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“Maybe that’s why I hesitated. I mean, I was asleep so there’s that. I was awakened by a crash, glass breaking—I know that there was a window broken, so I always assumed that was what the noise was. I heard my mother scream, sounds of scuffling… and I kept waiting for the sound of a gunshot. That’s how it was supposed to go—get attacked, shoot the bad guy. That’s what my mom said she’d do. So I waited in the dark like a scared little kid—”
“You were a scared little kid,” he murmured, kissing my brow and swiping a thumb at my cheek. I understood why when I felt the wetness there. “Try to find your clinical self through all that internal hell you’re going through now, love. You were eight, do you hear me? You weren’t the competent, composed adult you are now. You wereeight. Focus on that reality while you’re trying to get this poison out.”
I was eight, I repeated to myself, trying to calm the rhythm of my breathing that had become so tight it almost whistled through my clenched throat. “Things seemed to go quiet, though there were these strange grunting noises that I didn’t recognize. So I crept out of the room I shared with my mother, grabbed the gun from the linen closet, and tiptoed down the hall. It sounded like someone was hammering raw meat, impact after impact. I kept thinking it had to be my mother tenderizing something for the next night’s dinner… but it wasn’t that.” A sob I’d been trying to control escaped, and I put my hands over my face, trying to hide from a scene that had already happened.
“I knew you’d seen it.” Luke’s voice was rough with rage and sorrow, and somehow it was a comfort to hear it. “I knew you’d seen your mother’s murder. But I didn’t know until now that I’d hoped I was wrong. This right here is where your PTSD comes from.”
“She was so…quiet.” There was no stopping the tears now, the terrible sobbing. I’d never done this, not back then, or in the ensuing years. God only knew why I was doing it now. “I didn’t understand. Why was she so quiet when she should be crying or screaming? What he was doing to her had to hurt, so why was she just so… soquiet?”
“Baby, shh.” He rocked me back and forth while I sobbed out the words, because this…this… was the worst moment of my life. Reliving it was an insane act of self-torture, but here I was, doing it.
“I called out to her—whenever I called ‘Mommy,’ she always responded ‘what-ee.’ Always. It was our thing, and it always made me giggle. So I called out to her, but for the first time ever, she didn’t say what-ee. She didn’t sayanything. But Leonard heard me. He’d been standing over her, one hand fisted on the front of her nightgown, the other pile-driving into her ruined face, but he dropped her when I called out to her. And then… he came toward me.”
“Motherfucking Neanderthal was going to murder you, Eden.” The rage was back in his voice, and I looked up through my tears to see it flaring like wildfire in his eyes. “That sonofabitch beat your mother to death with his bare hands, and then when he saw you witnessing it, there was suddenly only one thought in his beady little brain—he couldn’t have any witnesses. Do you understand that?”
“I don’t know what I understood, then or now. I just know that I wasn’t afraid. Not for myself. I couldn’t allow him to go back to my mother, because he would hurt her some more if I didn’t stop him. I can still hear his footsteps as he rushed toward me, his hands… they were glistening wet with my mother’s blood. I know I screamed because I was so angry. Then I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.”
I heard his exhalation while the hand at my back kept up a soothing rhythm. “I read the autopsy report on Leonard Driscoll. There were signs of a physical altercation, so clearly your mother fought for her life. Then the close-range shot to the head. He was no more than two to three inches from you when you pulled that trigger, love. I know seeing something like that is devastating, but you have to understandhewas the murderer in this scenario, notyou. All you did was survive. That alone is a goddamn miracle.”
“I never saw what I did,” I whispered, feeling drained of everything—of tears, of life itself. My worst secret was out, and I had nothing left. “My scream, the gunshot—it all happened so fast that I never heard the front door open behind me. Suddenly I was up in the air and rushed out of the house by someone, I couldn’t see who. It was in the middle of the night, and I remember my feet were cold when I was put down barefoot at the end of the dirt drive next to the mailbox.”
Luke’s mahogany brows shot up. “Someone took you out of there? A neighbor?”
I shook my head. “He was just a shadowy figure that I’d never seen before. He put my hands around the metal post that our mailbox was mounted on, and told me that it was very important that I hold on tight to that post. I must have been going into shock at that point, so things get a little, um…jumbledin my head at this point. But I do remember holding on as tightly as I could to that post as the man ran back to the house. It seemed like forever. I was slipping into what would become a semi-catatonic state for months, so I’m not sure about the order of things from here on in, but I remember thinking I needed to help my mother, and then a gunshot, and then… then the man who’d carried me out of there appeared beside me with all my belongings packed up in plastic grocery bags. He told me that it was okay for me to let go of the mailbox at that point. I did, and then he said I needed to go with him because he was my father, and he was there to save me.”
“Holy shit,” Luke breathed, staring at me. “Marvin Pankey? You’re telling me Marvin Pankey got out on the same day your mother was murdered?”
“It’s like I said,” I nodded, so exhausted I just wanted to sleep and never wake up. “We were doomed.”
“Marvin and Romy were, and that fucking sucks. I hate what they went through, but they producedyou, the greatest miracle that’s ever hit my life. That’s how I know you are most definitely notdoomed.”
I looked up at him with what felt like the world’s most swollen eyes. “Don’t forget, I believe in karma. After all that I’ve done, both with Leonard Driscoll and helping my father build up HEG to what it is today, I don’t deserve anything good.”
“Bullshit. You deserve the best in life. That’s where I come in.”
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“Hell yeah, I do, and you should, too. From here on in, I’m going to fight to give you that best life. You’re going to become a believer not in karma, but in me.”
The very thought filled me with equal parts hope and trepidation. “Don’t make me believe in you, Luke,” I warned, even as I held on to him all the tighter. “Believing in people always leads to disappointment. As a man who studies human behavior, you should know this better than anyone.”
“I knowusbetter than anyone, so I have no doubt,” he began, then cocked his head at a faint, familiar sound. “Do you hear that?”
“That’s my phone. Kels’s ringtone ” In a flash I was up and out the bedroom door. “I think I dropped my purse by the front door… Hold on.”
“Let it go to voicemail,” he commanded, following me just far enough to lean against the bedroom’s doorjamb, naked and utterly unselfconscious about it. “Newsflash, love—no man likes it when you leave his arms to catch a call from another swinging dick.”
“For the millionth time, Kels and I are like siblings, so anything beyond that is just gross,” I admonished even as I dug out my phone and hit the right button. “Kels? Everything okay?”
“No,” came the overwrought reply, making me instinctively tense for a blow. “Eden, your dad’s been attacked.”
Chapter Fifteen
Hold On
“Luke, you don’t have to stay,” I said for what I suspected was the eighth time. After offering the first half-dozen pleas for him to go home and take care of himself, they all started to blur together. “It’s after midnight, and it looks like Echo is here to take over for Nix, so you know I’m in safe hands. You have to be ready for work tomorrow, right?”
“You and this case are my work now.” Leaning back in the uncomfortable waiting room chair, he slung an arm around me to rest it on my chair’s backrest. “I’m not going anywhere until they let you see your old man and you feel better about heading home, or until something else happens.”
