The Blind Tiger: An Unusual Paranormal Romance (9 page)

THE WEDDING

It was a low-key Balinese wedding, and it happened exactly four weeks after they had arrived.

Karen had never known that Bali was such a hot wedding destination. There were so many wedding packages to choose from – from the ostentatious to the modest. There were beach weddings, jungle weddings, cliff weddings, and weddings in large, spacious villas. Some went for as low as $US1000.

They opted for a modest beach wedding.

It was just the two of them in front of a priest and a floral arch. The waves crashed gently upon the pristine white sand. The air was salty. There were no guests or observers amid the coconut trees.

Karen was in a simple white dress with a boat-shaped neck. The neck and hem of the dress were studded with delicate white flowers. She looked resplendent and beautiful. Her only regret was that her groom couldn’t see her.

Noah was in a white cotton suit. He did not wear his dark glasses.

The priest said, “Would you like to exchange your vows to each other?”

Noah said, “Yes.”

He faced Karen. His eyes were shining.

“Adeline Petrovski,
I promise to love and care for you, and I will try in every way to be worthy of your love.
I will always be honest with you, kind, patient and forgiving.
I will always protect you with my body and spirit. I am completely yours.
I love you.”

Karen had tears in her eyes.

She said, “You are my protector and friend, my playmate and confidant. You are my greatest challenge and the love of my life. You make me a better and more courageous person that I’d ever thought possible. I am truly blessed to be part of your life. I am completely yours, my partner and lover. I love you.”

They exchanged rings – simple gold bands carved with each other’s initials and the date of the wedding.

The priest said, “By the powers vested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

Noah’s unseeing eyes were filled with love, as were hers. They embraced and kissed, with their only witnesses being the priest and the sky.

THREE YEARS LATER

THE BEACH

Could life be any more blissful? Karen wondered as she gazed out at the sea with its gently rollicking waves.

She laid her hand on her swollen belly. She was pregnant again, and deliriously happy. Her firstborn, a delightful little toddler they called Kitty, had learned to walk with a vengeance and was happily tottering all over the sand.

Kitty went to a group of older children building sandcastles. The tourists flooded the beaches of Bali at this time of year. They were mostly from Australia, but there were Europeans, Asians and Americans as well.

Kitty struck down a carefully built sandcastle. The other kids immediately raised a ruckus.

“Hey!”

“Stop that!”

“Go away!”

Whoops.

Karen got up as hurried as she could, clutching her pregnant belly.

“Kitty!” she called. “Now that isn’t nice.”

Kitty chortled with glee. She was a dark-haired child, one-and-a-half years old and as destructive as they came at that age. She hadn’t manifested any tiger shifter traits yet, thank goodness, or she would really be a handful. But Noah had said that shifter traits usually manifested at puberty.

“Besides, she’s only one quarter shifter,” he added. “She might not even display the trait at all.”

Karen lifted the little girl up. “Now what did I tell you about destroying other people’s things?”

“Bad,” Kitty agreed. “Bad things.”

“That’s right. It’s a bad thing to destroy other people’s things. Especially when it took them a long time to build those sandcastles.” Karen felt guilty for not getting up sooner, but she really was fat and unwieldy.

Well, I’m a big, beautiful woman again,
she thought. Just as nature intended.

“Now you have to say sorry to these nice children.”

She put Kitty down. Kitty stuck her thumb into her mouth.

“Say ‘sorry’,” Karen prompted.

The other kids waited.

Kitty shook her head.

Karen sighed. Well, she would have to work on that.

“Sorry,” she said to the kids.

“Sheesh.”

“Take better care of her next time, will ya?”

Yeah. Easier said that done.

*

After a nice lunch, they went home.

Home was a lovely bungalow in Ubud, a prosperous and touristy sector of Bali island. Noah made quite a lot of money from his writing, and the US dollar went very far in Indonesia. Karen supplemented the family income by doing taxes and some contract accounting work for some expatriates. It was strange to think that accounting was what she was trained for, because she never had a job in the field for very long, until now.

Noah was at home. She went up to him and put her arms around his neck. He was at the computer, dictating into the voice convertor. She would read over what he wrote afterwards and correct anything, if needed. Voice convertors weren’t perfect tools any more than autocorrect on phone text messages were.

“Hello, handsome,” she said in a seductive voice.

He looked every bit as good as the first day she met him.

“Hello, sexy.” He leaned back in his chair.

“Whoops. Typo here. There. Everywhere.”

“No worries. I’ve got you to correct them.”

“Careful. My grammar isn’t superb.”

“You mean like your cooking?”

She punched him in the arm. “Careful I don’t feed you grass stalks and brown rice for dinner.”

He was a tiger, and therefore, a carnivore. He didn’t usually like vegetables of any sort.

“Ow,” he said. “That hurts.”

They both laughed. Then he grew serious as he caressed her swollen belly. He lifted her maternity dress and kissed the stretched skin.

“Can you feel the baby kicking?” she asked.

He laid his ear on her belly.

“He’s going to kick you in the side of the head if you’re not careful.”

“How do you know it’s a he? Kitty wants a little sister.”

“And I just want a healthy baby.” She caressed her husband’s head as well as her belly. “As do you.”

He smiled. “So what will you do the rest of the afternoon, my lady of leisure?”

“I don’t know. Go shopping in Kuta with Kitty.”

“Kuta Kitty. Sounds like the next heroine for my novel. Remember, don’t spoil her.”

“I should be telling you that. You’re the one who spoils her rotten.”

“But she’s so cute.”

“That’s no excuse.”

They kissed goodbye. Then she went to give Kitty a change of clothes.

It was another afternoon out for the girls.

*

Karen and Kitty went to the Discovery Shopping Mall in Kuta. It was a super-modern, air-conditioned shopping mall with plenty of interesting shops and restaurants, as well as spas, manicure centers, and a gym.

As usual, going out with Kitty entailed a whole typhoon of packing – a push-buggy just in case she got tired, her bottles, her toys, her special jacket just in case she got cold, her pillows, her special blanket. It was an entire family vacation’s worth of packing in itself. Karen contrasted this to the time she and Noah arrived in Bali. They literally came with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Karen went to buy some groceries. She passed by the brown rice section and was tempted to buy some just to spite Noah.

Here’s brown rice and grass stalks for you, my beloved tiger, while Kitty and I will have sirloin steak and roasted potatoes.

She relented, however, and bought some steaks for everyone.

Then she went down to the basement parking lot to load her bags into her car, an old Volvo. They lived frugally but comfortably, as befitting a family in hiding.

Kitty was in her push-buggy. She crammed a lollipop into her mouth.

The squeal of tires next to her made Karen turn. A black van screeched to a halt next to the Volvo. The back doors of the van opened. Two men got out.

“Get in,” said one of them, grabbing her arm.

“What?”

The other man grabbed Kitty’s buggy.

“Don’t hurt her!” Karen yelled.

Kitty twisted her head and took her lollipop out of her mouth. She looked impossibly innocent.

“Then come quietly. If you scream, we will hurt your daughter.”

Karen clammed up. She looked frantically around, but there was no one in this section of the parking lot.

The next few moments passed in a whirl. Karen and Kitty were bundled into the back of the van. Kitty started to cry. The two men got in, and the van drove off.

Karen picked Kitty up and stroked her back of her head, the way Kitty liked to be comforted.

“Sssh, honey, sssh. It’ll be alright.” She didn’t want the crying to antagonize the men. Some people weren’t good with children that way.

She studied the men. They were local. She was aware that kidnapping happened fairly often, and that the locals sometimes demanded ransoms. But she didn’t think this was one of those cases.

She said, “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

The men kept silent.

“Who ordered this?” she asked again.

No answer.

Fine. Have it your way. She hugged Kitty to her pregnant belly and kept quiet the rest of the way.

REUNION

Karen knew who it was going to be even before she saw him.

The van did not stop until an hour later. She figured that they were going deep into some estate. There were a lot of places that you could lose yourself on this island – jungles, cliffs, caves, fields of paddy stalks that were as tall as a boy.

The van finally rolled to a stop. The engine was still purring when one of the men in the back got up to unlock the door. Bright sunlight streamed in. Karen held her hand up to shield her eyes. She squinted.

“Hello, Karen,” said a familiar voice.

Her heart skipped a beat. She had hoped never to see him again. But of course, he sometimes plagued her dreams.

Karen, suck my dick.

Karen, you’re such a doormat. You deserve to be punished
.

There he was, standing outside the back of the van. Zach looked visibly older, to her surprise. But he was still magnificent. There were new creases around his eyes. His chin wore a new crescent shaped scar. Job hazard, she presumed. He towered over the local goons he had hired.

“There you are, little flower. Only you’re not little anymore, are you?”

To think that she had once loved him.

She hung on to Kitty. “Please, Zach. Don’t hurt her.”

Don’t hurt both my babies.

Zach eyed Kitty with interest. “She’s his, I presume?”

Fear blossomed in the pit of her stomach. “Don’t you dare hurt her.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t hurt her.” Zach crept closer. She could smell his aftershave. He had changed the brand as well. It used to be Polo Ralph Lauren. It was what she had always bought him when she went to JC Penney’s in town. But now he made her skin crawl.

He lifted a hand to stroke Kitty’s cheek. “Beautiful. She could have been mine.”

Maybe. If you hadn’t put me on the pill so that I could be your slave
.

Zach always did have a cruel streak in him. She remembered all the times he had struck her buttocks for the sheer pleasure of hearing her scream and watching her soft, white skin turn an angry red.

“Except,” he continued softly. “. . . She’s an abomination, isn’t she?”

So he remembered everything that had happened to him.

She found her voice. “He didn’t kill you, even though you tried to kill him.”

“He should have. He’s a coward.”

“No, he isn’t. A coward is someone who tries to take a blind man down. A coward is someone who threatens a pregnant woman and her toddler.”

“My, my, being with an abomination has given you claws, little flower. I liked you better when you were on your knees, getting fucked by my cock. You begged me not to stop, remember? You liked everything I did to you.”

He seized her jaw.

Kitty began to cry again.

“Bad things, Mama,” she wailed.

“Yes, I did,” Karen shot back defiantly. She marveled at her own courage. “Until I didn’t like it anymore. Then I left you. Your pride was wounded. Wasn’t it, Zach? No woman had ever left you.”

She saw Zach flinch slightly. She knew she had hit home.

It didn’t give her joy.

“Well, it’s over between us. It was over a long time ago. But I don’t think you’re the type of man who would hunt me over several continents for petty revenge. You’re too smart for that.”

“You know me too well, as always, little flower. You are right. This is mostly a business trip, albeit one with a special prize in addition to my usual fee. You see, I always get my man, Karen, even if it takes me years.” He motioned to his men. “Take her to the green room. Show her every courtesy, until I tell you not to.”

She was terrified. Not for herself, but for her children. And Noah. Now they were confronted with the same issues they had run away from – no matter who else they tried to be.

Zach seemed to sense what she was thinking.

“You can never hide from yourself and what you did, little flower.” He paused. “I’ve found that out the hard way.”