Chapter 62
Eric
O ut of my depth here, I stood next to a seething Lily, red against the orange-yellow lights, face tight and eyes fixed ahead of her. Her fists were folded next to her hips. I had no clue how to fix this. All I knew was she couldn't leave me if I was next to her. I'd follow her everywhere. She'd have to get me arrested for stalking to get rid of me. Although, it might not have to get that far. She could have us arrested right now for murder.
"I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to hit me." That was my stupid attempt to break the silence.
She pressed her lips together, hard, and shut her eyes. Her chest swelled and fell.
"I'd deserve it," I continued.
Lily let out an audible sigh and released her fists. "I'm sorry about the busted lip," she mumbled.
"No, as I said, I deserved it." My heart leapt as I attempted to keep her talking.
"Stop saying that. That's how my dad and Marco justified what they did. I'm not them. Damn it! Why did you all have to fuck things up? Wake up that side in me. I thought I had it buried. I'm not them!" She turned around and balled up her fists again, aimed at me, but let them fall.
Lily was shaking when I took the opportunity to wrap my arms around her waist and pull her into my chest. "No, you're not them. You're nothing like your father, Lily."
"Yes, I am!" she screamed, pulling away from me.
I held her tighter, but the elevator came to a stop to let in an older couple. We both looked at them. That's what I wanted us to be one day. Gray hair, wrinkles, smushed bodies, but still together until death.
"Please. We can still have a future together. Don't let Terry ruin this too," I whispered.
"Terry isn't ruining this! You are! All of you! This is about what..." She caught herself as one half of the older couple cleared her throat before whispering something to her husband, who also turned to judge us.
"Let me go," Lily gritted her teeth.
I dropped my arms. The last thing I wanted was for them to call the cops on us and for Lily to spill everything. How was I supposed to fix our relationship from prison? If I went away now, that was it. There'd be no more us. Ever. She was my everything, and I'd have lost her, without a doubt.
When the elevator finally got to the parking lot floor, she rushed out. The old couple behind us also wandered out. Great.
"Lily," I whispered, hurrying after her and trying to grab hold of her hand. "We have to talk about this."
"There's nothing to talk about." She headed toward the rental car. "You murdered my..."
"Cat!" I yelled and she whipped around. I whipped around as well. The old couple was staring at us, mouths agape.
"I didn't mean to. It was an accident," I forced a smile and explained to them for no reason.
Lily's footsteps departed from my side and I swallowed hard at the old couple's scrutiny. Turning to each other, they muttered something in French and I ran through the few Parisian laws I knew to determine whether or not I could be imprisoned for 'murdering a cat'.
"It really was an accident," I insisted as the wife looked me up and down with her pointy nose and her husband cleared his throat. But they left. And I hadn't seen them take out a phone. Still I added, "It happened in America." Just in case. I didn't think I could be charged for murdering an American cat. I would never do that. A rat on the other hand? For sure. And Terry Thornbread and his sidekick were exactly that. Poisonous, deadly little rats.
Lily swore behind me and when I turned, I found her with her back against the rental car and her arms crossed over her chest. I walked up beside her.
"Do you have the fucking keys?" she ground out, eyes dead ahead.
I patted my pockets and not having them was like letting her down all over again. "I'm sorry."
"Great." She rolled her eyes. "I'll go get them."
"I don't regret it, you know," I confessed to her back.
Her slippered feet dragged to a stop. She was pale as a ghost when she turned back around to look at me. Fuck, I didn't want her to look at me like that.
"I regret getting involved in the action itself. I regret hurting you. I regret losing you. But I'm not the least bit sorry that those pieces of shit are dead. I know you're not either. I saw it that day you found out..." I said.
"And what? Did you feel proud of yourself? Watching me breathe a sigh of relief, knowing you were a part of the reason?" She grabbed her face as if it was going to drop to the ground if she didn't hold it up. "Did it make you feel powerful?"
"Well..." I started, but her eyes kept going wider with her words.
"Because you're a man, aren't you? Deep down, you seek power. Control. You couldn't let the police handle it. You had to do it, to take control of how he affected my life..." She was going.
"No, it wasn't like that. Yeah, after what he did to you, I wanted to kill him," I growled.
She shook her head and backed away as if I had evolved into a monster.
"I was angry. Tyler offered his services..." I said.
"His services?!" she gasped.
"Yeah. Former mob boss, you know? He has some ties," I nodded.
"How could Ann-Marie keep this from me?" She kept backing up. Her legs were trembling now.
"Lily. Please. You don't have to be afraid of me," I interjected and moved toward her, grabbing her before she could run away.
"No, let me go!" she screamed.
Now tears fell down my eyes. "Lily. Stop. It's Eric. I'm still me!" I held her tighter and her body rattled out of control, the tears pouring from her reddened eyes mixing with snot.
"Out of everyone else, I was supposed to know you the best! You were supposed to know me the best!" She stopped struggling, dropping her body weight into me, pressing her head into my chest and grabbing my shirt. "You were supposed to be my fucking stupid fairytale ending."
"You never believed in fairytales," I reminded her.
"Not until you all re-entered my life and had me convinced that shit was real." She punched my chest.
"It was real. Is. Please. Lily. When you were gone, I was going out of my mind without options, my parents were ill, I didn't want to bother them, I got some contacts from my parents, but lost it when Matt and I accidentally crashed the car on my way back from the airport..." I squeezed my eyes shut, the weight pulling my forehead down to rest on the top of her head.
"You crashed?" Her voice scratched.
"Tyler offered to help us find you. We figured either Marco or Terry had you. Turned out it wasn't Marco and Terry tricked us," I forced the words out against the boulder in my chest. "Fuck, we were so close. We were there, where the containers were..." My heart was pounding now, my vision darkening, my pulse taking up all the space in my chest.
She was silent, looking up at me. Tears trickled down my neck, the tickle the only thing making me aware I was still crying.
"We could have rescued you, if we got the truth beaten out of him then and there." My hands tightened around her waist.
"Eric. You know I don't like violence," she insisted.
"They could have killed you!" I released her, my body growing hot.
"But they..." She raised her voice.
"Yeah, yeah. I know. They didn't. But they could have. And Terry was like mold. Unless you tore down everything and eliminated it from the source, he'd keep coming back. How long would they lock him up for?" I asked.
"I would have handled it." Her lips trembled.
My lungs expanded to capacity and I grabbed my head, steadying myself.
"I know there were better ways to handle it. But I wasn't thinking straight, okay? None of us were. After you were rescued, we thought it went without saying that Tyler would leave it. But then he told us that he caught them. And he was going to handle it with or without us."
Lily opened her mouth.
"I know what you're about to say, because I know you, remember? We could have left it. Called the police and told them that he caught them. Let the law deal with them. Talk Tyler down. Yeah, the last one wouldn't have worked. Besides, I wanted to see their faces one last time. And I wanted to walk away and leave them in the lion's den with Tyler. But Tyler wanted insurance. He wanted to make sure that we wouldn't go straight to the police, especially since Ryan was threatening that he would. Trying to talk him down. I've convinced myself that we didn't have a choice. But we did. We could have participated or let him hurt us. We chose ourselves, because he would've killed them anyway. I spent some time regretting it. But more than anything else, I was fucking relieved. You don't understand how much I love you, Lily..." I said.
"Don't do that. Don't blame this on love," she sobbed.
"But I didn't want that man to have access to you anymore. And as the days went by, and I knew he wouldn't be popping his slimy ass into your life ever again, it became easier to sleep," I confessed. "I wanted to protect you."
"And who's going to protect me from you?" Lily choked.
"I'd never hurt you," I scoffed at the idea.
"Yeah? You already have. More than you could ever know, Eric." She rubbed her forehead and sniffed back a chuckle. "This is fucking crazy. What is it with me and attracting men who don't have their fucking heads on their bodies? I thought I actually found normal men. I thought I could be normal. But you fucking killed two people because you 'love me'." She took a breath. "And I get why you did it. It doesn't make me hate it any less. When it came down to it, it was your life against theirs."
Lily trembled.
"Fuck, no matter how hard I try, I end up in some dumb shit, huh? I knew something was wrong with Tyler the moment I saw him. It's all been lies. All of the people I love lied to me. At least my parents never gave me false hopes. You know what the worst part is? Your lack of remorse. That's some psychopath shit, Eric. I don't think I ever knew the real you."
That hit harder than anything else I could have faced at the hands of Tyler. In fact, I think it would have been best if I had let him finish me off. The resignation in her body, the blankness in her eyes, I'd lost her.
Fuck. There was no getting her back.
"Lily. Please don't hate me for this. I thought I was..." I reached for her.
"No, Eric. I've heard all about what you wanted. But you knew what this would mean to me. And you did it anyway. You didn't do this for me. You did this for you." She let out a heavy breath. "Fuck. I don't hate you for it. I should. But I don't. As you said, Tyler threatened you and if he hurt you...." The rims of her eyes trembled and she let me touch her. She even reached out and touched my cheek. "If I lost you, any of you, there's no telling what I would do."
My heart grabbed hold of hers, thinking it had a chance. She dropped her hand and pulled away.
"But I can't forgive you for getting involved with a mob boss..." Lily looked at the floor as if she was searching the smooth concrete for answers.
"Wouldn't you have done the same for us?" My face crumpled as my heart was ripped out.
"There were so many options! How many people do you know that go missing and are found because a criminal helped them?!" She yelled. "That's what the cops are there for."
style="text-align: left;""Those cops weren't worth shit! They were more focused on the dynamic of our relationship than going out there to find you. We had to do something! How many missing people have you heard of who were found alive?! Time was running out. We were desperate..." I yelled back.
"I get that!" She balled her fists and walked away from me. We were both heaving as if we just got done running track in the Olympics. "But, fuck!" Lily grabbed her head and screamed. "It's all one big fucking mess." Exhausted, she dropped her head. Her voice was hoarse and run ragged. "I'm glad he can't bother me anymore. I'm glad that when my nightmares attack me, I can rest assured that he's never coming back."
She nodded then shook her head, fighting her mental battle.
"But that wasn't a coincidence. A hand dealt by fate because he deserved what was coming to him. That was all of you enacting revenge on my behalf, or Tyler using what happened to me to get his kicks." She shook her head. "You robbed me of my chance to see him get what he deserves. To look him in the face at the trial and watch him squirm, knowing that for once in his fucking life, he didn't get away with harming someone. That no one was going to make excuses for him, give him a slap on the wrist and let him walk around all smug, knowing there would be no consequences for his actions. I wanted to see him go down for this and know that damn it, there was no escape."
"Trust me, he knew that in the end." I confirmed, remembering the way he regretted all his life decisions that led him up to that final moment. When his threats were silenced and terror seized him.
"Yes, but I wasn't there to see it! He was my tormentor, mine and my mother's worst nightmare, my captor, my sperm donor whose blood ran through my veins. He was my hell. He's the one who turned my beautiful men into monsters. He's the fucker that's always taking something from me and I wanted to see him suffer at the trial." She sobbed.
"He might have gotten off in a couple of years, and what then?" I choked.
"There's no justification for murder! He HURT ME and fuck it, I didn't set out to murder him! I didn't set out to murder the other guy! In my case, it would have been self-defense. In yours, it was cold-blooded. Stop making it sound honorable! It wasn't." Her body shook with her breath. "Just please, can somebody get me the fuck out of here? I don't have money for a plane ticket or a cab. What the fuck am I doing with my life? What am I doing here? Damn it, I'll go get the fucking keys, myself."
"I already texted Ryan..." My voice trailed off to her deafened ears. The elevator dinged open and it was him.
"Oh, fuck me." Lily looked from side to side, looking for an escape.