The Bite That Binds (The Deep In Your Veins #2) (24 page)

“She was good to you.” I’d never heard Jared’s voice sound so small before. He almost seemed…lost – a total first for him. It made my chest ache.

“Not for the right reasons, but it took me a while to see that.” Evan shook his head. “I honestly don’t know how you can’t hate me just a little.”

Jared chuckled, though there didn’t seem much humour in it. “That was one thing she never succeeding in doing, wasn’t it? Causing a divide between me and you proved too much, even for her.”

“I know how you think, so I’m pretty sure you’ve felt bad that you didn’t go to the funeral. Yes, she was our mother, but she didn’t act like one. What I’m trying to say is that you aren’t harsh for not going. I just want you to know that.”

“I don’t feel bad for not going. I feel bad that I
don’t
feel bad…if that even makes sense.”

“Don’t feel bad. You shouldn’t. She doesn’t deserve the satisfaction. She’ll be looking up at this, laughing in delight, so stop.”

When Jared raised a brow questioningly, his twin shrugged.

“Yeah, she was good to me,” he allowed, “but she’s burning in hell for sure.” Both then chuckled, and turned. When Jared’s eyes landed on me, they instantly narrowed. I could tell by his expression that he knew I’d been eavesdropping, and he wasn’t happy about it.

Evan smiled widely. “Hey there, calmed down yet?”

“No. That’s why I still have this.” I held up the chopstick.

“The look on Magda’s face when you dived at her…Priceless.” A nudge from one of the Master Vampires made Evan turn.

As I looked up at my fiancé, I sighed. “You’re never going to tell me about your mother, are you?” I’d heard the strain in his voice, sensed the pain and anger he felt at merely thinking about her.

Jared’s face hardened. “I’ve said I will, and I will. Just not until after the Binding.”

“But
when
after the Binding? A month later, a year later, ten?”

“Sam, I told you—” He stopped on hearing Antonio call his name. “I’ll be back in a minute.” But we both knew he wouldn’t.

Laughing, Evan turned away from the vampire and double-blinked at the empty space beside him. “Where’d he go?”

“Do you mean physically or mentally?”

Evan’s expression morphed into one of concern. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s shutting me out again, the bastard.” There was no venom in my voice because a part of me felt sorry for him. But apparently there was enough frustration that Evan decided to subtly lead me out of the room and into the ballroom adjacent to it.

The second the door was closed, he pressed, “What do you mean, shutting you out? Don’t tell me you guys are letting Magda get to you. I really thought you were both coping pretty well with that.”

“We are. Sort of. But that’s not what this is about anyway.”

“Then, what?”

“Answer me something. Is it a lot to ask him to talk to me about your mother, about why he wouldn’t go to the funeral? If it truly is, I’ll let this go. For now. But if it’s not, tell me so that I can kick him up the arse and
make
him tell me. This isn’t about my curiosity anymore. I heard his voice when he spoke of her, I heard him say he’s feeling bad. I want to help him. He won’t let me.”

Evan ran a hand through his hair, looking like he would rather be anywhere but there with me at that very moment. “You can’t understand what our mom was like, Sam.”

“Then help me understand. He won’t tell me anything, Evan. I just want to be there for him.”

There was a long pause before he finally spoke. “If this was any other subject, I’d tell you to go to Jared, I wouldn’t get involved. But this is a sore subject for him. I’m pretty sure he’d have told you eventually, but not now. And
now
is when he needs to talk about it, whether he likes it or not.”

He led me over to one of the large circular tables, taking the seat opposite me. He then took a long, preparatory breath before starting. “Our mother…She wasn’t a mom to Jared, Sam. To understand why, you have to understand what she was like. Ever met a narcissist before? I mean a true narcissist.”

“No.”

He smiled sadly. “That’s the thing, you probably have; you just hadn’t known it. Narcissists have two faces. They’re one person in public, but a completely different person
behind closed doors. Of course, no one other than the people living behind those doors with them will have any inkling there is more than one side to them.

“Lorna Michaels was totally obsessed with herself, had a sense of entitlement, couldn’t empathise with another person, used and manipulated everyone around her. Her needs always came first. In some ways, she was like a spoilt child. And the vanity…she was so superficial; all about looks and appearances.”

When he hesitated to continue, I knew he was debating whether to send me to Jared. “Please, Evan. I need to know.”

Sighing, he nodded. “Because she was so nice to everyone else, they all thought she was amazing; a regular martyr who would do anything for anybody. Some kids even used to say that they wished they had my mom. They didn’t know about the outbursts, the emotional abuse, or the physical abuse. But we did. Or, more specifically, Jared did, because it was only really him who suffered from it. Occasionally I was the focus of an outburst, but that was only if I’d tried to defend Jared or disobey her. Lorna Michaels had to be obeyed, and that was that.”

Already I wished I’d been at the funeral just to do a celebratory dance around the headstone, singing ‘Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead’. “And your dad?”

“I don’t remember him being home all that much – he was either at work, or out drinking with his friends. He was a ‘woe is me’ person, too wrapped up in his own misery to give a shit about anybody else. I think that was why their marriage was so bad – they were both attention seekers, and neither liked it when the other was getting all the attention. It was almost like sibling rivalry. But my mother would
never
have given him a divorce. No, other people weren’t allowed to know that we were anything but the perfect little family. She let him have his work affairs as long as he was discreet about it. After all, she had secrets of her own, didn’t she?”

“Why did she hone in on Jared?”

“When she gave birth to us, I popped out easily enough. But he hadn’t turned, so she’d needed a C-section. And she was sure to tell him on a regular basis that she wished she’d never had him because she hated the scar. I think she would always have chosen just one of us to dote on. Apparently, it’s typical of narcissists to, on a subconscious level, pick a golden child and a scapegoat. The golden child can do no wrong; the scapegoat can do no right.”

Weird. “And she chose Jared to be the scapegoat because of the scar?”

“I don’t think so. I think it was because she couldn’t mould him into the person she wanted him to be. She tried to make us both extensions of her. Tried to control us – our every move, our every feeling, our every thought. With me, it worked in some ways. I wanted her attention, and the best way to get it was to agree with her, mirror her, do whatever she wanted. But Jared wouldn’t let her control him.”

And didn’t that make me proud as hell.

“No matter how much she punished him, she couldn’t break him. She couldn’t get into his head and take control. Personally, I think it was because of the hurtful comments she made. Instead of trying to seek her approval, he’d rejected her in his mind as some kind of defence mechanism. Because of that, she simply couldn’t get in. She actually made the job harder for herself, it was like a vicious cycle – the more she demeaned him to try to weaken him and take over, the more he rejected her and the tougher his defences against her became.”

“You said there’d been physical abuse.” A part of me didn’t want to hear it, but this was Jared, and I couldn’t help if I didn’t understand.

Evan swallowed hard. “It was more about control, wanting us to fear her enough that we’d be easier to control. Oh she was nice to me, but she still terrified me. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t help Jared in the beginning. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to. Sometimes, I’d get an urge to pull her away from him, but then I’d feel guilty because she was my mom and she was always good to me.”

With a disbelieving look on his face, he continued, “See, I thought she was great, because she thought
I
was great, and she’d tell me how I was her best boy, and that we were so alike and special. But with Jared, she was cold, aloof, distant, and abusive…except when people came around. Then she’d talk about her ‘
two
best boys’ and put him on display. And he’d have to perform. The punishment was so severe when he didn’t that he learned it was easier to act the perfect family when people were around.”

“What kind of punishments?”

He inhaled deeply. “One of her favourites was to lock him in our tiny shed – this was after she’d beaten the shit out of him. Even when it was winter and ice cold, she’d lock him in there, not even bothering to give him a coat. Yeah, she did lots of cruel crap like that. Other times, it would be mind games. She’d ask him to imagine what it would be like if she let ‘The Bad Man’ take him away and keep him, to imagine what that man would do to him. Or she’d pretend that she couldn’t hear or see him, would act as if he wasn’t there, like he didn’t exist.”

It was hard speaking while there was a big, fat lump in my throat. Just imagining him as a little boy being huddled in the corner of a cold shed, or repeatedly talking to his mother only to be completely ignored and made to feel like a ghost…Twisted bitch. “Didn’t he ever tell anyone?” I couldn’t imagine Jared ever suffering
anything
in silence.

“He told our aunt, but she didn’t believe him. Why would she? Lorna was so nice to everyone, and she made him out to be ‘troubled’ and an ‘attention seeker’ with a ‘vivid imagination’. She was cunning like that.”

As he went on, Evan grinned; it was all pride. “He managed to get his revenge in subtle ways. He’d realised that she liked it when he flinched or cried, so he never did it for her. No matter what she did to him, he wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t ask her to stop, wouldn’t even wince. Nothing.
That
got to her, because it was a reminder that she might be able to physically overpower him, but she still hadn’t got in here.” He tapped his temple, still grinning. “And denying that to someone who fed off misery and pain…it was probably the best form of revenge.”

His grin faded as he went on. “I should have spoken up with him, should have told my aunt that Lorna was lying. I should have got him help. I wanted to, I did. But, like I said,
then
I’d feel guilty, because I’d sort of felt indebted to her. That was how she made me feel.”

Hearing the shame and guilt in his voice, I patted his arm. “You were just a kid, Evan.”

His chuckle was humourless. “He always says the same thing. But I still should have helped him. He’s my
twin
.”

“You didn’t know any other way. To you, that was probably normal.”

“I was eleven when it finally clicked in my head that it wasn’t right. When I started spending time at my friends’ houses, I saw how other parents were, how the kids were treated equally. But the real turning point for me was the time when I went inside one of my friends’ homes with him and we found his dad beating up his brother. The first thing my friend did was jump on his dad’s back and try to help his brother.

“That was when I really started to defend Jared rather than just divert her attention from him. We started to spend lots of time together and we became really close, and maybe that was a lot to do with being the only two people who knew the
real
her – we were each the other’s validation that we weren’t crazy for thinking that this supposed martyr was truly, well, evil.”

“I’ll bet she didn’t like you two becoming close.”

“No, she didn’t. She turned on me big time, and she did some mean shit to me, too. But I was still the golden child, no matter what. Jared, on the other hand…She made it clear to him in as many ways as possible that he didn’t matter to her, that he wasn’t even a person. I’ll tell you one thing that I remember. It happened when we were in our teens. We got quite a bit of female attention at school. I’m not being boastful here, I’m just—”

I held up a hand, smiling. “No, it’s okay, I can fully imagine. I’ll bet Jared loved that.”

“Actually, he didn’t. He
hated
attention back then.
Hated
it. He didn’t trust anyone, he thought everyone was fake, he expected everyone to try to use him, or to fuck him over. He even hated his looks, because he looked so much like Lorna. He couldn’t bring himself to respect many of the girls who rallied around him because most were as superficial as the bitch that gave birth to us.
But
he wasn’t bitter or a total asshole, he was just very guarded and even quiet. He never really showed emotion…probably because at home, emotions had always got him in deep shit.”

It was at that moment that I realised that I
had
been asking a lot of Jared when I wanted him to talk to me. But how was I supposed to know that this was such a hot button for him? Still, I felt like crap for pushing him.