Darker Than Desire (31 page)

And now, as her body tensed, he had to brace himself.

She woke quickly, going from a soft, sleepy woman to alert and ready in the blink of an eye.

She sat up and he turned his head without moving anything else. Once he moved, this ended and he had to decide. Not just where to go, what to do next. But about everything. It hadn't been fair of him to come back here.

He shouldn't have done this and he knew it.

Lying there, staring into her wide, unreadable eyes, he had to admit the truth. He'd never been able to think past the moment, not when it came to her.

She reached up and he tensed, breath locking in his lungs as she touched a mark, up high on his shoulder. It was an ugly raised ridge of flesh. He could remember, vividly, when it had been put there. The stink of scorched flesh flooding the air, his screams muffled behind cruel hands.

It was a brand. In the shape of a sickle, it was the mark of Cronus.
Their
fucking mark.

They'd put it on him the first night they'd dragged him down there.

“They still have you.”

Stiffening, David went to pull away.

But, before he could, her eyes caught his.

She didn't say anything, didn't do anything to stop him.

Instead of pulling away, he fisted one hand in the pillow and just stared at her.

“How long has it been since one of them touched you?”

Shutting his eyes, he rolled away into a sitting position and sat up, his back to her. When the light, soft touch of her fingers ghosted over the mark, he tensed. She didn't stop. “Twenty years? More?”

Silent seconds ticked by. He opened his mouth to tell her, once more, to stop, but to his surprise, it was something else.

An answer.

“More.”

The assaults had stopped right before his sixteenth birthday. The beatings hadn't stopped. If anything,
those
had gotten worse, but they'd started to talk to him, tell him how he was growing up. Getting older. Bigger. Stronger. Soon it would be
his
turn.

His turn—

Clenching his fist in the sheets, he thought about how often he'd thought about killing them. One by one. Himself. Doing both. But he'd been too scared, then. As a boy, he couldn't have done it. Once he was older, he could have, but Max had already done that job.

“Twenty years.” David stared into the darkness as he spoke. “The last time my father raped me was the day before I turned sixteen.”

Sybil stopped tracing the scar—the
brand
—on his back.

Her hand moved to rest on his shoulder and he reached up, covered her hand with his as he continued to stare outside. There was nothing to see, just the bright white paint of the fence he'd put up for her a few years ago. “It didn't end there. But that was the last time one of them—”

She moved then, sliding around to curl up in his lap. “I don't need to know this. Not unless you want to tell me.”

Closing his eyes, he buried his face in her hair.

The curls blocked out the light, the room, the world.

Want
to tell her … of the shame, the horror. They'd done their job well, teaching him to expect the pain, to almost need it—
hell. Almost
? He needed pain now. It was the one thing that centered him, and they'd done that to him, taught him to function on pain, to function
through
it.

No. He didn't
want
to talk about it.

“No.” The word came slowly, through a throat gone tight and rusty. “I don't want to talk about this, not any of it. But they broke me down there.”

“You're only broken if you let them
keep
you down there.” Her hand smoothed down his shoulder. “You're still trapped, David. Still barely living. Don't let them do this to you.”

He barely even heard the words. “They expected me to be just like them.”

She stiffened in his arms then.

Looking down at her, he told her what he'd told no other soul. Oh, he knew the cops probably suspected, but he'd never told anybody. It was too ugly, too evil, to think about it. Saying it was even harder. “That's what it was. Their fucked-up, sick little boys' club was a family thing. They passed it down from father to son, uncle to nephew, grandfather to grandson. My father expected me to join—to be another one of the monsters. And if I had a son, they'd expect me to be one of them.”

Her low intake of breath told him that she hadn't figured it out. A lot of people probably hadn't. When the trials started, more people would begin to understand, but for now there was speculation. There were lies and rumors and gossip.

But nobody really had the faintest clue.

Brushing her hair back, he met her eyes.

“My father was brought in when he was the same age I was. And I suspect the same thing of his father. It was one long, ugly cycle.”

*   *   *

The sheer, utter horror of what he was telling her just froze her.

She couldn't think past it. She didn't want to think at
all
, but she couldn't shut this out of her head.

It hurt and it sickened and it infuriated.

His gaze, always so direct and unflinching, cut into her and she wanted to look away.

But she couldn't. If ever there was a time to meet that hard, blunt gaze, it was now.

“But you ended the cycle.” He'd fisted a hand in her hair and she reached up, curled her fingers around his wrist. “You made it stop. That matters. Now finish the job. Get out of the hell where they tried to break you.”

“I
am
broken,” he said, his voice soft. “And I ruin everything around me.”

Then he eased her off his lap and rose, moving to pace the bedroom.

His voice, so final, so steady and sure, was a slice against her already raw heart. “You're not broken,” she said, fighting the urge to go to him.
Again
. She couldn't make him accept her love. She couldn't make him accept this.

And if he walked away … again …

If he couldn't break the chains of a past that was strangling him …

Tears choked her. She needed him. So much. She knew he needed her. But sex without anything more would slowly kill her. She needed more. And she knew he'd never let himself give anything more. That he was even here now was a shock.

Sighing, she sat up, reaching for the blanket, chilled to the bone.

“Why are you here?” she asked. It had been hours since he'd shown up and she knew he was convinced that she was in trouble somehow, but she still wasn't following. With her body aching from hard, bone-melting sex, her brain spinning from what he'd told her and her heart one giant bruise, she didn't know how she'd process what he had to say, but he needed to say it.

So she could make him leave.

But he continued to pace, like he hadn't even heard her speak.

“David.” She said his name again, watched as this time he came to a halt, turning to look at her. “Why are you here?”

*   *   *

Why are you here?

The soft question cut through the noise in his mind, but the thunderous torrent that followed wasn't really a welcome distraction.

Black truck.

Max …

Taneisha Oakes was attacked—

Without saying anything, he turned and moved out of the bedroom, looking around until he spied his jeans in a tangle a few feet away from the door. He snagged them and gathered up the rest of his clothes before retreating back into the bedroom. It was past midnight. If he could, he'd spend the rest of the night here, wrapped around Sybil. He could hope that she'd turn to him, again, and that he could hear her voice break as he made her come again.

Or maybe, those softly whispered words.

Words she hadn't given him again.

Not even once.

Could he have said them to her while she'd slept? It had been decades, maybe even a lifetime, since he'd given those words to anybody.

If he'd ever harbored any feelings of love for his mother, that emotion had died long before she had.
May the bitch rot in hell.
Some part of him wished she were still rotting down in that cellar, but the discovery of her miserable corpse had set in motion a series of events that would eventually be the downfall of Cronus, for good. So he couldn't really regret it.

He'd never told his father, but his father had been a monster.

His father …

Closing his eyes, he thought about that evil bastard.

It had been twenty years since David had seen him, climbing out of the car on the winding road leading out of Madison.

Max had seen the car, pulled over. It had started to rain. Blood had been pumping out of him.

Peter had that good ol' boy grin on his face.
I don't know what my boy has told you.…

And Max had lifted the gun.

Peter had gone white.

After that, David's memory had gone black, fuzzing in and out as blood loss and shock settled in.

He didn't remember much of anything after that.

The first clear memory he had after Max had leveled that gun after his father had been when he'd been lying in a bed, staring up at a wooden roof.

“David?”

Fighting the urge to just go to her, he dragged his clothes on and started to speak.

“It's all about me,” he said softly. “Whoever killed Max, Louisa, Brumley. Whoever attacked Taneisha, it's about me. I'm not just broken, Sybil. I'm poison.”
But I'm going to fix it. I'm going to purge it. Just—

He clenched his jaw.
Just what?
he thought, half-wild.
Give me time?

She'd given him ten years. How much more time did he need to purge that poison, to cut out the diseased parts of himself?

“
You
are not poison,” she said, her voice stark. Then she sighed. “But I can't make you believe otherwise, and I'm tired of trying.”

The defeat in her voice ripped at his soul.
Give me time
 … but he didn't have the right to ask. He had to find a way to make himself whole. To make himself better. If he couldn't do that, he didn't deserve her.
Fuck that.
He already
didn't
, but he sure as hell needed her.

“There.…” He cleared his throat. “We can't do this now. I came to make sure you were safe. I think I know who is doing this and I've already talked to the cops. But for now, I just—”

When he cut himself off, Sybil started to laugh. It was a sad, cynical sound. “Even when you try to open up, you can't.”

The words cut deep gouges into his heart, but they were no more than the truth. “I can't do this right now,” he said quietly. “I can't be here, around you, because being around me isn't safe.”

He pulled his T-shirt on and then looked at her through the darkness of the room. “I won't risk you. Not for anything.” He glanced up, as if he could somehow see Drew sleeping overhead. “You and Drew are all that matter—the only things in my life that really do. I won't risk it.”

When he looked back at her, her eyes were sad.

“So go on then.” She shrugged and tucked the blanket around her tighter. Her shoulders were naked, vulnerable in the moonlight, and he wanted to go to her, sink down and pull the blanket away, press a kiss to each shoulder, then lower, down along the swells of her breasts, tug at her nipples with his teeth and then go lower, lower … until the distance between them faded away and nothing but sighs and breathless need remained.

But Sybil kept her gaze downcast on the sheets.

And somewhere out in the dark night, somebody searched for him.

He could all but feel her, out there, slinking through the dark.
I never saw you,
he thought.
Why didn't I see you
?

“I have to go,” he said, his voice rough.
Before she finds me here.

“I already told you to go.” Sybil looked up then and her eyes, sharp and cutting, met his. “I need to tell you something, though.”

She slid from the bed and David felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Her feet made no sound as she came to him, wrapped in white, her hair a dark mass down her shoulders. The shadows wrapped around her and her eyes glinted at him as she came to a stop just inches away.

“When you leave here,” she said, her voice soft and sad, “I want you to understand something.”

He reached for her hand, twined her fingers with his.

She squeezed and lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it, her lips soft on his rough skin.

Then she looked at him, her eyes honest, direct. And so full of pain, he would have done anything to take it away.

“Don't come back,” she said quietly.

He tensed.

She pulled her hand away and turned her back. “I love you,” she said, the words spoken to the darkened room around them. She didn't look at
him
this time. It hurt more than he'd thought possible. “When you leave, just stay away. I don't care what the reason is and I don't care how much trouble you think I might be in. Tell Jensen, tell Noah, skywrite it, I don't care. Let somebody else get the message to me. I'll take care of Drew, and myself. But if you can't come back to
stay
,” she said, turning to look at him over her shoulder, “then don't come back at all.”

“Sybil…” Her name fell from his lips on a rasp and he had to fight the urge to go to her, haul her back against him.
Not now!
He wanted to snarl it, wanted to shake her. He understood now. He couldn't be without her. He needed her, and fuck it all, he
did
love her. But now this, none of this could be discussed when he stood there with a target all but vibrating on his back.

He shouldn't have come at all, and if he hadn't panicked he would have figured that out already.