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“Cat, it’s me!”
The voice, the deep calm tenor of it, stills me. My surroundings come back to me slowly. My big bed, the familiar smell, and the feel of my sheets on my skin. The voice that is calling to me and the hands that are wrapped around my arms, holding me down on the bed, register. “Aiden?”
“Yeah.” His grip gentles, turning from restraints to caresses, massaging the points where he’d held me so tightly. “Jesus.” He sounds shaken. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I can hear it. The fear and uncertainty in his voice. Embarrassed, I begin a stumbling apology. “I…I don’t know what happened. I guess I was having a dream.”
“Dream?” Curling his body around mine, he pulls me closer to him, hooking one arm around my chest and nestling the other beneath my pillow. “That was one hell of a dream.”
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to know, a part of my brain that doesn’t want to open that Pandora’s Box. Logic tells me that if I just curl up in Aiden’s arms and go back to sleep, the terror will be kept at bay by his presence. Even his smell is enough to calm my galloping heart. And, yet my innate curiosity propels the question from my lips. “What happened?”
When he speaks, his voice is a whisper. “You woke me up, screaming.” His arms around me tighten. “Jesus, I’ve never been so scared. I thought someone was in the room. I…I rolled over, but…there was nobody there and you were thrashing around on the bed. When I held you down, you started fighting me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, astounded with myself. “I…I’ve never had that dream before.”
“Cat. Don’t apologize,” he tells me, but I can feel his heart thumping against my back.
I try to catch the murky fragments of my dream from memory. Was I alone? Or were there voices in the room with me? For a moment, I think I can feel a chill, like I’m naked or on a cold floor, but then they slip out of my grasp, leaving me reaching for nothing. Only the fear my nightmare evoked lingers.
Aiden’s arm has moved from around my chest. Now, his big hand runs over the fabric of the heavy shirt I’m wearing, soothing me. I look down and see that I’m still in his white dress shirt from earlier. Except now the buttons are all done up. The cuffs too.
It comes back to me slowly. The scar and Aiden’s recounting of seeing the symbol in Sascha’s office. If I am conscious that he saw it in another location too, I don’t dwell on it. I can’t. At least, not yet.
It seems so obvious now.
All of my memories of Antoinette and Elizabeth fighting about Sascha are halves, little snippets, as if I’m walking into a fight that suddenly stops when I’m in the room. And they did, stop. I can see it clearly now. The way that Toni’s eyes would be black with rage and directed at Lizzie as they shouted at each other, but the moment I stepped into the room, the anger would leave her in one big rush, as if she couldn’t even let me see that. Or the way that Lizzie would always say or do something nice for me after Sascha was the subject of one of their spats.
There’s only one memory that is different from the halves and the snippets.
It might have been a year after I moved into Clementine Lane. I had been lounging by the pool in my bikini but stepped inside to grab a drink. Antoinette and Lizzie were in the kitchen, talking and laughing aboutsome Newb who lost himself and ejaculated all over Lizzie’s new dress.
They both trailed off when I came into the kitchen, and it had hurt my feelings at the time because it felt as if they didn’t want me there. But when I turned around, margarita in hand, Lizzie was standing in front of me, staring at the burn on my chest. Lying in the sun had made the snake red and angry, almost like a giant blister that I was embarrassed by.
But Elizabeth placed her palm over it. Her eyes welled with tears, and she said, “I’d take it from you if I could, Cat.”
Antoinette had turned away, but not before I saw the anguish in her eyes.
That was the first time I suspected they knew more about who I had belonged to before they found me. But I never pushed. For the first time in years, my life was goingsomewhere. I had a home. And friends who I’d give my life for. I had a future that extended beyond finding a bed for the night. So, I had looked at Lizzie and smiled. And I told her, ‘It wouldn’t suit you. You’re too flat-chested’. And I walked out on her surprised laugh so that she wouldn’t see my tears.
“They might have kept it from me,” I tell Aiden now. “But I think if I’d really wanted to know, I could have gotten it out of them.”
“You suspected?”
“I knew they had more information than I did. But I never asked. I…” I can’t even say it aloud.I didn’t want to know.
He brushes my hair back from my face, curling it behind my ear. “It’s okay to not want to revisit it. That type of trauma…Our minds are built to bury it, Cat. You were surviving.”
But at what point do I stop surviving and startlivingagain? I’ve spent the last four years recovering from the terrible mistakes I made. Fouryears. I meant what I told Toni—that I’m proud of how far I’ve come. But I never realized until that night with Aiden in the Twelfth Tower that I may have come far in the wrong direction. Or, not even thewrongdirection. Just one of many directions I could have taken. Couldstilltake.
Frustrated with myself, I flip over onto my back and look up into Aiden’s face. His deep brown eyes quietly take me in. “I…” I don’t even know how to voice what I’m thinking.
“You want to start?” Aiden sees where I’m going.
“What you said before? About the girls in the room…”
“We don’t have any evidence that it-”
“Aside from the huge dick on the wall screaming I’M SASCHA SOKOLOV?”
