Divided Souls (Captured Miracle #3)
Divided Souls
A Captured Miracle Novel
Book Three
By Alannah Carbonneau
Copyright © 2015 Alannah Carbonneau
All rights reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Ebook formatting by
www.ebooklaunch.com
Table of Contents
Other Books By Alannah Carbonneau
To every action, there is a reaction.
To every high, there is a low, because what goes up must eventually come down.
I’d always lived my life in bright shades of white. But now, all I know is the harsh bleakness of black. I never could have predicted that so many shades of gray exist within this world.
Until Calix.
Calix was everything gray.
Nothing about the man was either black or white, up or down, or even right or wrong. Looking back now, I realize that very important fact.
Calix is subjective.
Somehow, he took a situation that, in its entirety, was wrong - and he crafted it with his twisted ways, into something that was so beautifully and blissfully right.
Kidnapping me had been wrong. I mean, it was wrong.
It is wrong.
There is no part of my damaged mind that can even pretend, that what Calix did to me, and my family, was right. It wasn’t.
I know that.
I know that with every fiber of my being - and yet, in his damning action, was a reaction I never could have anticipated. I love Calix.
I am in love with Calix McKnight.
Love can’t be wrong.
Love, in its true form of pure emotion cannot possibly be wrong.
So you see, this is my dilemma. I discarded my shades of white for a gray with uncharted waters, before being forced into a suffocating blackness I have no hope of living within. I used to see things as right and wrong, up and down, black and white. But now, all I can see are the spaces between the words - and the prospects of what those spaces could be filled with. Now, there is no up or down, black or white, and right or wrong. In their place stand a center, and even a left, and a right. Black and white have meshed to create a shade of gray so beautiful and exciting, I find myself longing for something more - like color. And both right and wrong is challenged by circumstance and new desire.
Nothing is simple any longer.
My life is not simple, as it once was.
I don’t recognize the life I once lived, because I’d been introduced to so much more in a short existence with Calix.
Now, I longed for the man I’d lost. I longed to expand on his shades of gray, so that we could stand beneath skies of baby blue, suns of brilliant yellow, surrounded by fields of captivating green and oceans of endless cerulean. Now, I longed for the man who taught, in his forcible ways, my soul to crave.
I’ve been to the place they keep calling home, for six weeks.
Six weeks is exactly forty-two days. I’ve been without Calix, my true home, for forty-two long, sufferable days.
My mother and father insist that I am sick.
They say I have something called Stockholm syndrome. I know what it is. I know that it is the explanation used when the spectacle occurs, that a hostage becomes empathetic, and or sympathetic, toward his or her captor. I understand what this means. I’ve done my due diligence in reading. Hell, for shits and giggles, I can even provide you with Webster’s definition by memory;
the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor
.
I know what Stockholm syndrome is. I know the ins and outs - and even the scenario where it originates. To say I have been obsessed with the possibility that my feelings for Calix are nothing more than an evolutionary tactic to preserve ones own life, is mild.
For the first two weeks that I was home, I mourned. I screamed and cried and ached inside. Then, I spent a week in utter silence. I think that week was the silence before the storm that became my mind. Because since that week, I’ve researched Stockholm syndrome with every spare moment of my time. And I have a lot of time, because my father won’t permit me to leave the house. He won’t permit me to do anything without either himself, my mother, or Jaylah. Even my poor little sister, Amy, has been delegated with the task of keeping me safe - from myself.
So, I know everything there is to know about Stockholm syndrome. It is because of my new knowledge that I can concur; I do not suffer from this.
I don’t empathize with Calix.
I don’t agree with what he did.
I don’t agree with his plan of revenge and I don’t empathize with his reasons. What I pity, not empathize - but pity, is his obsession with revenge and the pause it placed on a beautiful life he could have lived.
I do not feel sympathy, but instead, I feel
responsibility
for his pain. My father is the reason the monster inside Calix was cultured. We all have a monster living in hibernation inside of our bodies. We all have the ability to become something of a nightmare, but it is not something we simply choose to be. Monsters are the consequence of inhumane actions. Sometimes, we can see the monsters we’re creating - and other times, the monsters take us entirely by surprise. I believe that the monster my father created in Calix was not something he’d been expecting to have to face.
I know I don’t have Stockholm syndrome, because only eight percent of victims have been recorded to show symptoms of such a syndrome. And I don’t. What I feel toward Calix is an all-consuming love. I feel the need to fight for a life with him.
I feel, without Calix, broken.
Even if I do have Stockholm syndrome, I don’t wish to be cured. I just don’t care.
I don’t care about the fragile eggshells my family walk on while in my presence. I don’t care that their eyes dart quickly away from mine when I glance their way - as though they don’t know I can feel the prickling of their inquisitive, pity-filled gazes.
I don’t care about anything but the life inside of me, or the man I love. I don’t know, with certainty, if that man is dead or alive - my father refuses to answer my endless questions.
Stealing in a deep breath of the chilly November air, I watch in a mesmerized fashion, as the rain dribbles from the sky above. It’s not a heavy rain, more of a drizzle - but it’s still rain. You really can expect nothing less from Seattle, the city of Heavenly tears.
I’ve always loved the rain - until I lived in the color with Calix.
The still swing I’m sitting on shifts back as Jaylah plops herself down beside me, and I feel my feet drag unceremoniously against the wood floorboards of our porch. For a moment, she stared out at the rain, and then she twisted her neck to focus her eyes on me. “What are you going to do, Nova?”
I don’t answer her. I know what she’s asking. I know she wants to know about the one-sided argument my father had tried to have with me this morning - about my baby.
While I’d been unconscious from whatever drug he’d given to me after stealing me from Calix, he’d taken my blood to confirm my claim of pregnancy. Since then, he’s been trying to convince me to abort. I refuse, but he continues to ask. He’s even gone so far as threatening to have me committed, because I’m mentally unstable and without the ability to make my own decisions. Again, he’s wrong.
We both know he can’t commit me. Yes, he believes I’ve suffered a terrible injustice. And yes, the people who make up my small world agree with him. But I don’t. And right now, I’m the only vote that matters. I’ve done nothing to give them the right to commit me, and thankfully, my mother is the softness that is restraining the angry force that is my father.
So, I do nothing - because until I can find a way to get myself away from them all long enough to find Calix, doing nothing is the safest thing I can do.
“Nova?” Jaylah moans my name on a strangled breath and I flinch at her pain. I don’t like causing pain. I’ve never been a soul who felt it was easy or just to cause any brand of pain. I mean, even in the beginning with Calix, when I’d seen him as nothing more than a monster, I couldn’t bring myself to end his life when given the chance.
Her voice rings into the silence. “Please, talk to me.” Her hand reached out to pull mine from where I’d tucked it between my thighs for warmth, and she holds it tight. I can feel her trembling. “Please, tell me how I can help. Anything, Nova, I’ll do anything.” Her voice started to shake. “When you first came home, I thought the screaming and crying was the worst thing I would ever have to endure, because God, knowing you were in so much pain was killing me. But then you turned so silent, Nova, and I realized that silence is worse.” She gasped in a strangled breath. “It’s so much worse, because I can’t figure out if you’re feeling anything at all. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. Please talk to me.” She is begging now, sobbing loudly through her chattering teeth. From the corner of my eye, I can see that her face is streaked with tears and her flesh is blotchy and red from the intensity of her emotions. “I’ll do anything. It’s been weeks. I can’t take it anymore. Talk to me!”
Even though I can feel her desperate eyes searching my face, and her hand is hurting mine with her punishing grip, I can’t seem to find the strength to allow myself to look at her.
I just can’t.
“Christ, Nova,” Jaylah pulled in a deep breath. “I swear to God, I will help you, if you’ll just talk to me.” She scooted her bum across the bench of the swing until her thigh was pressed tight against mine, and then she dipped her head to my ear. “In the beginning, when you first came back home, you were hysterical, but I listened to everything you said. I heard every word, Nova. Were they true? Did Dad kill his parents?” I flinched, but she held me tight. “Did he love you and take you to Greece? And did you really love him?
Do
you love him? Still?”
For the first time in what felt like years, I turned my head toward my sister’s voice. Her breath caught as she blinked her eyes as though ensuring I’d responded, although not verbally, to her questions.
Again, she whispered. “Do you love him?”
“Yes.” I whispered.
She cried. “How, Nova? After everything - how?”
Feeling the small ember of hope I’d felt ignite inside of my heart dim, I refocused on the rain. I sensed her panic before she began to speak again. “Don’t go, Nova!” Her arm moved around my waist and she shook my body roughly. “Don’t you dare shut up inside yourself!”
I didn’t reply.
“If you tell me - everything - I’ll help you get to him.”
I knew her words startled her, because as soon as she spoke them, she tensed and grew deathly silent. Even her breathing stilled, until all I could hear was the rain pebbling against the blades of grass.
Turning in her now stiff arms, I spoke. “Where should I begin?”
Her face paled. “At the beginning.” She whispered. “I want to know everything.”
And I told my little sister everything. I told her about the night I was taken and how it only took four days for my heart to fall hopelessly in love with my captor. I told her about our magical wedding, and our honeymoon, and I told her about his plan of revenge against our father. I told her about everything, apart from his tricking me into carrying his child. That was the one thing I left out.
When I was finished, her eyes were pouring tears that could compete with the legendary Seattle rain.
“You really love him?” Jaylah whispered into the chilly November air surrounding us.
“I do.” My reply was quiet, so quiet, I knew that if she hadn’t been sitting so close to me, she wouldn’t have heard my words. “More than anything. More than my own life.” I tilted my head, capturing her eyes with my own. “I don’t want to live without him, Jaylah.”
She blinked, and another tear squeezed from her eye to stream down the glossy path on her cheek. “I know.” Another tear fell. “But after the way Dad took you,” she lowered her voice. “Do you think he’s still...” her voice broke off and I felt my heart contract in my chest at the implications of her silence.
“I believe he’s alive. In my heart, I believe his heart is still beating.”