Cellar Door

I’m not going back there, and I’m not going back in that damn cellar room. I heft the sledgehammer over my shoulder and barge past him, the cellar door only a few feet away. I take the hammer to the door, every swing a shattering pain to my arms. My back and chest pinch with sharp pain, like I might be having a heart attack. Maybe I am. But I keep driving the hammer home, chipping away at the door.

I feel his arms encase me, and he takes hold of the handle. “Stop.”

I struggle against him, knowing it’s a useless fight. But I want to destroy that door. I want to smash all the glass orbs and demented sculptures down here. Everything that has his imprint.

He wrestles the sledgehammer free, and I’m too racked with pain to move. My body sags against his, my breathing clipped, too much pain to inhale fully. My hands burn, and I don’t have to look at them to know I’ve reopened the wounds. I can feel the warmth of my blood coating my palms.

“You weren’t alone that night,” he says, letting my back rest against his solid chest. I hate his chest. I hate his knowing eyes. I hate that I can’t move, and that I don’t want to—that his strength is the only thing keeping me standing.

“Who else was there?” he demands to know.

“You!”

“Who else!”

Figures move against the darkness. There’s a flash. I remember telling Hudson how strange it was, to see lightning streak the sky. But it was sexy, and erotic, making love in the unmarked car, in the middle of the storm.

I shake my head, a dry heave racks my stomach. My vision tunnels.

“I can tell you what happened,” Luke says. “But you won’t believe me. You have to remember.”

How can I trust him? “You’re a liar.”

“Time to go back in the cellar.”

“No!”

A flash of Hudson’s face: I’m sorry, Mak.

Shit. Shit shit shit. The memory engulfs me. “Make it stop. I’m going to be sick.”

I’m deadweight in Luke’s arms as he carries me through the door. That fucking door. I shutter my eyes; I don’t want to see the room. The smell of dank earth and concrete infuses my senses; it’s all around me.

Luke doesn’t lay me on the bed of clothes. I wait for him to do this, so I can use my last reserve of energy to fight my way out. I can’t be down here alone, with these memories. “Please…”

He stops moving, his arms the only thing grounding me, keeping me from slipping into the past.

I can’t breathe. I clutch his shirt with my bloody hands. “Make it stop.”

He settles us along the wall, instead. “This will hurt…but it will help.” His arms become a vise around me, the suffocating pain is almost unbearable, but the panic eases. He’s shutting down my nervous system. I’ve seen it done to children at the precinct before. When they’re too upset to handle whatever horrible news has shattered their world.

“Why are you doing this…?”

“It will help,” he says again.

I shake my head against his chest, hating that his fucking manly scent is a comfort. My head is spinning. “Why are you fucking with my head? It’s not enough that you have me trapped down here, withering away. You have to inflict psychological torture?”

His sigh releases on a heavy groan, like searching the answer causes him distress. “Before you give yourself over to revenge, you need to know who your enemy is.”

I swallow hard, my throat raw. “Why do you care?” Why does it matter? Whether I’m a sick, delusional woman with latent memories, or whether I’ve been wrong, so wrong, about Hudson… None of that changes what needs to happen between us.

He’s the monster that dragged me to his lair.

He’s the villain that I watched murder my partner.

Nothing will change those facts.

And the facts are what matter—what can be proven.