The Price You Pay #4
He did stop. Not then, not as Kara screamed, her voice raw, every shout stabbing through her bruised stomach. No, her pleas didn’t stop him. The thumps and the screams continued. Then thumps and whimpers. Then just thumps. And finally silence. Absolute silence.
Kara collapsed on the floor and started to cry.
Gavin. When Kara first met him, he’d reminded her of Eddie.
He didn’t look like him, but there was the way his forelock fell, getting into his eyes when he was distracted.
The way he smiled sometimes, at just the right angle.
Even some of his kisses, in the beginning, took her back to those days, when life was as perfect as it would ever be.
But Gavin wasn’t Eddie. As time passed, she’d come to see more of Ingrid in him and, sometimes, even Bill.
Old story again. Too often told. The victim who kept stumbling into the same kind of relationships, not because she went looking for them, but maybe because she didn’t feel she deserved any better.
That after Eddie’s murder, she didn’t deserve another sweet boy like him.
But at some point, when you realize what you’re doing, trapped in old patterns, you have to make a choice to stop doing it. To say “enough.”
Gavin must have sensed she was thinking about leaving him, because that’s when the condom “broke.” Twice. That’s when she got pregnant.
If he’d thought that would make her stay, he’d underestimated her.
Whatever Kara still felt for him, she felt more for the life growing inside her.
She’d tried to leave Gavin for the baby’s sake.
He figured out how to make her stay. He might never have been even a B student, but he was a quick study, and he realized how to get to her.
All he had to do was punch or kick a little too close to her belly, and she got the message.
Leave and you leave alone. So she stayed.
He promised to stop hitting her, and to take her to Seattle and start their new lives together, and she went because she didn’t really see another option.
As for keeping his promise, the hitting stopped while she was pregnant.
She’d give him that. And he never threatened or hurt Melody.
On a relative scale, he wasn’t as bad as he could have been, and she knew that was no justification at all, but sometimes, when you’re trapped badly enough, you need to find a bright side.
Life was not good; life was not bad. Kara would bide her time until she finished high school, then she’d run with Melody.
That’s when Ingrid came back into her life, and things went from “not bad” to hell, the nightmare of her old life seeping into her new.
That’s when Kara devised the plan, one Gavin happily agreed to.
He would call pretending to be Eddie’s brother out for revenge and if that didn’t scare Ingrid off, then this would.
An abandoned cabin with a basement, where “Eddie’s brother” would beat them both until Kara found a way to “escape” and they’d flee.
After that, Ingrid would keep running until she was out of their lives.
Killing Ingrid? Not part of the plan. Not Kara’s plan, at least.
Kara lay on the floor, crying quietly. The door opened. Gavin’s footsteps crossed the room. She kept her eyes squeezed shut as he walked toward her. She could smell the blood on him. Ingrid’s blood.
Ingrid dead. How many times had she fantasized about that while she slept on her hard, metal bed in the detention center and thought about Eddie, began to admit to herself that he’d done nothing wrong, that Ingrid murdered him in cold blood?
But she never dreamed about this, about being there, smelling her friend’s blood, being responsible for the spilling of it.
No, in her fantasies, someone simply gave her the news: Ingrid is dead.
Did that make her a coward? Maybe.
Gavin crouched beside her. His hand touched her shoulder and she shrank back, eyes still shut.
“I did it for you, Kerry,” he whispered. “For us. You know that.”
No. She knew exactly why he’d done it and been a fool for not seeing it coming.
She opened her eyes. Blood flecked his face, but his eyes glittered.
As they’d glittered the whole time he’d been beating her.
Afterwards, he’d kneel beside her and touch her battered face and whisper that he’d hated doing it, remind her that it had been her idea, that she had to be beaten as badly as Ingrid so her friend wouldn’t suspect anything when they escaped.
But he hadn’t regretted it. She’d seen that in his eyes, and now she realized he hadn’t needed to beat her at all, because he’d never intended for Ingrid to see her again.
“And if I want to go?” Kara whispered, bracing for the answer, but knowing she had to ask, to be sure. “If I want to leave now?”
His lips curved in a smile, almost tender.
“You can’t, Kerry. You just helped me murder your best friend.
If you leave, I’ll blame you. They’ll put you back in jail—real jail this time—and you’ll never see your daughter again.
” He looked her in the eyes. “Can you imagine what her life would be like without her mommy?”
Yes. Yes, she could.
“And if I say you did it?” Kara asked. “That you killed Ingrid?”
He shrugged. “Then that’s the chance I take. But remember who’s the convicted killer, Kerry. You won’t leave and you won’t tell. I saved you, again, and this is the price you pay.”
Kara nodded, her gaze down. Gavin unlocked the cuff on her leg. As he did, she reached into her pocket for something nestled deep in the folds. She pulled it out, hidden in her palm.
“It’s going to be okay,” Gavin said, reaching to hug her.
She accepted his embrace. “Yes, it is,” she said, and stabbed the penknife into his throat.
Kara huddled outside the cabin with a blanket wrapped tight around her.
Red and blue lights cut through the night, bouncing off the trees.
More lights bobbed across the ground as the crime scene techs made their way into the house.
She glanced at the ambulance. The lights were off now, bodies being loaded into the back.
“It’s all right,” whispered the older female officer beside her. “You’re safe now.”
Kara managed a twist of a smile. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
She’d taken the cell phone from Gavin’s pocket and called the police.
When they arrived, she’d given her story, how Ingrid had been the victim of a stalker.
A stalker who’d claimed to be the brother of a boy Ingrid killed six years ago.
Except it wasn’t the brother. It was Kara’s own husband.
Her abusive husband—her medical records would back that up.
He’d gone crazy when Ingrid re-entered Kara’s life.
Accused them of having an affair. This had been his revenge.
He’d played the stalker, kidnapped and beaten his wife and her supposed lover, and planned to murder both and blame it on Ingrid’s “stalker.” Kara had stabbed him with his own penknife and escaped, but not before Ingrid paid the ultimate price.
“Kerry?” a voice said.
She looked up to see her neighbor walking toward them, Melody in her arms, the sleepy toddler blinking as she looked about.
Kara smiled—a real smile now—and reached out, and the woman settled Melody into her arms. The officer and neighbor walked away to leave mother and daughter together.
When they were gone, Kara leaned over Melody’s ear.
“There’s always a price, baby,” she said. “But never pay more than you owe.”