Turned out using the excuse that you needed tampons and running out the front door like a crazy woman was the perfect deterrent to assuage Finn’s concerns about me running into town alone.
The shaking rumble of Daemon’s old truck as I attempted and failed to dodge potholes in the back country roads I knew like the back of my hand jumbled my already frazzled nerves.
But nothing… nothing prepared me for the moment I pulled into the driveway of my house. It came at me in slow motion as I hesitantly pulled the truck into the driveway and headed toward the house. I stared at my childhood home. It was the same home I’d lived in every day of my life, but for the first time, I really looked at it. The roof over the cement front porch hung haphazardly in one corner, as if one more giant snow storm we were likely to receive in the winter would force it to the ground. The cement stairs crumbled and the paint was chipped all over the place. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had done work in the yard or trimmed the bushes that lined the front of the porch and the side of the house.
A sad oak tree stood tall but wilted in the front yard. Even the tree looked like it’d given up on life. I stared at my house, my yard, the place I had lived my entire life, and wondered if apathy and self-loathing sucked the life out of everything that tried to grow and live once you stepped foot on the property.
Nothing looked alive. Nothing looked like anything I wanted any part of. The gray house loomed in front of me; the large bay window at the front of the house had the curtains pulled closed and prevented me from an inkling of what I should expect when I stepped inside.
But still, I moved. Quietly I closed the door to Daemon’s truck, although Cain knew I had already arrived. No one could miss the deep rumbling of the run down truck. My hesitant steps trudged across the front sidewalk and up the cracking cement stairs until I stood before the front door.
A gentle breeze blew through the air, cooling my sweaty skin while at the same time sending shivers down my spine. Darkness and everything nasty and evil awaited me on the other side of the door. No matter how many slow breaths I took, no matter how many times my trembling fingers reach for the front door, nothing could make me take the final steps.
Expecting me, Cain opened the door before I could knock. A metal frame and a screen full of holes separated us.
My stomach churned as I took in his probing eyes and squinting, hard smile. Nothing about Cain and the way he looked with his beady eyes and nasty graying beard had ever radiated anything except pure evil.
My insides twisted as I nodded once. My hands itched to feel the cool metal from Liv’s gun that I lifted from her dresser before I had taken off. She had only given me one simple glance when I told her I was headed toward town while she continued to help Melissa fill out college paperwork.
Now I wished I’d taken one quick moment and scribbled a note to her. Something that told her if I didn’t come back that I’d always loved and admired her.
“You going to come in?”
My eyes snapped to Cain’s before I quickly looked around him and inside my living room.
As I entered my own house, Cain caged me in the doorway so I had to shift to move passed him. I twisted so I could move by, my breath catching in my throat as my breasts rubbed lightly against his leather vest. A slow burn erupted in my throat. I pushed down the vile taste to hide my disgusted reaction from him.
“What do you want?” I asked him, remembering to keep my back out of his view. I knew the gun was hidden in the loosely fitted Nordic Lords t-shirt I’d thrown on, but Cain wasn’t stupid.
His pale hazel eyes slid down my body as smoothly as a snake glided across the grass. His lips curved as he took in the skulled Viking holding an axe, the Nordic Lords logo, on the left shoulder of my shirt.
“I’ve missed you.”
I swallowed the thick taste of disgust in my throat, breathed deep in order to slow my pulse, and did everything I could to keep my hands at my sides. I would end him, and I would never allow Cain to ever see again any emotion from me.
“Why are we here?” I asked, my eyes trained over his right shoulder at the door to outside. My voice, surprisingly, carried a tinge of impatience, whereas the inside of my stomach was rolling with my earlier eaten popcorn. A quick glance backward ensured no one was behind me as I widened the space between us.
He huffed at my question as his eyes flickered to the empty living room. “You haven’t been to see your mom or checked in to see how she’s doing.” The knowledge that he’d either been following me or had me followed sent a chill down my spine that I fought to hide. Instead, I arched a brow in silent response as he shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. She never was much of a mother to you.”
As he talked, he walked into the living room, glancing at the fireplace mantel that held one family photo. The only family photo we’d ever had taken. I was eight. My long, black hair was braided into two perfect French braids that hung down to my waist. Even in that photo, my mother’s eyes were depressed and dark. Cain crossed his arms against his massive chest and took in the photo before he faced me.
His head nodded toward the photo while his eyes stayed fixed on me. A slight smirk graced his lips. “Do you know why that is?”
Every word he spoke sent a chilled response to my chest until my entire body felt as if I’d been dipped in an ice bath. My knees trembled from the simple weight of holding my body in a standing position. It took every ounce of strength I didn’t know I possessed to cross my arms and mirror his response, instead of sinking to the floor and begging him to answer my questions.
Why me?
Why her?
Why does she hate me?
“Come sit,” he said, his smile wide as he waved a hand out toward the couch. “I have a story for you.”
I didn’t want to hear his story. I also didn’t want to sit on the couch where he could too easily reach me from the across the room.
I needed space and the buffer of furniture for not only my physical safety, but also my emotional stability.
“I’ll stay here,” I said, and then took two small steps toward the back of the couch as a show that I was willing to listen.
I didn’t want to hear it, but I still had to know it.
Cain licked his lips before rolling them between his teeth. As he faced me, his arms fell to his sides before he took a relaxed seat in one of my mother’s wingback armed chairs. His languish movements expressed a calmness to him, while every nerve in my body was firing on high-alert. The air around me seemed to buzz in anticipation.
Of his answers. And his death. Because I wasn’t leaving until I had both.
“Did you know your father and I were friends once?”
I blinked once and then leaned forward, my hands gripping the back of the couch and in shock of this news. It was the only reaction I would give the monster in front of me.
Cain’s smile grew wider, showing a full mouth of yellowing teeth from too many years of nicotine and probably infrequent toothbrush purchases. “I suppose you didn’t know that we grew up together then, did you?”
My nose twitched. A hundred questions screamed inside my brain. Still, I stayed quiet, wondering the purpose of this.
Cain stood again, pacing a few steps back and forth before he scrubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand. “Your mom…” he started and stopped, frozen, while he stared at the curtains that covered the front window of our house. There was nothing to look at, yet he was seeing something. My eyes darted in the direction of his gaze and I frowned.
“She was beautiful. So full of life. Gorgeous as fuck and had a laugh that made all the boys in our high school want to get their hands on her.”
My pulse thrummed in my ears the more he talked and more questions filtered into my brain. I pressed my lips together forcefully to prevent them from slipping out while I tried as hard as possible to remain unaffected by this confession that meant so little, but knew would explain so much.
Time. I needed more time.
“And?” I asked, an irritated tone to my voice.
Cain turned on his heels, his arms crossed over his slightly protruding gut, and narrowed his eyes on me. “You look so much like her, you know.”
Oh, God. Sick slimy filth crawled in my veins and all over my body. My lips twisted in disgust.
“Except for your eyes,” he continued, as if he didn’t notice I was ready to vomit all over my own furniture. “Your eyes are your dad’s.”
As he spoke of my dad, his words turned dark—the familiar evil expression in his eyes appeared as he stared directly into my light blue eyes that one hundred percent mirrored my father’s.
“What’s your point, Cain?”
His nose twitched before he reclaimed his seat in the chair like a king on his throne. “I dated your mom. I took her out, did everything I could to get her to want me as much as she wanted him.”
A perverse sense of satisfaction began to erase the filth. I arched a brow. “And she chose him over you? That’s what this is about?”
“He stole her from me!” He shouted the words with vehemence as he launched himself out of the chair, directly at me. Had I not been behind the couch, he would have been on me in seconds.
As it was, I stumbled backward until my back pressed against the knobby pine wall behind me. My hands flew to my chest as I attempted to calm my racing heart.
Cain stared at me, panting heavily, his hands fisted at his sides and a cruel scowl on his face. He stabbed himself in the chest with his index finger. “She was mine. She was always going to be mine, and then one night your father got her drunk and took advantage of her. And then…” His eyes narrowed as they raked my body again. Despite the eighty degree humid weather, I wished I would have worn a snowmobile suit as Cain’s eyes dragged down my exposed legs. “You came along. And your father took her from her home, took her from her family, and brought her to this hell-hole where she never wanted to be.” He leaned forward and leered. “And with people she never wanted to be with.”
“So all of this,” I said, my voice shaking and trembling. My heart raced and pounded against my rib cage; I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had made a sudden appearance in the palm of my hand. “Is to get even… with a dead man?”
“It was to give your mom what she wanted. A life without you and him.” His tongue darted out and licked his lips.
“You’re sick,” I gasped. I struggled. I struggled to breathe and to speak and to have a rational thought in my head. “You fucked me? You raped me and whipped me because you blamed me for my mom leaving you?”
“I wanted to destroy you.” His eyes flashed and he moved to walk around the couch. “I wanted to kill every part of you.”
I shook my head, my long hair getting tangled against the uneven sanded finish of the wooden wall at my back. “That makes no sense.”
He shrugged. “I got your mom.”
“You drugged her and beat her. You did everything you could to keep her high out of her mind until her body started dying long before her mind would.”
“You had the Nordic Lords gut my brother!” he bellowed, his face contorted in rage as he leaned forward, panting for breath.
All of my breath left me in one huge whoosh of expulsion. “I didn’t know.” I blinked, once, twice, and then three times, while I fought my quivering limbs to settle.
Cain smiled. It was twisted and sick and didn’t look right. “I gave her what she wanted. A life without you, and it kept her close to me. And now she knows the consequences for trying to leave me.”
I gasped. The realization of where we were hitting me. The significance of it. “Where is she?” I asked, too afraid to tear my eyes off of his slowly approaching, menacing frame.
His eyes darted to the stairway behind me. I refused to follow it. “Upstairs. And soon, we’ll be together again. Just the two of us.”
He was sick. Vile and disgusting and fucking warped in his head.
“And me?” I asked as I slowly moved my hands to my hips defensively. I turned my back from the wall and toward the kitchen.
“You’ll be dead.”
I expected it. I still flinched from the coldness of his words and ambivalent shrug. “Why keep me alive at all then?” I asked, putting more space between us as I took a timid step back toward the kitchen. I had no idea if anyone was there—I only hoped we were alone.
He perused my body again. “Because you were worth money.” As his eyes reached mine, he tilted his head. “Did you think I’d ever let you live?”
“I figured you would have killed me a long time ago.”
“I thought it’d be more fun to kill your spirit first.”
My tongue rolled in my teeth before my hand reached to my back. My fingers easily slid over the handle as I gripped the gun in the back of my waistband. I had one shot at killing him. With every ounce of courage I could muster up, I stared him down and aimed the gun directly at him. “Looks like that idea failed.”
The gun trembled in my sweaty grip. My lips pulled into a grin that had to be unnatural and matched Cain’s in evilness. I didn’t care.
I cared about blowing his head off so the sick fuck was dead and could never again touch me, violate me, or any other woman—my loser of a mother included.
Suddenly, Cain’s eyes darted behind my shoulder right as a thick, warm arm slid around my chest. Before I knew what happened, I was braced tightly against a chest of hot, steeled warmth and a thick, rumbling voice was at my ear.
“Put the gun down.”
I melted into him as my grip on the gun tightened.