CHAPTER 19
GHOSTS OF THE PAST
ARELLA
I was lying in his arms in the bathtub, while he hummed a Russian lullaby and washed my hair, and I felt more at home than anywhere, ever.
I wondered why he did all these gentle things that were completely at odds with his personality, because sometimes they seemed to take a lot out of him, almost as if there was a voice inside his head that tried to actively deny the actions his heart dictated.
I didn’t know if Grimm opening up to me about his mother was meant to get me to tell him about my past, but it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to open that can of worms, even if they multiplied until they spilled out.
“Feeling better?” he asked as he rinsed my hair, his long fingers massaging my scalp in the most relaxing way possible.
“Yeah,” I hummed, leaning into his touch. “Your hands are magical.”
I could feel his grin, even though I couldn’t see his face. “These hands?” He chuckled as he pushed his arms forward so I could look at them.
I laughed at his arrogance, and for the first time, I was able to analyze the hands that held me like I was the most precious thing in the world.
Strong forearms covered in intricate tattoos I couldn’t understand, stained with my name and the red scratches I left on him three years ago. Large palms that could carry me as if I were a feather, though I was anything but. Protruding veins running down to his knuckles that did unholy things to my brain every time I saw them. And those fingers, those deliciously long fingers that could push me up to heaven and hold me there for as long as they wanted, then catch me on the way down.
It was contradictory how the same hands that touched me with the utmost gentleness were capable of absolute carnage. That the hands that were capable of bringing my body to life in the most decadent, unimaginable ways, were the same hands that took life without hesitation and remorse. That the hands that soothed my pain were those of a ruthless criminal.
And the most fucked-up thing was… I didn’t care. I wasn’t disgusted or afraid of him, quite the opposite, I felt safer with him than I ever had with anyone else.
I loved him.
I loved the man he was with me, but I also loved the killer in him and everything that came along with it. His world, the constant adrenaline, even the damned voices in his head that could one day take complete hold of him.
I knew he considered himself a psychopath, but he wasn’t. Not in the pathological sense, at least. Not in my eyes.
A psychopath wouldn’t have worried about my safety and certainly wouldn’t have looked so devastated at the prospect of losing his brother. I chose to believe that he wouldn’t be so good at faking emotion, that his feelings for me were as true as mine were.
I knew that a psychopath could learn to fake empathy and use it to manipulate others into doing what they wanted, but in my heart I knew that the empathy I read on Grimm’s face was real, as were all the other emotions he displayed.
I saw grief, sadness, and so much pain.
Not physical pain, he could take that without even batting an eyelid, but psychological pain. It hurt him down to his core that I had secrets, it made him howl inside, it made him ache more than a broken bone or even a bullet wound.
I wished he really was a psychopath, though.
I wanted it, because then he wouldn’t have to endure the emotional torture that I was putting him through. He wouldn’t have felt it if he was one. He would have been indifferent to it, and he would have been able to think clearly and methodically, as he did in every situation that didn’t involve me.
I wanted it because when we got out of the bathroom and tangled ourselves between the sheets, lost in sweet whispers and gentle caresses, I knew he no longer used his rationality to think about how to protect me, he used his heart. And he would tear it to pieces if his plan didn’t work.
*
“Mam…”
My cry echoed through the gunshots, louder than I ever thought myself capable of. “No, sultame!”
I fought against the man who held me in his arms, trying to take me away with him. I scratched at his face and neck. I punched and kicked and screamed at the top of my lungs, begging him to let me go to her because she needed me.
More shots rang around us, their sounds etched in my brain forever.
Faceless men began to run, fleeing the scene.
The army behind me chased them away one by one, shooting as many as they could in the process, but reinforcement arrived much too late.
Finally, when the gunshots faded away, leaving nothing but the ringing in my ears behind, he let go of me and I ran to where her body had fallen.
I tripped over my own feet and fell on the pathway, scraping my knees and palms on the sharp stones.
Sobbing, with my eyes burning from the tears that streamed in rivers down my face, I stood up and barely managed the steps that separated me from her.
“Mam…” I sank to my knees beside the woman who gave me life and gently pushed the long blonde hair that stuck to her skin out of her face.
She coughed.
Blood spurted out of her mouth while her eyelids fluttered frantically as she struggled to keep her eyes open. My hands shook as I wiped it off, but it kept dripping, and dripping…
Dripping…
“No, mam, no me dejes, por favor
[11]
,” I cried, trying to turn her on her side so she wouldn’t choke.
“No llores, mi pequeo sol
[12]
,” she said softly, as she always spoke.
The brightest light, the warmest day, my only ray of sunshine, lying between life and death, and my heart sank. The sun burned down on us, but ice began to envelop me as I touched her skin and felt her warmth fading into cold.
For the briefest moment, I saw myself in her place. My face, a carbon copy of hers, covered in blood.
I closed my eyes, shook my head, and tried to stifle my cries, but I couldn’t. The tears continued to flow as her blood continued to pour, and she took my hand in hers, seemingly with the last of her power.
“Mrame, mi nia
[13]
…”
I opened my eyes as if I were a robot listening to a command.
I could hear it in her voice, the life draining out of her, and she smiled a broken smile as she opened her mouth to speak, but no more words came out. The spark in her blue eyes, identical to mine, slowly dissipated, as though death had kissed her with bitter lips before she could say her goodbye, and she faded into the afterlife, leaving nothing but a pain-glazed look behind.
I didn’t recognize the agonized howl that left my lungs.
“No!”
I looked around, feeling my body covered in sweat, a heavy weight pressing down on me from above, keeping me from thrashing around and falling off the bed.
Grimm was on top of me, holding me tightly, his eyes full of panic as he breathed heavily over my face. He looked so worried, almost as if it shocked and frightened him to see me like this.
When I finally stopped shaking, he dropped onto the bed next to me and pulled me into his arms, enveloping me in his warmth, promising that I was safe through his touch. His heart hammered in his chest, vibrating against my ear, strong and alive. I was trying to calm my breathing and banish the bitter thoughts that had crawled their way into my brain, like a dodder crept to the nearest plant, ready to infect it and drain all the life out of it.
“You’ve never had nightmares before,” he whispered while he traced soothing circles across my bare back.
“Do I want to know how you know that?” I asked.
I always found that the best way to avoid talking about what was on your mind was to change the subject completely, treat it like a bacterium that you don’t want in your body.
“Don’t do that,” he reprimanded, as his fingers dug into my skin.
“Don’t do what?” I sat up, rubbing my eyes and fighting the urge to cry.
It was true.
I haven’t had any nightmares about my mother’s death — or any kind of nightmares — since I changed my name and moved to the States. I haven’t talked about her to anyone and I pretended that nothing happened, meticulously avoiding the topic of my family in every conversation I ever had. I became a master of deflection, so why was Grimm able to read me as easily as one reads the title of a book?
How was it that the memory was now revealing itself?
That was the thing about ghosts of the past, wasn’t it? They came back to haunt you when you were already down and only pushed you deeper into the mud. As if my brain didn’t already have enough demons to deal with, the image of my mother just had to pour gasoline on the fire.
“Don’t avoid the subject,” he sat up and leaned against the headboard, running his fingers through his hair a few times.
The lights from outside cast ominous shadows on his face, making him look like the poltergeist hiding in your closet, ready to come out and attack you at any moment. I had to remind myself that I was in bed with a patient predator who was just waiting for me to make a mistake and fall into his trap.
“Recent events in my life brought back memories of things I thought I had forgotten,” I sighed, pushing back the hair that was sticking to my sweaty face.
“We never really forget the past,
Snezhinka
,” he sighed as he linked our fingers. “We fool ourselves into thinking it’s forgotten, we repress it and avoid talking about it until it becomes nothing but a shadow in the back of our minds, but just because you can’t see the monster, it doesn’t mean it’s not there…”
Before I could realize what was happening, he rolled on top of me, his eyes spearing into mine.
He was big, naked, menacing, otherworldly.
Everything I wanted and more.
Everything I needed.
“It’s waiting for you to turn your back on it,” he whispered over my neck as his palms found my legs and wrapped them around his hips, his tone sending a shiver down my spine. “Then it attacks.”
I cried out when he entered me without holding back, arching my back off the bed and pressing my chest to his.
It burned, but never in my life had I craved the flames so much. I wanted to burn, hoping that his fire would burn away the shadows, too.
“Is this your way of distracting me from my head?” I asked as I clutched at his shoulders and writhed my hips beneath him, urging him to move.
“It’s my way of telling you that there’s only one monster I’ll allow to cloud your mind.” He drew my bottom lip between his teeth as he pulled out.
“You?” I taunted him.
“Me.”
His lips crashed against mine at the same time he thrust back inside me, swallowing each whimper as if he was feasting on the sounds he was provoking.
I remembered how the prospect of something inside me used to scare me, and I realized it wasn’t fear of the act itself, but fear that it could have happened with the wrong person.
“Grimm,” I moaned his name and wrapped myself tighter around him.
“Fuck, my name has never sounded so good,” he gritted his teeth as he kept plunging into me with the same fervor.
He was relentless and merciless in his hunger. When I thought that he was finally going to fall off the edge, he just changed positions and kept going. When I thought that he was going to have a heart attack from the punishing rhythm he was breaking me with, he just paused for a moment and kissed all the air out of my lungs. Only when I thought I was going to faint from all the pleasure, did he finally come.
We were drenched in sweat and nothing except our gasping breaths echoed through the dimly lit bedroom. Maybe I was wrong. Only a psychopath could do that in bed.
Our bedroom.
Home
.
Exhausted.
I could think of nothing else but how it felt to have him inside me and how he so easily dominated my body. How he bent it to his will, and somehow, any fear I had before that moment seemed to have vanished into thin air, absorbed by the man whose world posed more danger to me than anything else.
It felt as though he reached inside me and ripped the terror out by the roots, reminding me that I wasn’t being chased by the monster.
No.
I was in the monster’s arms, and the beast that was chasing me didn’t stand a chance against him.
Or maybe I just liked lying to myself.
*
He had to leave for a meeting in the morning – whatever that meant – and although I woke up with a bad feeling in my stomach, I didn’t tell him. Just because I was in danger didn’t mean the earth had stopped spinning and he didn’t have other things to take care of.
Trying to distract myself and ignore the sinking feeling in my gut that something bad was about to happen, I started unpacking the boxes from my apartment.
Somehow, my colorful, mismatched coffee cups looked out of place among Grimm’s sets of small, black espresso cups. I actually laughed when I arranged my pink, yellow, and blue cushions on his black leather couch.
And so, after throwing a rainbow knitted blanket over the armrest and my favorite pair of pink, fluffy slippers at the foot of the couch, I snapped a photo of my masterpiece and sent it to him.
Me
:
Do you think the owner
will mind?
Grimm
:
Now you have something to
bite into when I’ll bend you
over that couch.
Me
:
Crude.
Grimm
:
Realistic.
I shook my head as laughter bubbled in my throat and threw the phone on the couch to continue unpacking.
I was just about to hang my clothes in his uselessly large closet when the fire alarm snapped me out of my happy trance.
The uneasy feeling returned to my stomach and made me freeze on the spot for a moment before leaving the boxes as they were and running to the elevator. I pressed the button fifteen times before I realized that in case of fire, all elevators dropped to the first floor, and stayed there.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
I ran to the door we never used, stumbling on my feet on the way, then struggling to open it as if it was the first time I was opening a door. I was wearing fluffy slippers, my underwear, and one of Grimm’s black T-shirts, and in my panic, I forgot to take my phone. I heard it ring on the couch right before the door closed behind me with a soft click.
I didn’t have a key to it.
I chewed on my lip until the blood seemed to freeze in my veins and every fine hair on my body stood up as I looked around. The hallway was empty because his apartment was the only one on the top floor.
When I reached the stairwell and looked over the railing, dozens of people were hurrying to get outside, all already near the first floor, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I too began to descend the stairs.
It was just a fire. There was no need to panic.
Grimm had guards at every entrance, so all I had to do was reach one of them and wait for him to come back with the keys.
I was fine, I was safe.
Someone laughed behind me, and when I looked up, a man I didn’t recognize was looking down at me with a crooked grin on his face. The air caught in my throat as I recognized the brand on his neck, the tattoo I used to wait for when I was young, and I pushed my feet to run.
And I ran.
Down thirty-five flights of stairs, while the laughter didn’t stop, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, mocking me and my attempt to escape, and the heavy footsteps lazily descended behind me, almost as if he knew he was going to catch me.
One of my slippers slipped off, and when I reached the last step, I tripped over my own feet and fell to my knees.
I winced and stood up as quickly as I could, feeling the sweat running in rivers down my back while my eyes looked from one door to the other. The one on the left led to the lobby, and the one on the right led to the alley.
I had no idea where all the other people went, left or right, but I assumed that any human being would choose to go outside when faced with a fire, so I decided to go right.
I chose wrong, because as soon as the cold wind touched my heated skin, I bumped into a hard chest and two arms wrapped around me, but they weren’t his arms.
They weren’t the arms of the man I loved.
I slowly tilted my head up and I found myself facing dirty blonde short hair, a clean-shaven face and eyes that were a perfect copy of my own.
“
Es hora de que vuelvas a casa
[14]
,” my brother said as I felt the prick of a needle on the side of my neck.
I whimpered as my vision blurred and my knees knocked against each other, then I was picked up, my eyes rolling to the back of my head as I heard a car door closing.
“Grimm,” I whispered.
The darkness swallowed me.