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He pulls back and away from me, driving distance between us. “I can be exactly like him. It’s easy really. Soaking up all that power and pussy. It’s so fucking easy and seductive. I’ve done things…”
“To survive.” I charge over to him reaching for his shoulders. “You did it to survive.”
“No.” He snatches away. “I’m the fucking reason she’s dead.”
Grabbing my arm, he tugs me back to the stairway. We go up one flight of stairs, and there’s a landing, then another, and he stops by a dumbwaiter and points. “I used to hide here.” He opens it; on the inside I can see just enough room for food trays and maybe a load of laundry and sundries.
“My mom suggested it when he was in one of his rages. She had her hiding places too. But this time she couldn’t get away because she was sick because he’d made her lose another baby from his beatings…” His eyes glaze over with a faraway look. Then he starts speaking in a monotone, almost childlike, like he’s reciting an Easter speech he learned by rote. “He was drunk, wild with rage. Cussing her out for failing him and not giving him another child. For some reason he wanted a daughter. Then he started telling her she was trying to poison me against him. He started hitting her. I could hear it through the dumbwaiter. I crawled out and yelled for him to stop.” He takes a deep pause, his eyes like bruises as he looks at me with so much sorrow. “He did. I thought he respected me because I was big for my age and getting stronger every day. It was becoming harder and harder for him to beat me.
“Then he lifted her high and demanded I choose. Thinking he’d kill her if I chose her after he’d just accused her of turning me against him, I told him, ‘You, Dad. I choose you,’ and I even added that I wanted to be just like him when I grew up, strong and brave. And you know what he did?” He looks from the ghosts haunting him on the stairs to me, his voice breaking. “That motherfucker said, ‘See, Isabella? Not even your son wants you.’ Then he threw her down the stairs.” He blinks away the tears that started to fall when he told me that last part. Mathias covers his face, raw muffled sobs wracking his broad shoulders.
I hug him from the back, pouring my strength into him. It seems to be enough to make him continue. Draping a strong arm around me, he pulls me under the crook on his arm and takes me down the hallway, then opens a door. The room is bright and airy; the scent of honeysuckle permeates it. It has been well-kept. There is a beautiful four-poster bed in the center with cleverly concealed medical equipment around it. It has been sealed in the state it was in when his mother lived. Deep sorrow flows through every inch of this space. The room is heavy with the energy of despair.
“He kept it like this. Once she was paralyzed and he could take no pleasure in destroying her, he was actually kind. He saved his depravity for me and his victims. Girls young as twelve, never over twenty. He’d have them shipped in from all over the world. It was his sick little secret. Then there were the workers he’d use—those fields are filled with his victims. He was a serial killer, Nikki.”
He pulls away from me, looking around the room his mother was trapped in. “He would come here and read to her. Play the lovelorn swain. Brought my grandmother to live in the cottage. My mom—she even loved him in the end, forgave him—and I—I lied to her. Told her he’d stopped hitting me after the stairs. The truth is it only got worse because with her not around, I learned what all those trips were for: trafficking his victims. Wh-when I tried to stop him or help someone, he’d do this s to me.” He waves to his torso. “But I didn’t have the courage to tell her. She finally had a little happiness, and I didn’t want to take that away, and he’d promised to kill her if I did.”
“You gave her a mercy,” I say to him.
He pulls back, his eyes troubled. “That’s why I never wanted you here. This place was not a home for me. It wasn’t because of who you are but me. Who I am, what I come from. What I have the potential to be. I’m not a good man, Nik.”
“No, you’re not. But you’re not him. You could never be him. Not with the mother you had. Not with a mother who would fight for you. Help keep you safe and be ready to lay down her life for you. No, you are not his legacy but Isabella’s.” Walking back to him, I say, “Let’s go home.”
“I want to burn this motherfucker to the ground.” He looks at his own personal nightmare, stripped bare hiding nothing from me as we stand before the beautiful home he grew up in , experiencing his mother’s love and his father’s evil.
Everything falls into place. Why as soon as he could, he renovated one of the barns out of view of the mansion instead of living in the house. Why he only came to visit me and never his father, whom I knew he hated, but I never knew why. The extent of his father’s evil was so far-reaching, Mathias feels like he can never atone enough for his sins.
“Were there more like him—like your dad?” I pull my gaze from the onyx fields being allowed to lie fallow this season to look at my husband, whose face has relaxed back to its normal lines.
His eyes cut to mine, his mouth hardening as he nods. “Yeah, every other generation or so, we get an evil motherfucker in the ranks. Ready to kill at birth, which is how it starts—them killing their mothers when they are born, tearing them clean open and making them bleed to death. Which is why Ananias was so fascinated by it,” he tells me. I recall him saying his brother is a psychiatrist and lives out in Seattle researching serial killers and consulting with the FBI.
We take a right to the road leading to the barn. “My family believes it’s a curse put on us by one of your ancestors—not that we don’t deserve it.” He smirks, and I can’t help up laugh at his silly ass.
We laugh together until he tells me quietly, “I just want you to know it was never about you, Nik. If he ever found out about you, knew what you meant—” He focuses back on the road.
I don’t press. I don’t push. I just sit in the ensuing silence, taking everything he said in. Finally, he pulls up the dark sleek farmhouse.
“What did Natalie say when you told her all this?” I don’t know what little insecure bitch inside me made me ask, but when I catch her outside, it’s going to be on.
“Nothing,” He glances my way, pausing like he’s about to give the whole store away. “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know how much I hate my father. Only you and Angel know because he lived in the house since his mom was my mom’s nurse and had to be on call twenty-four seven.”
“But Natalie saw your scars—she had to have questions,” I say, thinking back to that day when she seemed mad that I’d seen them too, and he reminded her that I’m his wife.
“No, little wife,” he drawls. “You misunderstood, which is why you need to stop eavesdropping. She asked if you saw me completely naked because she never has. At first, I didn’t want to scare her or make her upset. Later we stopped having sex altogether.”
I let that settle for a moment before asking, my tummy twisting like swirls on a candy cane, “When did y’all stop having sex?”
He takes a deep breath, sighs, hanging his head, then lets it fall back, staring up at the ceiling of the truck. He turns his eyes, looking at me. This time they are hot with another emotion—desire so hot, he scorches me with his gaze. Reaching over, he tugs my chin, leaning in, coming so close, our lips touch when he starts to speak.
“Before the day I first kissed you at Gran’s house. You’re all I can think about since.”
It takes me a moment to process what he says.
“Oh,” I whisper in wonder, waiting for him to kiss me.
“Oh?” he asks, his mouth kicking up on one side.
When I nod, he leaves me hanging, getting out and coming around to my side. Instead of helping me down, he drags me over his shoulder before slamming his palm down on my ass, making a loud smacking sound and my bottom jiggle.
