Captive Souls

Chapter 13

Thirteen

Piper

“ H ow will we know that she made it back safely?” I asked Knox, staring at the woods, long silent from the crunch of the car tires.

“We won’t,” Knox replied in a level tone, not bothering to try to placate me.

I stared up at him. He cut such a harsh figure against the green of the woods. “Can’t you call someone to check?”

He hadn’t been looking down the empty road, his gaze was on me. I sensed it had been for a very long time. His mask was back in place.

“Me calling someone and ‘checking’ not only risks a trace on a call but also could blow any kind of cover that Daisy had. The call would put her in even more danger than she already put herself in. And that’s saying something.”

His jaw was rock hard, his posture tight, words clipped. It was not hard to deduce that he was pissed. At Daisy.

Anger of my own bubbled up inside of me, churning like an active volcano, the power ready to decimate anything in its path “My sister did an incredibly brave thing,” I said through my teeth.

“An incredibly stupid thing.” He didn’t seem bothered by my volcanic fury. To him, it was probably less powerful than the flame of a match.

My hands balled into fists at my sides, resisting the urge to smack them against his body, remembering he did just get shot an hour ago.

“Doing something to try to save someone you love is not stupid.”

He looked at me for a long time, long enough to dump a bucket of cold water on my hot fury. “Yes, it is, Piper.” His voice was featherlight. “The only thing dumber than that is loving someone in the first place.”

The air flew from my chest at the heaviness of his words. He believed them. Solidly. That love meant weakness.

“Don’t you have someone like that, who you would do anything to protect?” I asked, desperate to find a heart in the cold enclave of his chest.

He stared at the trees, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer me.

“My brother.” He spoke so quietly, I barely heard it over the whisper of the wind against the trees.

A brother. Knox had a brother. And not just a person with whom he shared the same parents. Someone he obviously cared for, the admission of his existence seeming as if I’d wrenched it from his throat.

“And more recently, my niece,” he added, voice even lower than before, his posture tighter, as if that were even possible.

I studied his profile, shocked at the admission and warm with knowing he was giving something to me. He was shedding his skin of armor and hinting at the human that lay beneath. The human who was capable of love.

He jerked his gaze back to me almost violently. His eyes were a sharp blade, cutting into me.

“But I am capable of keeping them safe,” he uttered, voice sure and cold and cruel. “By staying away from them. By making sure that I can and will do anything to keep them that way. Neither you nor your sister are capable of doing the things required to keep each other alive.”

He slung the words to hurt, to pile up on my shoulders and drive me into the ground with hopelessness, with terror. I knew he wanted me to be afraid because he thought that scaring me was the only way to keep me alive. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Maybe he wanted me to be afraid because he liked scaring me.

I chewed on my lip. “You’re wrong. I would do anything possible to keep Daisy safe. I’m prepared to marry a monster in order to ensure that.”

Knox’s arm shot out so quickly, I barely noticed him moving until his hand was circling my neck. He squeezed enough to make it hard for me to breathe.

“You’re not marrying him,” he gritted out. “You’ll never breathe the same air as him again. He’ll never so much as lay a fucking eye on you.”

I rasped against the pressure and the pain against my windpipe, Knox’s hands on my skin a scalding brand. And the words... The promise in them.

He was planning on saving me. That’s what lay underneath his words. He didn’t deem me or Daisy capable of the depraved acts required to get out of this situation. Although having a self-professed killer declare he was going to do horrible things in order to keep me safe should’ve been unnerving, I felt … safe. Even with his hand wrapped around my throat, obscuring my air flow.

The man who was tasked with breaking me had at some point decided he was going to save me instead.

With his hand around my throat, his eyes searing into me and my heart pounding in tandem with his words, I knew I was not being saved. I was damned. Because even though I might not have to marry a monster, I was tangled up in one, nonetheless.

“You can’t promise that,” I croaked, barely able to grind out the words with the pressure on my neck not letting up.

I should’ve been clawing at his hands, fighting him, hating him for only being able to touch me in violence. Just like he had my sister. Instead, I leaned into his touch. Into him.

“I can’t make many promises to you, Piper.” He bent forward so our mouths were almost brushing. “But I can promise you that you won’t be going near him the rest of your life. And that I’ll ensure that your life will be a long one. You’ll die warm and wrinkled in your bed, with the memory of this being nothing but a nightmare.”

The promise threaded through the air, slithered down my throat then squirreled its way somewhere deep and permanent. Not only that he’d save me but that this situation—him—would be nothing but a nightmare.

My chest heaved up and down as my breath came in short bursts.

Knox’s hand was still around my throat.

For a shadow of a moment, I thought he might not let go. Thought he might just keep squeezing until the darkness at the edge of my vision crept further and further until it swallowed me up, releasing me from this world.

I was sure the thought had crossed his mind. It was clear he was fighting whatever feelings he had for me. That those feelings made him question his whole existence, made him feel weak. And men who felt weak would do anything to delude themselves into feeling strong again. Even if it meant hurting a woman. Especially if it meant hurting a woman. The moment lay in the balance, of whether he was like my father or not, whether he’d use me to feel big.

His hands released a second later. He stepped back, running his hand across his jaw in a rare gesture of unease.

I rubbed at my neck, not hating the pain, even though it served as more evidence that he could hurt me. That he was the kind of man I’d spent my life ensuring I’d never get close to.

“My father killed my mother when we were young. I was thirteen,” I blurted in a hoarse voice.

This was not information I shared readily, definitely not first date kind of fodder. But the scant amount of people I had told always had varying expressions of shock, horror, pity, discomfort. It was not a nice thing to hear. You perhaps read about such things in the news or scrolled across the stories on social media, but it was rare you met someone central to the acts countless true crime documentaries covered.

But I supposed to Knox, acts of horror and depravity were commonplace, so he didn’t have an outward reaction to my news.

Yet his hands balled into fists. Not something I’d seen him do. His face remained impassive, though.

“He abused her since I can remember,” I continued, staring from him to the trees, unsure of why I was sharing this now, of all times. “And us. To a lesser extent, not that I think there really is a lesser extent of abuse.” I sighed. “My mom didn’t protect us, really. She was too broken down by then.”

The memories I had of my mother were mostly sullied with violence, her bruised, begging, being hit. I couldn’t even remember if she was pretty. Because all I saw was the ugliness wrought upon our life.

“The only escape we had was summers here.” I smiled at the trees, seeing much further than just the ones bordering the cabin. “Not right here, but somewhere in these mountains, there was a two-story house with a wraparound porch, three rockers and a vibrant garden out front, vegetables in the back along with a chicken coop. The woods and mountains stretched as far as the eye could see.”

I closed my eyes, smelling the lavender my grandmother grew by the porch, the dirt, the dew, feeling the sunshine on my face.

Opening them I saw Knox staring at me with such intensity it was hard to breathe around.

“My grandmother was my mother’s mom,” I explained. “And to this day, I do not know how my mother let my father batter her so completely when my grandmother had given her support, endless love and was the picture of feminine strength.” I shook my head. “The eternal question of how a man can break a woman who seemingly has everything going for her.”

I didn’t miss the parallels there. My spine stiffened as the truth settled into my bones, and I forced myself to continue the story.

“My mother, even in the peak of her brokenness, knew how to hold on to a facade.” I still looked at the trees, unsure if Knox was really listening. That was a lie. I knew he was. I could practically taste his undivided attention. “My grandmother knew nothing of what was going on in New York, with the daughter who sent her two children to have summers with her, no explanation of why she didn’t come too. My grandmother worried over this, asking us subtle questions about our home life, about Mom. We expertly lied, still holding on to a loyalty to our mother, even though the truth might’ve saved us from a lot. Sadly, we didn’t realize it then.”

I’d spent many nights wondering what life might’ve looked like if we had told our grandmother the truth. She would’ve acted, swiftly and immediately. And though I knew that the laws were infinitely complicated around abuse, custody and removal of children, I knew in my gut that my grandmother would’ve been victorious in saving us from the situation.

Maybe even our mother too. But that was more of a hopeful feeling, that given the real opportunity to escape, to be with her girls, that she would’ve taken it.

The truth was, I knew she wouldn’t have. She was twisted up in my father. Embroiled in a toxic kind of love that sickly trumped the love she had for her daughters.

I didn’t know what went wrong with her, how she could’ve been so different from my grandmother. My mother was the truest example of how loving the wrong man could not only kill you but warp you into an unimaginable version of yourself.

I was there in front of Knox telling my story, and even that didn’t tamp down whatever feelings I had for him.

“As we got older, my father decided that the summers spent in Appalachia weren’t good for us girls.” I sucked in a deep breath. “He realized that we were getting ‘too smart for our own good’—his words—since there is no such thing as a young girl being too educated.” I sneered with anger, fresh and visceral after all these years, recalling the things my father had said that made it clear he hated women, his children and wife included, yet my mother stayed.

“My guess was he sensed that we were eventually going to tell our grandmother the truth.” I clicked my tongue. “She fought against his ruling. She even came out to New York once.”

I leaned over to grasp some leaves from a bush, needing to rub the pieces in my hands to ground me as I remembered the last time I saw my beloved grandmother.

The memory was foggy, but I remembered raised voices in our small apartment, my grandmother far too big for the space. Not because she was large in stature but because she existed in such a large place in my mind.

“She likely would’ve fought harder, until she got to the bottom of it, but she died later that summer.” My nails bit into my palms as I spoke, willing my voice not to break.

To that day, the pain I felt over losing my grandmother was still visceral and agonizing, nothing like the way I felt over the loss of my mother.

“A fall.” I shook my head. “She just tripped, broke her hip and then died because the night was cold, and Appalachia is unforgiving and brutal to even those who reside there. Even those who love it fiercely.”

I looked out upon the silhouettes of the trees, standing like ancient sentinels observing us. Though there were a lot of legends I didn’t believe about this place, I believed it to have a kind of sentience to it and that it decided on a whim whether it was benevolent or malevolent.

“It broke my mother, I think,” I whispered. “Or maybe that’s me being overly generous. Thinking she was still whole at that point. Because if there was even an inch of me still put together, I’d use it to give myself strength to take me and my children out of that situation.”

I shook my head, punishing myself for the ugly thought. The resentment I carried like cancer in my insides for my mother. Blaming her for my father’s sins.

“It wasn’t her fault—” I tried to reason.

“It was,” Knox interrupted coldly.

I glanced up at him. “My father, he—”

“Was a piece of shit,” Knox finished. “And so was your mother. For staying.”

“It’s not that black and white,” I argued. “It’s more complicated. She loved him.”

“More than she loved her children?” he replied, his words coated in acid.

It seeped through skin and flesh and bone, right to the core of me.

“Yes,” I rubbed my eyes. “Yes, I think she loved him more than she loved us and hated herself even more than that.”

Having grace for my mother was hard, as I had longed for her to protect us, to have changed our lives. For her to be something different. Even if it was to just be strong enough to let our grandmother have us.

But it was never that simple.

“You, putting your hands on Daisy,” I continued, determined to bring this back full circle, to show him the gravity of what he’d done to me when his hands landed around my sister’s neck. Raging at him and calling him names was tempting, but I was attempting a softer route with the hardest, cruelest man I’d ever encountered. As if that would soften him to me.

“Not the same,” he ground out.

I tilted my head to eye him. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it that black and white? You had your justifications for what you did, just like I’m sure my father did. How can I be sure you won’t hurt her? Hurt me?”

It was the most vulnerable thing I’d said.

It was a plea.

Please don’t hurt us. I’m already too deep to wrench myself out. Please don’t turn me into my mother.

“I would put a knife through my heart before laying a hand on you in anger, Piper,” he vowed.

I rubbed my neck, the pulsating from his touch. Not with pain. With an electric awareness, a wanting that vaguely sickened me, given the violent gesture.

Knox’s eyes went there. “That wasn’t anger.”

“Then what was it?” I asked, my voice a low rasp.

He didn’t answer.

His gaze bore into me, scraped over my skin, ripping pieces of it away until I was nothing but a trembling pile of bones.

Then he walked into the forest, leaving me alone.

Was it smart, following the seething demon into the forest?

He’d stalked off there because he hadn’t wanted to be around me. Hadn’t wanted to be around the feelings we were drenched in when we were in each other’s presence.

Because he wanted to continue to hide his secrets and his true feelings.

No, it wasn’t smart, following him.

Maybe if I’d gone into the cabin and created some distance between us, it would’ve stayed there. The tension between us might have remained tension, coiled so it never released. Like a bomb, long buried, ready to explode but keeping the world tentatively safe under layers of soil and rock.

I had always made smart decisions when it came to men—Daisy had pointed that out earlier. Those smart decisions landed me here anyway. In the place I loved so much. With Knox. I couldn’t help but think that was the universe urging me toward him.

Or maybe it was the universe testing me, to see if I was like my mother.

I didn’t marinate too much on that thought.

Instead, I followed him into the forest.

If it was a test, I failed.

He wasn’t hard to find.

He wasn’t trying to hide.

Predators didn’t need to hide.

And I knew he heard me approach.

“I was broken. Early on.”

His back was to me and stayed to me while he spoke.

I wanted to see his face, desperately, but something told me whatever he was about to say was too painful for him to speak while facing me.

So I stood. Waiting.

“My mother, if you could call her that, wanted a man. She had two sons, but that didn’t matter to her.”

I could feel the scorn in his voice. The poisonous, unyielding hatred. It almost choked him. An inkling of why he’d had such a visceral opinion of my own mother.

“When she found someone she thought was good for her, she ignored what he did to us.”

My stomach pitted as I heard in his voice agony that no one should have to carry. I had an inkling of what he meant, and it squeezed my heart.

“I like to think she didn’t know he was a child molester when she married him,” he continued, speaking my greatest fear. “I’ll be generous for her, but she was also so fucking desperate that he could’ve told her that on her wedding night, and she would’ve stayed. Not that the how of it matters. It mattered that it happened.”

He turned then, and as much as I’d been longing for his eyes, I wished he would’ve stayed facing away from me so I didn’t see the void in his gaze.

There was no pain, there was no anger, no grief. Nothing but a never-ending black hole of coldness that he’d created to keep him safe from it all.

“I knew there was something off with him from the moment I met him.” His voice was a flat monotone, words so heavy I was surprised they didn’t drill me chest-deep into the earth. “So I stayed up that night, the first night he was in the house as our stepfather.” He laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. Not that I would ever truly call the sound he made a laugh. I’d never heard a sound so horrible. So chilling. It echoed through the forest.

“He didn’t even bother to wait,” he continued. “He went for my brother first.” He stopped speaking, standing stock-still. I would’ve thought he turned to stone right there and then had his hand not fisted and his body quaked.

Seeing him shuddering was akin to seeing a skyscraper tremble. You were so used to them standing tall and strong that you forgot they could fall too. And if they did, the wreckage was unimaginable.

“My brother was younger. He preferred them younger. But I managed to avert most of his attention away from him. When I could.”

The handful of sentences held decades’ worth of meaning. Of pain. Of a kind of evil I couldn’t even digest. Logically, I knew terrible things like this happened in the world. Sickening things. But I had never let myself think too much on it. I worked with children. Every day, I saw the brightness in them. The purity. The innocence. What a treasure they were.

And to think a human could sully something like that in such a disgusting way sent my blood curdling. My heart splintered in my chest for Knox.

He was explaining how he averted a pedophile’s attention in order to save his brother the trauma.

“How old were you?” I barely resisted the urge to vomit in the dirt beside me.

“I was nine when it started,” he said, his voice dead.

I blinked slowly, trying my best not to let my horror and pity seep onto my face. I knew that’s not what Knox wanted, that that would only drive him further away.

There was a reason for Knox being the way he was. That I’d known. People did not come out of the womb entirely wrong. Not even my father. The world molded my father to be that way. Sure, there was a rottenness in his core that might’ve been there since birth. But that could’ve melted away had he grown in an environment of nurture and love, raised in places where the good parts of him could’ve bloomed to outweigh the bad.

I’d known Knox was made, not born. And I’d reasoned that something horrible must’ve happened to him to leech so much happiness and empathy from a man, leaving only a cold, malevolent presence.

But I couldn’t have dreamt up this.

“He was the first person I killed.” Knox was unapologetic, unashamed. Matter of fact.

“Good,” I choked out, never thinking I’d celebrate the idea of someone being murdered. I was against the death penalty; I believed in redemption.

In theory.

But in that moment, when it was personal, I understood the need for retribution. Vengeance. Death.

Knox tilted his head. “Good?”

I nodded. “I hate that he stole even more of your innocence by you taking a life.” I was genuinely mourning for the boy who was forced on that path. “But I am glad that he doesn’t walk this earth. I’m glad you took him off this planet.”

Knox didn’t speak for a long time, as if mulling over my words, deciding if he was going to share more.

I was hungry for more, even if the horrid truth of his past stung my insides like a nest of hornets.

“I started by killing those who deserved it,” he finally spoke. “You may agree with those early deaths too. They were truly sick. It was black and white. Clean.”

When he stepped forward, I quivered. He was Knox, but he was something else inside of his skin too. The killer he’d turned himself into.

“But things never stay in black and white for long,” he continued, prowling closer.

I kept shaking at his advance, but I didn’t retreat. This was a test, I knew that. He wanted to scare me, he wanted me to run. I wouldn’t give him that. I’d show him I was strong enough to handle this. Handle him.

“But then it became clear that I needed to kill.” The ground crunched as he stopped in front of me, completely in my face. He consumed me, his harsh expression, the danger radiating off him. My body thrummed with fear and need and sadness.

“I need it to breathe, Piper,” he murmured. “There’s nothing romantic or redemptive about it. I’m not some fucked-up kind of Robin Hood killing predators. You can’t make this pretty in your mind. You can’t make me pretty in your mind. What he took from me is what I am. Ruined. Disfigured.”

The weight of his words settled inside of me like lead. He truly believed that he was wrong, damaged. The hatred he felt for himself was palpable.

“You’re not ruined or disfigured to me,” I whispered, my words broken, tears wanting to escape my eyes.

His brow hardened as I saw his determination to disgust me. To terrify me.

“You still think you want me after this?” he spat. “Want my blood-stained hands on your body? Want me to fuck you with tastes formed by years of abuse?”

I nodded slowly. His words were brutal and ugly, unveiling the attraction we’d been dancing around, but doing it so he tainted it. Made it wrong. And he did that on purpose. Because, I suspected, he’d never had an intimate relationship that felt right in any kind of way. I mourned that for him. I also felt kindred. Although I had been spared the horror of sexual abuse, all of my intimate liaisons were tarnished by fear and feigned attraction to men who wouldn’t hurt me.

“I don’t fuck like any man you’ve been with, Piper.” His rasped whisper was more powerful than any roar could’ve been. “I haven’t … enjoyed any sexual touch with a woman. Or a man.”

There was a slight difference to the cadence of his last sentence. Almost a tremor in it.

He was still trying to unsettle me. Trying to put me off as if him exploring his sexual identity and agency were something to be ashamed of.

“You haven’t found the right person, then.” I was breathing heavily.

His eyes flickered over me, purposefully brutal, assessing, unimpressed.

“You think that’s you? Because you have a tragic backstory? You’re chipped in places, Piper, but you’re not broken. Not shattered. And those chips only make you more stunning. I lay a hand on you and it would all evaporate.”

I stepped forward, purposefully pressing our bodies flush together. Knox went statue still.

Forcing my hand not to shake, I reached out to cup his jaw. My palms exploded with electricity when I made contact. The skin was smooth, warm, unlike the cold facade he wore.

“You’re not the one who gets to decide how broken I am,” I cupped his cheek. “And you’re also not going to stand here in front of me, trying to scare me with your trauma, with your sexual history or your biased view of your soul.”

“I’m not trying to scare you with my trauma, Piper.” Knox took hold of my wrist. Although he didn’t yank my hand away, he squeezed my bone. I loved the pressure, the pain on my flesh. I’d thought I didn’t want a possessive man, but it turned out I wanted this man to possess all of me.

“I’m trying to scare you with how I dealt with it,” he bit out. “Plenty of people who get abused process it in healthy ways, become normal members of society. Or if you’re my brother, they become famous by defying death for a living.”

I filed away that tidbit about his brother. The tone in which he said it showed scorn on the surface, but I detected other things too. Worry. Reverence. Pride. Love. He was capable of all of the human emotions he thought himself immune to.

“As for my soul.” His grip tightened. “You’re deluding yourself if you think I have one of those worthy of you.”

“I’m aware of the road you’ve walked down,” I replied in a low voice, careful with my words, tasting them before putting them into the air. “Since it brought you to me by way of kidnapping preceding a forced marriage. I’m under no illusions as to who you are and what you’ve done.” I stroked my finger down his neck then rested it lightly against the bullet wound I’d all but forgotten about.

Shit. We had been traipsing through the forest, having this heavy conversation, and he’d been shot an hour ago.

I scanned over his face. He was pale, but that was his norm. Somehow, despite sitting in the sun for hours on end watching me garden, that hadn’t added so much as a smidge of color to his face. Not a reliable marker for his overall health.

Though it was incredibly difficult, I swallowed my need to speak more, uncover more of him, share more with him.

“We need to shelve this discussion,” I said with a heavy breath.

“Shelve it?” His brow barely rose. It was little more than a twitch, really, but I noted it.

I nodded. “You were shot.”

“Not in the throat. I can still speak.” His hands were at my rib cage suddenly, a ghost over my torso for how lightly they skimmed me, as if he were afraid to touch me. “I can still take you.” He grasped my chin roughly, much rougher than his barely-there touch on my torso. “If I want to.”

There was a cruel undertone in his voice, in his gaze. He was implying that this was all teetering on his decision. That he was in control. But I knew that he was trying to convince himself more than anything.

I knew that there was no controlling this. Us. Whatever this was. If I was able to control it, I would’ve left with Daisy, risks be damned.

“We need to go back,” I protested. “You need to sleep. In the bed. Not on the couch.”

His eyes skimmed over my face. Slowly over every inch of it. “No way in fuck you’re sleeping on the couch.”

I swallowed my nerves. “I won’t be.”

It was time to be rid of this illusion that we were captor and captive.

We were both captives to each other.