The Wrong Kind of Love

The small amount of light coming in through the window catches the torrent of emotion on his face. I’m suddenly not sure I want to know what kind of atrocities could put a look like that on the face of a man like Jude.

He drops his head back against the headboard and closes his eyes on a heavy breath. “He killed my mother and sister. Grace was only seventeen. I couldn’t save them…And I fall asleep to the memories of their screams every damn night.” Seconds pass, seconds where pity for him quickly fills the space where hate once lingered. He looks up, his gaze locking with mine. “And I’ll be damned if I’ll let him have you.” With those words, it feels as though everything shifts.

Jude no longer looks like the villain, and I’m not sure if that makes me naive or not, but before I can voice anything, he drops his gaze straight to my throat. The pity in his eyes tells me he knows what I did. That I slit my own throat on Bob’s knife when he pressed it to my throat.

“He was going to rape me,” I breathe the words that sound even worse out loud than in my head. I hate the pity that deepens in his gaze, but I feel the need to justify myself. I’m not a girl who wants to die. I just made a choice between bad and worse.

Jude’s hand drops from my throat and fists the sheets between us.

“I’ll fucking kill him…” He shoves up from the bed and goes to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Seconds later, something in the bathroom smashes, followed by an ominous silence.

His rage makes me feel like a cracked vase that is one tap away from shattering into something unsalvageable, and I hate it.

Sitting up, I swipe at the angry tears trailing down my cheeks, but more quickly follow.

The bathroom door opens a few minutes later. Jude’s shadow cuts across the room before he sinks to the bed beside me. “You shouldn’t be here, and I’m sorry.” His voice sounds as broken as I feel. “But I will kill anyone who tries to hurt you.”

He pulls me into his arms, and it snaps whatever thin thread my emotions were hanging on by. The last few days have been some of the worst of my life, and now I find out I can’t leave. That a guy I don’t even know will try to kill me if I try to go back to my life.

I inhale the scent of pine that clings to him, my tears soaking his shirt. The irony that I’m taking comfort in Jude of all people is not lost on me, and yet, with each calming sweep his large hand makes over my hair, I feel a little more whole.

He pulls me down on the bed, and I fall asleep in the arms of a man I should fear, but don’t.

Jude

Thick steam hangs in the air as I stare at the cracked mirror over the bathroom sink.

He was going to rape me. Those words played through my head on a loop all night. I knew he either had or was planning to, but hearing her say it, hearing the defense in her tone, it lit a fire of vengeance inside me.

With every ragged sob that left her lips, I fantasized about murdering Bob and making him suffer, and when I finally fell asleep with her in my arms, I dreamed of blood and retribution. Had Tor not slit her own throat, Bob would have done to her exactly what Tom did to my mom and Grace. That bastard beat them and tortured them, raped them. He filmed every gruesome detail and sent it to my father. And Bob knows that.

He has no respect for the dead, no respect for the living. And no respect for an innocent girl who was just as blameless as his own blood had been. The thought has my muscles wound so tight that the hot shower I just took didn’t relax them.

I wipe the fog from the mirror, and lather my face with shaving cream, playing out how I’m going to kill my uncle as I shave. I’m to the part where I pull a gun and aim it at his skull when the latch to the door clicks, the sudden interruption causing me to nick my jawline.

“Sorry. I didn’t—” The sound of her voice unwinds me better than a thirty-minute shower could, and the way her cheeks redden when her gaze skates from my bare chest down to my towel winds me right back up, but in a very different way.

Her focus shifts to my jaw. “You’re bleeding.” She skirts around me and grabs a piece of toilet paper like she’s mine and gives a damn.