Twenty-Four
Ian
I couldn’t stop watching her during dinner, after we’d heated up the meal that had almost gotten us killed. I loved the way she cut her steak into bites, then ate them two at a time and refused any sauce. The way she picked every single tiny sliver of carrot from her salad, then offered to trade them for my cucumber. I loved the way she laughed when I dribbled wine from the lip of the bottle because I was too busy watching her to pour with anything resembling competence.
She made a face over the red wine, but she liked the white enough to have a second glass after dinner. She was different now. More comfortable. More confident. Still brash, but less angry. She was funny and quick-witted, and on the rare occasions that night when her smile slipped, I suffered a renewed, intensified hatred for everyone who’d ever so much as bruised her, body or soul.
After dinner, I asked her if she wanted to stay the night—Tower’s order wasn’t good enough for me—careful to phrase my question so that she had an out, just in case.
She stayed, and we made love again, and afterward, with her head on my shoulder, my dark hand splayed against her pale stomach, I saw a snapshot of our life and what it could have been, if not for Tower. What it might still be, if I pulled off the impossible and freed us both, after I freed Steven.
After I freed all three of us, because she wouldn’t leave without her sister.
Kori fell asleep in my arms, in the dark, but rolled away from me in her sleep, so I curled around her, treasuring her warmth, wondering how so much woman could possibly fit into such a small, beautiful body.
* * *
Something woke me in the middle of the night, and I lay still, trying to figure out what I’d heard. Then I heard it again. Kori. I rolled over to find her mumbling in her sleep, half word, half moan of pain.
She was dreaming.
“No,” she murmured, and when she started twisting, the covers tangled around her legs, which seemed to upset her even more. “No, please…” Her eyes were closed, but her head rolled back and forth, a vague outline in the dark room.
“Please,” she begged in her sleep, and a tear rolled down her face, glittering in the moonlight shining between the cracks in the blinds. And that was all I could stand.
“Kori.” I touched her arm, and she froze. Her eyes flew open and her hand slid beneath her pillow. “Are you—” Before I could finish the question, she’d shoved me down on my back and I felt the cold steel of a knife at my throat. My pulse roared in my ears, my heart thumping painfully.
She was awake, but unaware, still caught in the nightmare. Still trapped in the basement. Only this time she was armed with a knife from the room service tray.
“Kori, it’s me,” I whispered, afraid to move my throat much because there was actual pressure behind the blade. It was a miracle she hadn’t yet broken skin. “It’s Ian. Remember? We’re in my hotel room.”
She blinked, and some of the confusion cleared.
“See the window? Can you see the moonlight? Do you know where you are?”
Kori gasped and let go of my shoulder, then retreated across the bed with the knife still in hand. “I’m sorry. Fuck! I’m so sorry. I could have killed you.”
“It’s okay. We’re both fine.” I probably could have subdued her, but not without making her nightmare worse. “But maybe you could put the knife down?”
She lifted her hand and seemed surprised to see the knife still in it, the serrated edge shining in a thin beam of moonlight. “Shit.” She dropped it onto the marble-topped nightstand, where it bounced and clattered, then went still. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do you mind if I put the knife away?”
“Get rid of it, please. I don’t even remember bringing it in here.”
“Do you sleep with one at home?” I stepped into my underwear, then rounded the bed toward the nightstand on her side.
“Yeah. Sorry. I guess I should have warned you.”
I took the knife into the front room, and when I got back into bed, she was in the bathroom. A minute later, the toilet flushed, then water ran in the sink. When she came out, she left the door open and the light on, without even seeming to notice. And that’s when I realized she was afraid of the dark. Or at least afraid of sleeping in it—surely a complicated problem for a shadow-walker.
She climbed back into bed next to me, wearing only plain black cotton underwear, and sat with her legs crossed beneath the covers, her hands over her face, visibly trying to collect herself. I reached out, aching to comfort her but hesitant to touch. Finally I laid my hand between her shoulder blades, and when she didn’t flinch, I started to rub her back.
But my hand froze after a couple of inches, when my fingers skimmed over a smooth, thick line of skin. A scar.
An inch later, I found another.
I scooted toward the headboard for a better view of her back, and in the light from the bathroom, I saw more than I wanted to see. I saw it all.
Bruises, still healing two weeks after she was let out. Burn scars, small and round, like the tip of a cigarette. Long thin strips of scar tissue I couldn’t identify. Teeth marks—an entire set of them—in three different places.
I don’t know what I’d expected, but this wasn’t it. She hadn’t been punished. She’d been tortured.
Rage burned so hot in my gut I felt like I was roasting alive. I wanted to kill something. Someone. Everyone who’d had a hand in what happened to her. But I swallowed that rage. I held it inside, because my anger could trigger hers, and justice for Kori couldn’t be had in that moment, in the middle of the night, with her still shaking from the latest bad dream.
But she would have justice. I would make sure of that.
“Do you have a lot of nightmares?”
She shrugged. “Sleep is overrated.”
“You can tell me about it,” I said, and her hands fell away from her face. She shook her head without looking at me. “It’s not going to scare me or make me want you any less.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Ian. That’ll make me want me less.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.” She sounded so alone. So convinced that she had to be.
“I don’t understand, but I want to. If you want to tell me, I want to hear.”
For a long time, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t lie down. She didn’t even move. She just wrapped her arms around her knees and stared at the end of the bed, breathing slowly. Deeply. Then she took one more deep breath, and her mouth opened.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Can you tell me who did this?” I rubbed her back again, and I felt kind of guilty for my own ulterior motive in asking that question. I wanted to know who had done it so I could kill him. Even if killing the bastard who had hurt her didn’t make her feel better, it would make me feel better.
“Doesn’t matter who it was. Jake gave the orders. Jake told him he could do whatever he wanted with me, so long as I survived intact. Then he told me not to fight back.”
“What?” My blood ran cold.
“That was my sentence. Before he left the day they locked me up, Jake looked right into my eyes and said, ‘You like to fight, don’t you, Kori? Then let’s let the sentence fit the criminal. Don’t fight back.’” She sucked in a choked breath and swallowed thickly. “Then he just left. I spent nearly every day at his side for the past six years, and he looked at me like I was worth less to him than the lint in his pocket. He just left me there, alone with—”
“With who?” She obviously didn’t want to say the name. She probably didn’t even want to think it. But she was seeing him in her head. I could tell that much. “Who did he tell you not to fight?” The very idea of which horrified me to no end.
“His brother. He told me not to fight Jonah. Six weeks, and I never lifted a fist, because the first time I tried, the resistance pain nearly killed me, and if I’d died, there’d be no one to protect Kenley. That, on top of the rest of it…it was just too much.”
“Sadistic bastard,” I hissed. Just thinking about it made me feel sick and useless. The fierce ache in my chest rivaled the vicious twisting in my gut, and if hearing about it was that painful, I couldn’t imagine how she’d held it together. How she’d come out of that cell traumatized, but mentally intact.
“I hate myself,” she whispered, and I blinked, sure I’d heard her wrong. I wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but I didn’t know how she’d react to being touched in the middle of remembered trauma.
“No, you don’t. You don’t hate yourself.” How could she? None of it was her fault.
“Don’t fucking tell me what I feel!” she snapped, her pale hair practically glowing in the light from the bathroom. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I want to hear whatever you want to say.”
“I hate myself,” she repeated, and if anything, she seemed to believe it more this time.
“You hate him,” I insisted, because I couldn’t help it. I hated hearing her say that.
“Yeah. I hate him more than anything else in the world. Except Jake. I hate Jake more. But that’s normal.”
“Normal?” How could any of this be normal?
Kori shook her head, confused, like she could feel what she was trying to say, but the words wouldn’t come out right. “They’re heartless. Cruel. Jake and Jonah are sadistic, and I knew that from the beginning. Sadistic people do sadistic things, so they were just being who and what they are.”
My jaws ached from being clenched in anger. “That doesn’t excuse anything they—”
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “Nothing can excuse what they did to me, or to anyone else, and I’ll hate them until the day I blow their heads into a million shards of bone and splashes of gray matter. And that day will come. But they aren’t the ones who betrayed me. I betrayed myself.”
“You didn’t—”
“Yes, I did.” She stared straight into my eyes, trying to make me understand. “Bad men do bad things. That’s what they do and who they are. I fight. That’s what I do, and who I am. But in the basement, I didn’t fight. I couldn’t.”
“That’s not your fault, Kori.” She was killing me. She was carving out a piece of my soul with every word she spoke, and pain flowed in to fill the void.
“Don’t…” She shook her head in frustration. “I can’t explain what I mean. You can tell me it wasn’t my fault until the earth cracks into a billion pieces of space dust, and in my head, I know that’s true. But that doesn’t change anything. I fight for Kenley. I fight for myself. I even fight for Jake, but that’s really just another way of fighting for me and Kenley. But in the dark, I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t do what I do, and that means I failed. I wasn’t strong.”
“Kori, they took away your strength,” I insisted, and she flinched, like my words actually hurt.
“Yeah. And if someone can take away your strength, you weren’t strong enough in the first place. I wasn’t strong enough to fight, and if I’m not a fighter, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know how to be me now. I don’t know how to be anything. I lost myself in there, Ian.” Her fists clenched around a handful of comforter, and her eyes watered. “The Kori who went into that cell isn’t the Kori who came out. I can’t find the old me, and I don’t know how to be this new one.” Her gaze held mine. I was captivated and devastated by the pain she was showing me. “I’m not the Kori Daniels you would have met if you’d come here two months ago.”
“Good.” I reached for her hand and she let me take it. “I’m so very sorry and angry about what happened to you, but I like this Kori. I might even love her.” How could I not? She was a force of nature—a sudden fierce storm that had blown into my life, overturning everything I thought I knew about myself and exposing new truths. She was stronger than anyone I’d ever met, whether she could see that or not. “You may not know who you are, but I do. I know you, and I know you can be anything you want. What do you want to be? Who do you want to be?”
“I don’t know!” She pulled her hand from mine and shoved blond tangles back from her face. “All I know is that I don’t want to be her anymore. I don’t want to be the woman I hear screaming and begging whenever there’s nothing else loud enough to drown it out. I hate her. I hate what she said and what she let happen. I hate her so much that it actually makes me sick. She’s there, in the pit of my stomach, rotting me from the inside out, and every time I think about it, I need to vomit. But no matter how many times I throw up, I can’t purge her. She’s in there, and she’s scared and hurt, and I hate her.”
“No.” I shook my head and took her hands, and finally she looked at me again. “You may not be the woman who went into that cell, but you’re not the woman who lived there for six weeks, either. That Kori died so you can live, and that’s what you have to do. You have to live. And I want to be a part of that life. When the time comes for Jake and Jonah to die, I want to help you hunt them down, and slice them open, and watch their insides fall out.”
“Again with the poetry.” She managed a small smile. “That sounds so much prettier than blowing their brains out.”
“I doubt Jonah would agree with you,” I said returning her smile with a small one of my own. “But I think it’s worth dreaming about. Why don’t you try that? Try dreaming about what we’re going to do to them, instead of what they did to you? I’ll do it with you. We’ll share the dream. Then we’ll share the reality. I promise.”
She blinked at me for several seconds, like she was trying to decide if I was serious. Then she nodded and kissed me, and we slid beneath the covers together. A few minutes later, she fell asleep in my arms again, and this time there were no nightmares. For her. I lay awake for three more hours, trying to figure out how to make my promise a reality. How to help her kill Jake and Jonah, without getting both of us killed in the process.
Her binding had to be broken. All roads led to that one conclusion. And there was only one person in the world who could make that happen.
Kenley Daniels. It all came back to her.
* * *
The next morning, I woke up to find Kori watching me, her fingers curled around mine on the comforter. There was something new in her eyes. Something fragile, but full of promise. After a moment, I realized what I was seeing.
Trust. She was trusting me. She had trusted me, and that couldn’t have been easy, considering what she’d been through. And what I’d come to do. But she didn’t know I’d come to kill her sister, and she wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t going to do it. If I’d had any doubts about that before, they were gone now. I could not betray this fragile new trust.
“Breakfast?” I asked.
She smiled, and my heart beat so hard it bruised the inside of my chest. How could she do that? How could one smile make me ache deep inside, in places I hadn’t even known existed? How could she mean so much to me, in so little time?
“Yeah, but first—” Her sentence ended abruptly as her phone started beeping from somewhere on the floor. Kori popped upright like a jack-in-the-box, fear suddenly as clear in her features as satisfaction had been a moment before. “Shit!” She glanced at the bedside clock, which said it was seven-thirty in the morning, then scrambled off the bed and snatched her jeans from the floor, digging in one pocket in search of her phone. “I have to be in Tower’s office in thirty minutes, or he’ll lock me back up.”
“What?” I rolled onto the floor and flipped up the lid on my suitcase, then snatched a pair of pants from the top of the pile.
“I’m in trouble for not reporting what happened at the park,” she said, stepping into her jeans as I stepped into mine.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because there was fighting, then there was sex, then I told you a whole bunch of other things, and this one just kind of slipped my mind. It’s messy in there, you know.”
“I’m coming with you.” I pulled on my shirt, then sat on the end of the bed to shove my feet into a pair of socks.
“No, I have to go alone.” She buttoned her pants, then took the bra I handed her and I fastened the hooks at her back while she dialed on her phone. “Kenley?” she said, when her sister answered. Kenley said something I couldn’t make out, and Kori nodded. “I know. Twenty-five minutes.” She shoved one arm into her sleeve, then transferred the phone to her other hand and slid the opposite arm in, too. “Is Van with you?” she said, and I buttoned her shirt, so she could hold the phone.
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Kori said, in response to something else I couldn’t hear, and I saw my opportunity.
“I’ll stay with her,” I said, and Kori looked up at me. And that trust faltered. I could see it. “She can come here, or I’ll go there. Whichever’s easier.”
“I don’t know…” Kori said, and I realized that her devotion to Kenley might be the only thing in the world strong enough to threaten the connection we’d just made.
Good thing I wasn’t planning to kill her sister anymore.
“I swear on my life that I won’t let anything happen to her,” I said.
Kori closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay.” She wanted to threaten me. I could almost hear the words she was holding back, and I understood them. She was trusting me with the only thing she had left in the world, other than her heart, and I was hoping she’d trust me with that, too, if I kept Kenley safe from…whatever was threatening her at the moment.
“Kenni, I’m going to drop Ian off on my way to Jake’s.” Another pause, and Kori frowned. “He’s not a babysitter. He’s a friend, and I trust him. Just humor me, okay? We’ll be there in a minute.”
Thanks to the miracle of shadow-walking, she meant that literally.
Kori threw on the rest of her clothes, then we brushed our teeth and I helped wind the scarf around her neck again. Then we stepped from my bathroom into her sister’s apartment.
Kori let go of my hand and a second later, light flared to life overhead, illuminating a cramped room stuffed with a twin bed, desk and dresser. A pile of free weights stood in one corner and a collection of handguns and knives were laid out on a towel stretched over her dresser, next to a squeeze bottle of gun oil sitting on an aluminum case that could only be a gun kit.
“Kenni!” Kori called, and an instant later Kenley Daniels appeared in the tiny hall. The three of us would hardly have fit in the bedroom together. “I have to go. I need you to stay here with Ian. He’ll protect you.”
“From what?” Kenley crossed her arms over her chest and glared openly at me. “There’s a guard right outside the front door.”
“We can’t trust Jake’s men. This is just in case.”
“No way. We can’t trust him, Kori! He’s not bound. You hardly even know him.”
“I know enough,” Kori said, and I realized she was using my words. And that I loved hearing them in her voice. “Just stay with him until I get back.” Then she turned to me, her hand already on the light switch, ready to step into the darkness once again. “If I’m not back in an hour, get her out of here. Same thing goes if anyone comes for her. Kill the bastard and get her as far away as you can.”
I nodded, but she shook her head, like that wasn’t enough. “Fucking promise me, Ian.”
“What’s going on?” Kenley demanded, but Kori didn’t even glance at her.
“I swear, I won’t let anything happen to her,” I said, but Kenley’s scowl didn’t soften.
Kori watched me for a second, then went up on her toes and kissed me. “Thank you.” Then she reached back and flipped the switch to kill the light, and as soon as she was gone, I realized that I could feel her absence, even though I couldn’t see it.