“It’s not your fault,” he says.
I break then. That’s the moment. It’s the kindness. The fucking tenderness in his voice.
“What he did to you. To Jones. What he made you—”
“Stop,” my voice is unrecognizable. I’m hiccuping and sobbing and my ears are full of so much noise. So much chaos. “Let me go.”
“No.”
He keeps his powerful arms around me, hands holding me fast, hugging me to him.
“Just please let me go.” His shirt is drenched with my tears and I don’t know how there can be so many of them. After so many years, still, all these tears.
“I’m not letting you go, Cilla.”
I know he’s not. I know. But he has to. I can’t do this. I can’t. I force my gaze up to his, force myself to harden. “I don’t need you,” I say. I try to push his arms off. “I don’t want you. Not like this.”
“No, you want me hard. You want me rough.”
I’m confused.
“It’s what you need. It’s the only way you can bury it. That ends tonight, sweetheart.”
He lets me off his lap, stands up, unbuckles his belt.
I shake my head, I don’t want to fuck. I turn and try to crawl away, but he catches my ankle.
“It’s not a fuck I’m thinking of,” he says, as if having read my mind.
When I hear the whoosh of his belt through his loops, I crane my neck back to find him standing over me, doubling the belt, gripping the buckle.
“I think what you need is pain. And maybe then you can let it out. Let it fucking go. Because holding it, Cilla, it’s killing you.”
I don’t understand and I’m still trying to process when he sits back down, hauls me over his lap so my legs are hanging off one side, and my torso is lying on the bed.
“Forgive me,” he says before he rips the dress.
I scream at the sound, at the cool air on the backs of my thighs before the line of fire that is his belt lashes my ass.
Everything stops and I suck in air. But when he strikes again, I fight. I fight hard, trying to get off him, slide off his lap, trying to cover my ass. But he’s too strong and he grips my wrists at my low back, drags my panties down my thighs and lashes me with his belt again and again and again.
I can’t breathe. I can’t keep up. The strokes come hard and fast and I can’t fucking breathe.
“It hurts!”
My heart is racing, I’m dripping sweat, my ass and thighs are on fire and still he holds me, his muscular thighs at my belly, his hands trapping my wrists and hugging me to him at once.
“Let it go.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and fuck, it hurts like hell, and I want him to stop and I want him to hold me forever.
“You can, Cilla. I’ve got you. I’m right here. You’re running like hell but you’re in a fucking hamster wheel. Just let it fucking go.”
“I can’t.” I always thought it was Jones who was too broken to be fixed, but maybe I was wrong, because right now, this—whatever the fuck this is—it’s breaking me apart. Shattering me into a thousand little pieces.
“You have to.”
I hear him and he’s still whipping me and all I can do is bury my face in the mattress and sob and sob because I can’t hold on anymore. I can’t hold this any longer. It owns me. It’s been killing me even when I’ve been thinking that I could control it. That I’d locked it away. It had only been growing. Like a cancer, it had metastasized, infecting all of me with its horror. Because what he did to us, what he made us do, brother and sister, it’s sick. It’s unnatural. And I can’t breathe for the sobbing. I’m drowning. Drowning.
A sound that’s more animal than human breaks from my chest and my ass throbs but the belt is gone. Kill lifts me in his arms, sits with his back against the wall and lets me curl into him, lets me bury my face in his chest as much to hide myself as to feel his arms around me.
“Let it out. Let all of it out.”
I do. I don’t have a choice. It’s like a tidal wave, a fucking tsunami of pain and anguish and fear and its coming out of me and I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to. And all I can do is cling to him. Cling like he is the only thing keeping me afloat, because right now, he is. If it weren’t for him, for his arms around me, I’d drown.
28
Kill
I’m holding her. She’s still, finally. I haven’t slept but she’s been sleeping, knocked out, for hours. She hasn’t moved since I stripped off her dress and laid her in my bed. And, I decided, I’m not letting her out of it again. What happened between us tonight, it’s bound us. But we were bound before that. We were bound from day one. I knew her darkness. Her damage. It’s what drew me. I just didn’t realize it would turn into this.