eight.”
Damn it, he wasn’t taking this seriously, and he probably wouldn’t until I told him all of it. Suddenly that was all I wanted. I wanted him to see how vile I was, so he understood I should never have a good life.
“Things were never easy for my mother and me. One of my first memories of life is being cold, because we didn’t have enough money to heat the house in the winter. I remember we’d go out into the woods and gather kindling to burn in the fireplace. I couldn’t really carry a lot since I was so small, but I tried my best to help. My mother couldn’t get stable work. Every time she landed a job she’d only get fired from it a few months later. Klaus von Krummacher didn’t want his daughter to exist outside his grasp, so he’d put pressure on her employers to fire her. I guess he thought she’d eventually be forced to come crawling back to him, but she never did. Instead, she briefly hooked up with Leonard Driscoll and started the worst, and last, year of her life.”
He cuddled me close, his mouth coming to rest on my temple. “I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t so hot for you, either.”
“That man wasn’t even human.” I nodded, shuddering. “By then I understood fully what our life was all about. I knew who the von Krummachers were to my mother, and to me. I also knew they didn’t want me, because the one and only time Klaus came to our little lean-to shack I overheard the bargain he offered my mother.”
“What bargain was that?”
I swallowed, amazed that this long-ago wound could still bleed. “He told my mother that he’d arranged for me, her shameful bastard, to be sent to an orphanage over in Lexington, and that if she allowed this to happen, Klaus and his wife—presumably my mother’s mother—would welcome her back with open arms. I’ll never forget it. Until that moment, I’d never known fear could be so sharp it hurt.”
“Jesus.” The arms that held me tightened, as if he feared I’d be sucked out of his hold to that long-ago orphanage and never be seen again. “That motherfucker. I knew he was a royal piece of shit from what everyone told me, but holyfuck.”
“There was nothing for me to worry about,” I assured him quickly. “I never should have doubted my mother. With every breath, she’d always shown me how much she loved me. Of course she told her father to go to hell. To this day, I’m sorry I doubted her for even a second.”
“Any child hearing cruel shit like that would have felt what you did,” he murmured, again kissing my temple. “Let that guilt go, yeah? Your mom wouldn’t want you to hold on to it.”
I nodded, because he was right. My mother had been nothing short of a saint. “That night, after Klaus left, I learned everything about my family’s past—that not only was Klaus responsible for us living in poverty, but that he was the one responsible for railroading my father before I was even born. We were doomed right from the beginning. Thanks to the von Krummachers we were never allowed just to exist as a family. Then Leonard Driscoll came along.”
He waited a beat. “Did your mom love him?”
I shook my head. “She’d caught pneumonia earlier that year, and I’d missed a ton of school just trying to keep her alive. Driscoll coming along must have seemed like a lifeline, so my mother grabbed at it.”
“Jesus,” he said again, a protective hand coming up to cradle my head. “You really had one helluva childhood, didn’t you?”
“I was never a child,” I said, and I could hear the flatness of it. “We spent six months with Driscoll before we moved back to our little shack on the edge of the woods. I know the papers all said that my mother and Driscoll were living together, but that’s some crazy lie they printed, probably fed to them by the police who hadn’t lifted a finger to help us when we asked for it. The truth is that Driscoll and my mother had split up by that point.”
“Why’d the split happen?”
“Too many broken bones. Specifically my mother’s jaw and my left wrist.”
“Fuck,” he breathed, and for a moment he looked murderous himself. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.” I raised my left hand and squeezed my fingers into a fist, remembering a time when my much-younger self couldn’t do that without screaming in agony. “My mother wasn’t great when it came to standing up for herself, but she tried like hell when it came to Leonard Driscoll. As I said earlier, she did go to the police. She tried to bring charges against him, or at the very least get a restraining order… but all the people she spoke with told her she didn’t have a case, despite the ER doc putting in a report on our behalf. To this day, I don’t know if it was because the local cops were still terrified of Klaus, or because back then with the rural folk of Gobbler Gulch, one didn’t get involved in domestic problems.”
“Probably a combination of the two.”
That sounded about right. “My mother, a gentle soul who was a hundred pounds soaking wet, bought a gun to protect us, since it was obvious the local authorities were too afraid to come near us to do it themselves. I remember how she and I sat at the kitchen table reading the manual on how to load a gun. We didn’t even know where the safety was. But we learned.”
Gently he rubbed my back. “What a fucking nightmare.”
“It was actually very empowering, or at least that was what we both felt at the time,” I said, while sorrow filled every corner of my soul. “My mother and I even felt sort of safe with that gun in the house. We actually believed it was this magical shield that could ward Leonard Driscoll off. It wasn’t.”
“No, love,” he murmured, rocking me gently. “Of course it wasn’t.”
“I never thought I’d actually be the one who had to pull the trigger,” I admitted, not seeing anything but that night, that terrible night, when I came around the corner and saw Driscoll holding my mother by the front of her nightgown as she lay on the floor, so silent, while he pounded his fist into her face again and again… “I said earlier that I was never a child, but at the time I knew that children shouldn’t be the ones to handle guns. I somehow thought my mother would be the one who would use it to protect us, not the other way around. Maybe that’s why…”
He gave me a squeeze. “Why what, baby?”
