Chained (Caged Book 2) (4 page)

She gasped when I grabbed her jaw and forced her to look at me. “Why – did – you – lie?”

Tears rolled over her cheeks, wetting my hands with her suffering as she tried to shake herself from my grip.

“Tell me!”

“Fuck you!” she spat, agony pouring from her with her tears. “Stop it! Stop this!”

“Tell me, Kloe.” She wrestled with me, trying to scramble back, but she couldn’t escape, not this time. “Tell me the fucking truth. Stop lying to yourself. Face it!”

“No!” she screamed as her fists fought to connect with any part of me she could.

The evidence of her pain was crippling me, but she needed to face it. She needed to stop hiding from herself. She would never heal if she didn’t cede to the correct memories.

“It was all bullshit, Kloe. All lies you told yourself to stop it from hurting. But hurting is good. It’s the only thing that can help you to accept the truth.”

She pushed at me, desperate to escape what I was forcing her to remember. She’d built so many walls that even now she struggled to knock them down and allow the truth to seep inside. I understood her, I did, and I knew when she bore the real story of her life that it would crush her. Maybe that’s why I was forcing her to see, or maybe I actually wanted to help her, or maybe it was both, but either way, she had to admit to the past.

“Your mother never called you Honey Cup, did she? She never held you and loved you. She never comforted you in the hours you spent alone in that attic. Because she was as bad as him. Wasn’t she? She hurt you as much as he did. Didn’t she? DIDN’T SHE?”

The wail that left her broke something inside me. It was raw and unbridled, the devastation she had locked away, hidden from even herself, spewing from her as I cracked open the part of her mind she had locked away, and compelled her to see the truth.

“Stop!” she cried, shaking her head. Her eyes implored, begged for me to stop. “Please…”

“It’s time to see the real you, Kloe. Time to allow Samantha the truth she deserves.”

I didn’t see it coming. I should have. I should have been prepared for it.

The glass in her hand smashed against my temple. The scent of whisky and blood stung my nostrils. The room swam when her fist followed it, her knuckles hitting my temple in such a way that stars burst behind my eyes.

“Shut up!” she screamed.

I’d seen her angry before. I’d seen her furious. But this, this was something entirely different. The chains she had padlocked herself into many years ago disintegrated and the real soul held hostage by them finally surfaced. I had wanted her to accept Samantha, allow the child who she had once been liberation to heal. Yet, for a brief moment, I wasn’t sure if I had finally destroyed her. Ruined her like I promised us both.

“You shut up!” she demanded in an icy tone that curdled the blood within my veins. “You know nothing. Nothing!”

“Let her have her say!” I shouted as I took hold of her arms and forced her down onto the sofa beneath me. “Samantha deserves freedom, Kloe. Stop burying her beneath all your fucking lies! She’s slowly drowning you in lies, massacring who you really are!”

She was feral, tossing and twisting. Her teeth snapped as she tried to bite, and her legs flipped as she wrestled with me. “Let me go!”

“Tell me who you are!”

“Let – me - go!”

Forcing her backwards I brought my face an inch from hers. “Tell me who you fucking are!”

“I’m no one!” she screamed. “I’m a girl that was only birthed to be abused. A child reared to be whored and sold for drugs. A little girl with no heart, and no soul. I’m no one. NO – ONE!”

She collapsed, sinking back as her sobs took her breath and the truth took her sanity. My heart broke along with hers as I witnessed her eyes deaden when her mind cracked and everything she had forced back spilled into her head in one furious overload of horrific memories.

“Samantha Rowan was a payment in kind for goods received,” she whispered. “She wasn’t a Honey Cup. She wasn’t even a Honey.” Her bleak eyes found mine and I had to bite back the vomit when it piled up my throat. “She was nothing more than an IOU.”

I
HAD STIRRED A WHILE
back but I hadn’t found the energy to move. If breathing wasn’t involuntary I think I may have given up on that too. My body ached with sorrow – with the truth.

The flames in the fire roared high and I still shivered although Anderson had placed a blanket over me some time during the night.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but sunlight was starting to stream through the cream curtains, the splatters of Richard’s blood projecting a light pink pattern across the carpet.

Richard’s body had disappeared, an abstract of blood on the carpet and curtains the only evidence he had been there. I hadn’t heard Anderson shift him, but come to that, I hadn’t much of anything other than the echo of Samantha weeping in my head.

I could feel Anderson’s presence in the room, but other than his soft breathing he was silent.

“I’m not sure when insanity slipped in and I started to believe my own lies,” I said into the quiet. “Or even when they started to make any sense to me. I’m not even sure why I… why I…”

“Why you crafted a loving mother from a cruel and selfish one?” Anderson finished for me.

I folded the edge of the blanket in my fingers, turning it over and over until it was a thick, material concertina in my grip. “Yeah.”

“I think maybe your mind did that for you.”

I nodded. It was the only explanation. That, or I had gone crazy. “Maybe.”

Anderson slid onto the floor in front of me. His deep green eyes sought me out in the dim light and the pain and sadness displayed so openly in them made me look away.

“Look at me, Kloe,” he whispered.

I did as he bid, the tenderness in his voice a huge jump from his aggression earlier. The storm in his eyes swallowed me, the rage of his emotion pulling me deeper and deeper until I couldn’t breathe.

“You were a little girl. You went through something so horrific that your brain blocked it out to keep you alive. I know you didn’t conjure a loving mother from nowhere…”

“I was weak…”

“You were seven!” he spat, making me flinch.

“And you were four but you remember every detail.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“But you do remember.”

“Yes, but I was with Hank and Mary for over twenty years, Kloe. That’s a hell of a lot to block out. The early stuff… Judd, I don’t remember him. I don’t feel any connection to the little boy I was.”

He wiped at a stray tear that rolled from my eye. He was like Jekyll and Hyde; hot and cold. One second he was furious and spiteful, and the next he was tender and reassuring. I couldn’t keep up with him. My heart was bleeding and then parched, my soul excited then dejected, and I was starting to question my own judgement.

“What’s your earliest memory?” he asked as he slid his finger down my neck and across my shoulder. His touch was barely there but my body shot to life with awareness. I hated that he had that much control over me. I wanted to be free; from him and myself.

A shiver took me and I squeezed my eyes closed.

“Let her out, Kloe,” Anderson demanded, his stern bite back once more. “You need to allow Samantha her memories or she’ll never find her peace.”

He made it sound like I was possessed, like another entity had buried itself deep down inside me. Yet, it was the total opposite. Another life had emerged from the scared and hurt child. A new soul had bled from the wounds of Samantha Rowan. Kloe Grant had been created from the torment of another. She had been coughed out and pushed into an existence without the nightmares she’d been born from.

“I heard that name, you know, once.” Anderson looked at me curiously but I carried on. “I was… I’m not even sure where I was, but I was small. My mother was meeting a man, I think.” The image flittered into my head and I concentrated on it. “I was sat on a dirty step outside a house. People shoved past me to get inside, most of them loud and boisterous, and I remember their laughter making me tremble. It was a cruel laugh. I knew, even then, that the laughter came from bad people. It was so hot that day.” I could practically feel the overbearing heat from the sun crushing me and I swallowed, attempting to wet my dry mouth. “A woman was pushing a buggy. She was across the road. Her child threw its teddy out and it fell to the pavement. She bent and picked it up and passed it back to her, and she said ‘There you go, Honey Cup’.”

Anderson gave me a small smile. “And what happened after?”

I shivered and slowly moved my eyes to him. “Trust me when I say you don’t want to know.”

He swallowed and clicked his tongue, but he nodded, allowing me my secrets. Sighing, he tipped his head. “You told me that Terry killed your mother…”

I knew where he was going, and I nodded. “He did.”

“Are you sure?” he asked softly, his eyes narrowing on me.

“Yes.” Every fibre of me stiffened and I bit into my lip. “Is it…Is it wrong that…”

Sensing my despair, Anderson found my hand beneath the blanket and threaded his fingers through mine. His touch sent a trickle of hope through me, but I pushed it away, refused to let it fester inside me. It would only open me up for more disappointment. “It’s okay that you still loved her, Kloe. It’s okay.”

No one could ever know how much his assurance allowed my heart to take another beat, for my soul to drop to its knees and thank him. Because, really, it wasn’t okay. My mother had taken so much from me, but still, even now, I still gave her my heart.

“She was nice sometimes,” I told him sadly as tears silently slid down my face. “I remember once, after… after…” Anderson nodded, telling me he understood what I couldn’t voice. “She gave me a dolly. It was old, and her dress was torn. She had short blonde hair, like some other child had hacked it off. I knew it was one she had perhaps found. But she gave it to me.”

“Do you still have it?”

Shaking my head, I smiled sadly, the memory of the scruffy doll at least giving me one good memory. “No. Brian burned it.”

Anderson drew a deep breath. Outrage poured from him and he dropped my hand and stood up. “Coffee?”

I looked up at him when he peered over me. “Tea?”

He nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen.

It was all a bit surreal. Not hours ago, Anderson had pinned me on the floor beneath him and fucked me raw, both with his cock and my own gun, while a dead man had watched us. He had instilled a fear in me that had taken my mind and squashed it under his cruelty. And here I sat, covered in a blanket on my sofa in front of a roaring fire while Anderson made a brew in my kitchen.

How the hell did that make sense? It didn’t.
It couldn’t.

My bottom was sore and I shifted uncomfortably. My eyes dropped to the floor where Anderson had taken me, the memory making my stomach twist and my belly ache with a need I didn’t want to accept. My chest hurt and I squeezed my eyes closed, hoping it would block out the visions starting to both plague me and arouse me.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I’d been determined to shoot Anderson straight between his eyes. To force a hole into his brain and stop him from ever hurting me again. Yet, he
had
hurt me again. Physically, anyway. His words also. But then the man I remembered from four years ago found his way through and held my hand while I relived some painful memories. He had encouraged me to heal myself.

But why? None of it made sense.

“Tea.” Anderson spoke quietly, pulling me from my inner argument.

I took the steaming mug from him and propped myself up, taking a sip. My stomach gurgled as though it resented the hot liquid, my gag reflex making me baulk at the sour taste. I wondered how long the teabags had been in the cupboard. I was sure they were fresh-ish.

Anderson was quiet as he drank his own drink, the only sound coming from the growing wind outside and the small patter of raindrops on the window.

“How do you know Sarah?”

I caught him flinch but I kept my gaze on the mug in my hand.

“I met her at a fight.”

I nodded. “Did you know who she was?”

“Not at first. I was a little surprised when I found out she was the same whore who fucked your ex.”