Chapter Fourteen
CADE
As I shoved my way past the guard, I could hear Emrick laughing at my retreating back.
That evil son of a bitch, he knew what I was the second I crossed the threshold, and it was only a matter of guesswork from there to figure out how I was involved with this situation.
He took a stab in the dark and hit his target, twisting the knife to cause the most damage without having to lift a finger.
The chances were slim I’d revealed my true nature to Nikki, and even less so that I had tortured her father in Hell.
Damn you, Emrick.
He was no angel.
His celestial power radiated from him, and although Nikki wouldn’t have understood it, she responded in the same way she responded to my nature when we first met.
But instead of arousal, it was fear prickling at her neck.
She’d managed to keep herself mostly composed and in control until Emrick had driven a wedge between us and cut through my heart at the same time.
The betrayal and pain in Nikki’s eyes were almost enough to bring me to my knees.
I never wanted to hurt her. I only wanted to help so she could move forward with her life.
Now her heart was broken, her world was shattered, and it was my fault.
Catching up with Nikki as she reached the bottom of the stairs, she shoved hard at my chest when I reached out to her.
Our first night together, she had been interested in challenging me to a fight for fun, but now she was fighting in earnest, knocking my hands out of the way whenever I reached for her and snarling at me, angry tears prickling her eyes as I grabbed her arm.
“Get the fuck away from me,” Nikki cried and attempted to pry my fingers from her arm.
We were making a scene, and people in the club started noticing.
However, we’d descended the stairs, and it seemed that whatever went on up there, people knew to look the other way, quickly turning away after glancing at us.
“I know you hate me, but I’m not letting you go home by yourself.”
She continued to fight, and I grunted when she landed a punch against my abs.
Nikki hissed through her teeth, shaking her fist out as the hit would have hurt her more than it did me.
I didn’t want to fight her, not like this, but she was becoming increasingly agitated, and her attacks grew wilder until I was forced to pick her up and throw her over my shoulder.
The bouncers cast a disinterested glance as I moved through the club, Nikki continuing to punch at my back and kicking against my stomach, yelling at me to put her down.
My jaw ached from how hard I ground my teeth together, the guilt and injustice of the situation stirring up the bile in my stomach and twisting my gut into knots.
Nikki didn’t stop fighting even as we broke out onto the street, the cool air assaulting my senses after the sweat and heat of the club.
She wouldn’t still and screamed with rage when I shoved her into the back of the truck before I slammed the large doors shut and locked them.
The drive back to her place was accompanied by the relentless pounding of her fists against the inside of the truck, screaming obscenities at me.
There was no point in saying anything, and nothing I could say would douse the flames of hatred she had for me now.
This wasn’t what I wanted to happen.
Anger continued to bubble inside me, and my demon stirred.
I hadn’t given in to my need for sex or violence recently, and with all the emotions stirring inside me, I was on the edge of losing control.
Pulling onto Nikki’s street, the symphony of crashing and screaming from the back of the truck had subsided, and when I dropped out of the cabin, my boots sounding heavy against the road, and opened the back, Nikki was curled up in the far corner.
Her knees were pulled up to her chest, her face was flushed red with her hair hanging around her shoulders, and her cheeks a sweaty mess.
But there was no more anger.
She was crying now.
Inside my chest, my heart simply broke.
I never believed it possible.
Everyone’s heard the figure of speech—your heart breaking—but I didn’t expect it to feel like this. It was like a cavern opened up behind my ribs, leaving a black hole that widened further as I reached my hand into the truck, and she cowered from me.
“Nikki, please,” I choked out, my voice hitching before I grit my teeth again. “I just wanted to bring you home.”
I expected questions from her, a barrage of screaming and accusations.
But the way she stood and brushed the sawdust from the truck off her pants and jacket before striding past me, ignoring my outstretched hand and jumping gracefully from the truck, cut deep.
Her lips were pressed together in a thin line, and she stared at me, a thousand things left unsaid running between us while the world of emotions played across her hazel eyes.
Without a word, she spun on her heel and stormed to her house, locking the door behind her with a definitive click.
I didn’t follow.
There’s a social norm for how to deal with many situations—how long you should wait before calling after a first date or sex, how to correctly respond to how are you when asked by a cashier at a shop, how long you shake hands with a stranger before letting go.
But how long should you wait before contacting someone who’s just found out her father was a criminal, information which was revealed by the man she had been dating and trusted, who then kidnapped and threw her in the back of a truck? There was no social protocol for that.
I could only manage one night before I went back to her.
While there wasn’t anything I could say to make things right, I simply couldn’t stay away.
With an ache in my chest, I was drawn to Nikki, an ache I knew could only be solved by holding her against me and hoping she could forgive me as I tried desperately to shove away the reminder she didn’t even know the worse of it yet.
Would it have been better to reveal the full truth?
I could feel Emrick’s eyes on me last night as I left out the information about what I was and how I knew Murphy, but he said nothing, instead throwing in some cryptic crap about the truth always coming out.
What was his truth? I wanted to know because then maybe I could use it against him as he had mine.
Although something told me there wasn’t much I could do or say to Emrick that would affect him at all, he was already surrounded by darkness.
Nikki wasn’t home, and I leaned against the truck thinking while trying to put myself in her shoes.
I’d explained to Smithy I was having personal issues, which somehow he knew meant it involved a woman, and he said as long as I completed my deliveries today, he was happy for me to use the truck to get where I needed to go to solve my problems.
At this point, I think I knew where I needed to be.
The truck rumbled along, the journey to the graveyard this time a stark contrast to my experience with Nikki’s driving when we went together.
Even if I put my foot on the accelerator and pushed it to the floor, it wouldn’t reach the speeds her little car could on a bad day.
This normally wouldn’t bother me, but today I was grinding my teeth because every second I was away from her after I’d decided to find her was grating against my nerves.
And my demon was stirring.
Demons don’t deal with emotions well. Hell, we rarely bother with them. But all this shit I was feeling was welling up inside me, and I had no idea how to cope with it. So my instincts told me to fight it out of my system or fuck it out.
I doubted Nikki would be in the mood to want sex with me right now.
Finally pulling into the graveyard parking lot, I sprinted across the field, ignoring the looks of indignation from the few mourners scattered around, and slowed only when the graveyard changed from the lush green grass to the broken garden beds and small stones.
Silence encased me once I stopped walking and the crunch of my boots subsided.
“No picnic this time?” I asked.
Nikki didn’t turn around. She was kneeling at her father’s grave, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking at the headstone or the ground. Maybe she had her eyes closed in silent prayer, hoping she could reach him and get some answers.
“What are you doing here?”
She didn’t move as I kneeled beside her, not even when I swept a lock of her hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.
The usual pink of her cheeks was darker, her face blotchy from crying and anger.
Betrayal would do that to a person, and I had to remind myself it wasn’t only me who’d betrayed her.
Her father had lied to her. Whether he did it to protect her or himself was irrelevant.
She loved and trusted him far longer than she’d known me, and she’d be grappling with that as well.
I wanted it to be all about me, selfishly, and I wanted all of her attention, even if all that was directed at me was hatred.
“I came to say I’m sorry,” I said.
“Okay.”
She turned to me, leaning back on her heels and placing her hands on her knees, waiting.
“Um,” I started, and she raised an eyebrow at me. “I’m sorry,” I said lamely, watching her eyes for a clue as to what she wanted to hear from me, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I knew… I was only trying to protect you.”
“Protect me from the truth, or were you just trying to protect yourself?”
“To protect you,” I insisted, and she nodded as though she believed me but looked into the distance, her eyes unfocused. The wind brushed her hair along her cheek, and when she stared back at me, something in her eyes had changed.
“What do you think of me?” she asked.