Chapter 15
Angel
I scrub at my face, holding my breath as the water rushes over it.
I’m fucking exhausted, bone fucking tired. Miserable.
I need to work, but I just don’t have the strength to fucking care right now.
It’s been nearly a month since I’ve been home, and despite needing to be there to rest, I had to stop.
Tomorrow, I’ll make it back, but another shitty hotel on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas is where I landed tonight.
I don’t sleep well unless I’m at home, and even then it’s hit or miss. I’m always at the mercy of my memories—either the ones I can’t get out of my head long enough to go to sleep or the nightmares that haunt me when I finally do.
They’ve been worse recently. The familiar cries of my mother, the begging and pleading me for help, as if she thought I had the power to stop what my father was doing to her, have been quiet.
Instead, I’ve been vexed with the cries of children, the begging of faceless women I never hurt myself but also didn’t lift a hand to save either. It’s as if I’m being haunted by the choices I’ve made in life, and I’m realizing that I’ve never once made the right one.
I don’t understand people not helping themselves. It’s as if they’re incapable even though they know what will eventually happen.
I know the psychology of it. I know my mother stayed after being abused. I know leaving was more than walking out of the house and getting in the car.
I know my father tortured her, threatened my life, and she didn’t want that even though I never lifted a hand to help her.
That forgiveness she always had in her eyes when she would catch me crying as a young boy for witnessing her abuse wasn’t there that last day.
There wasn’t whispered I love yous. There was nothing.
Cold, dead eyes in the morning sunshine. That’s what I got that day.
“Fuck you!” I growl, slamming my fists against the dingy tile of the shower.
If there was a way I could keep all cognitive function but get rid of every fucking memory I’ve ever created, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
Give me my house and my money, and I’d be a happy man.
Instead I have thoughts of my mother, thoughts of Lauren, thoughts of that little girl I didn’t help in time, bouncing around in my skull and threatening to make me fucking insane. I hate all three of them.
I hate the power they have to control my mood. I hate that I miss my mother, that I wonder if Lauren is safe. I hate that innocent little girl for just fucking existing.
The towel is abrasive on my skin as I scrub at it. The water on it at this point doesn’t matter. I just need an escape, a way to get my damn mind off of everything that seems hell-bent on hitting me at once.
I don’t like feeling. I never fucking have.
I need a decent night’s sleep and my house. I need silence.
I need—
“Fuck you, too,” Lauren says, her words heavy as she lifts a glass half filled with amber liquid when I step into the room.
I manage to hide my shock at her being in my hotel room, but the fact is that I never anticipated her being here. Lubbock is fucking over five hundred miles from where I saw her last.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snap, dropping my towel to the floor before grabbing a pair of sweats from my bag. “Haven’t I hurt you enough?”
Her eyes drop to my legs as I pull my sweats on, but I’m too fucking riled from not hearing her come into the room to let it affect me the way I know she’d like it to.
I’m also a little grateful to see she’s safe.
She walked away in Farmington when I went to pay for a tank of gas, and at the time, I figured she’d show up just like she has now, but she never did.
I left town not knowing what the hell happened to her.
“Having a drink.” She points to the nearly empty bottle of whiskey before lifting the glass to her lips and draining it.
“Getting drunk in the room with me isn’t going to end well, Lauren.”
A slow smile across her face. “Yeah? You gonna hurt me some more?”
My lip twitches at the challenge in her voice. “I like to cause pain in the moment. A drunk woman who only feels it in the morning isn’t my thing.”
“How often do you hurt women?”
“As often as I can,” I lie, because honestly it’s hard to find a woman who’s willing to go through it and not threaten to call the cops. I’ve had the safe word called too many times for it to even be worthwhile looking for a woman who can withstand what I have to offer.
“How would you hurt me this time?”
“I’ll fuck your ass until you bleed.”
Her eyes narrow, but she gets distracted by the empty glass and promptly starts refilling it.
“The last guy who fucked my ass ended up with a slit throat.”
“Sounds like a hell of a date,” I say, but the information makes me seethe inside.
I can only imagine the situation she was in. Lauren is no fucking stranger to being at the whims of some of the evilest men I’ve ever set eyes on.
Housewives claim to be unvalued because their husbands don’t take out the trash, or they don’t feel valued because they caught the man they married looking at other women, or watching porn and jacking off after her fourth headache of the week.
Lauren purposely puts herself right in the middle of hell. She’s been raped, sodomized, beaten, tortured, hurt in seriously bad ways in order to take out some of those men.
I think she’s fucking crazy for it, but I also know there has to be an underlying reason.
I completely understand wanting a little rough sex.
I can wrap my head around the hairpulling, the fast and quick invasion that burns in just the right way.
Hell, I can get behind the smacking and bruises and the breath play, but what she does?
It’s fucked up. It’s a way to punish herself, but the why will remain a mystery because it’s not my fucking business.
I have my own shit to deal with. I don’t need her sad tales of childhood in my head.
“How are you even fucking here, Lauren?” I ask, my tone bored as I drop onto the bed.
I know better than to close my eyes with her around, but I’m a little too tired to keep standing.
She chuckles as if I told a joke, but it’s once again interrupted by a long swig of her drink.
I know she’s smart enough not to get intoxicated around people she can’t trust, and thinking I’m someone who wouldn’t just walk out of this room and leave her to fend for herself is a grave fucking mistake on her part.
“I put an AirTag in your truck.” She smiles over her glass as if she’s the most creative person in the world.
“Crazy bitch,” I mutter, but I find myself smiling, too.
Modern technology is a fucking bitch these days. When I work, I have my older phone and drive my older truck. It doesn’t make tracking impossible, but it makes it harder.
Lauren shrugs as if tracking someone’s car is just an everyday practice, and maybe for her it is.
“Why here? Why not go back to Cerberus. You seemed cozy there.”
She scoffs, her head shaking back and forth, making it very clear she doesn’t have full control over her body. She lists to the side a little before catching herself and straightening back up.
“They already watch me and think I’m crazy for what I do for work.” She shakes her head again, her eyes growing even glassier as she looks at the wall across the room. “I can only imagine what they would think if they found out that Liana was Daddy’s favorite instead of me.”
My heart skips a beat, and when it pumps the next time, my skin is cold, my eyes feeling like branding irons as I stare at her.
I said I didn’t want this. I didn’t want her to spill her secrets. I don’t want to know why she continues to hurt herself in some of the vilest ways, but with her confession, I find I want to know more.
I don’t speak. I won’t open my mouth to ask, but I get the feeling I’m not going to have to. By sunrise tomorrow, I’m going to know all of her pain, her heartache, and the reasons she punishes herself.
“I found her, you know? The day she slit her wrists. I was the only one left alive in the house.”
I swallow, refusing to think about those last couple of hours with my mother, the spread of red, the sunshine, the hammer.
“She was pregnant. At least that’s what my grandmother said after the autopsy came back. That vindictive old lady died, thinking that my dad found out about the pregnancy and that’s what started the fight. She always defended him. Always blamed Liana.”
Tears, ones very similar to the ones she cried when I fucked her, slide down her cheeks. She doesn’t bother to swipe them away. She remains confident even in her pain.
“I never told her the truth. She wouldn’t have believed me.
I don’t imagine there are many that would believe that my father was the one to get her pregnant, that they fought because she wanted an abortion and he refused.
No one would believe that he’d been hurting her for years.
How could they?” she asks, looking in my direction.
“I hid her diary before the cops got there.”
I don’t respond to her. I don’t climb off the bed and wrap my arms around her.
I don’t promise her that things will get better.
I’m a man of my own experiences, and I know time doesn’t do shit to rid you of the fucking demons.
Getting control of them is about hard work and dedication, about growing bitter and cold rather than feeding on them until they no longer have the power to hurt you.
The monsters are ravenous, hungrier than you can ever satisfy.
I get the feeling that Lauren is very much aware of this, though.
“Years,” she says, her eyes dropping to the liquid in her cup.
“He was hurting her for years. I knew he was a violent man. I didn’t always escape his wrath, but he never came to me for that.
She was his pick. I didn’t know until after I read her diary that he used that against her.
It’s how he controlled her. She took everything he forced on her to protect me. I fucking failed her.”