The Good Girl (20 page)

“I – I don’t want to talk about them.”

Removing my hand from her breast, I moved to run it along her back, down along the crease of her ass until my thumb sat just above the puckered hole. She gasped, breathlessly waiting for my cock to force back in.

“Tell me how they died.” I shoved my thumb in her ass and I could feel the opening to her cunt tighten around my cock. She tried to speak, her body falling forward on the desk, her back moving from the force of her breath.

Bringing my head down, I grazed my teeth across the skin on the back of her neck. She shivered beneath me and I began to move my thumb slowly – in and out – until she loosened up and her hips moved in time with the movement of my thumb.

“Tell me…” I growled. Finally, her mouth opened and she spoke quietly, barely able to voice her words.

“Th – They overdosed…” I forced my cock inside her and she screamed out from the sensation. I could see from the angle of her face that tears had started to fall and I drove myself in harder and faster until I could hear the sound of her body beating against the wood of the desk.

Slowing to an almost lazy rhythm, I chuckled again, bringing my mouth to her ear and whispering, “Are you sure?”

She stilled beneath me, confusion settling over her thoughts so obviously that I sucked in a breath over smiling lips – realizing that in this minute she would first learn of how our lives are so intimately tied.

“When I first saw you outside the tattoo parlor – you brushed me off. I was nothing to you. I wasn’t a man you wanted to see, or know – or feel. However, I felt a connection to you instantly, I knew there was a reason that fate had brought us together – had revealed to me the fact that you exist.”

Slowing to a point where I was only sitting inside her, I groaned as she clenched around me, her body begging for me to go on while her mind wanted nothing more than to escape me. She knew I was hiding something. She knew I would destroy her with my words.

“I researched you. It wasn’t difficult at all. You flaunt yourself online. You post pictures of every drunken night you have – intimate shots that should be proof of your shame – and yet, you laugh and smile and carry on like you live by different rules than every other decent human being out there. I stalked you, Eleni, and you provided me the means to do so.”

I went soft while talking to her and her body never moved - her breath shallow and slow – as she listened attentively. Pulling myself apart from her, I pushed down on the desk, removing my weight from above her body, grasping her arm and spinning her over so that I could look in her eyes when I told her the rest.

“I have no life. I sit inside this fucking house with all the time in the world to play online, to track and follow you and learn about you. I hide in shadows, I go out to eat, gather supplies and fuck – and all the rest of the time – the HOURS I spend alone in this house – I watch you.”

Her eyes widened to hear my confession, but surprise did not exist behind those gorgeous blues. I understood her lack of shock. She was a smart girl. I knew her name, her habits – everything about her – when I brought her back to this place. She had to have known I’d followed her – that she wasn’t some random woman taken from some random bar. She’d seen me at the tattoo convention and she recognized me when I intervened as she was being attacked by those men. However, what I was about to tell her would birth the shock that I’d been wanting in her all along.

“There was something about you that I recognized, something that was always at the back of my mind – the tip of my tongue. My subconscious knew it before I could focus enough to understand what I was seeing. But then – THEN – one day while I was perusing your newly posted shame, I looked up at your name and it clicked.” I snapped my fingers so close to her ear that she jumped from the sound.

Her gaze never left mine and her mouth dropped open just enough that I knew she was lost in the story I was telling her. She hung on every word – every syllable and every inflection in my voice. It was part curiosity – part fear – but mostly a slow awakening inside her to the realization that there was more to her abduction than I’d originally let on.

“I’m not some perverted asshole, Eleni. I don’t abduct women, fuck them, torture them and make them believe it’s all some organized plan to rid them of the habits they use to destroy themselves. In all honesty, I could give a shit about what the trash and whores are doing on a daily basis. They bring on their own despair and pain – and I’m happy enough to sit back and let them. Stupidity breeds misery, but most are too ignorant to see it.”

Her lips moved and she stared at me when she asked, “So – so why me?”

I was silent for a second, my brain processing the fact that not only was she listening – she wanted to know what I had to tell her. I smiled. She wasn’t afraid of me, she wasn’t broken to the point of absolute servitude – she hadn’t lost her voice despite everything I’d put her through. She was strong, and regardless of what had been done, she still had the light inside of her that I’d grown so jealous of over the months that I watched her.

“Your name was familiar.” I ran my finger along her cheek, down across her jaw and her neck until I stopped at a point where I could feel the blood pump through her veins. Her pulse stuttered against my finger – the physical manifestation of her anticipation and fear. “Specifically, your LAST name. It didn’t register at first, but then the familiarity hit and I remembered where I’d heard that particular name before.”

I paused, giving her a few more seconds to allow her to exist within her ignorance of how we were connected.

“Your parents died of drugs, Eleni. That part is true. However, it wasn’t an overdose that was the exact cause. Tell me, when they left the last time you saw them, did you ever see their bodies again? In their coffins, perhaps?”

She shook her head slightly, understanding starting to dawn that she’d been lied to since she was a child.

“They died in a car accident. They were burned to a point of no longer being recognizable. They died screaming in pain even with their nerves dulled by the alcohol and drugs that were in their systems. They died – Eleni – when their car crossed the median on a warm Sunday afternoon and struck the front of another family’s car – MY family’s car.”

Then, at that moment, the click inside her head was almost audible. Confusion swirled behind her eyes, but a light turned on and I swore she knew the rest without my having to say it.

“My parents were killed. They died screaming in the same flames that killed your parents. I was caught in those flames and if it hadn’t been for a man passing by, a man brave enough to rip the door open and who allowed himself to be burned to save a child, I’d have perished on that road with all of them. But instead – INSTEAD – I lived. I was burned over the majority of my body, cut up by glass and living most of the rest of the year inside a hospital while I underwent treatment after treatment – skin graft after skin graft. As I grew, I had to return for more skin to be cut from my body and replaced, so it would stretch with my growing bones. Do you have any idea what kind of PAIN comes with growing up that way? Both physical and mental, I was constantly hidden away, a child that could not play with other children, a life destroyed by the choices that the demons that spawned YOU had made.”

“N – no ….”

Her head shook in rejection of what I was telling her and I smiled. “After the hospitals that fixed my skin came the hospitals that would help fix my mind. Your parents taunt me still, speaking to me, telling me to hurt other people like they hurt me. They laugh at me, they mock me - even in death, they won’t let me out of their fucking grasp!”

I shoved away from her and paced the floor in front of the desk where she remained motionless – stuck in a state of shock that no person would easily break through.

“Do you have any fucking idea how it feels to not be able to go outside? To not be able to stand in the middle of a crowded room without wanting to beat the living shit out of every person around you?!” I was in her face again, my hand grasping her hair so that I could keep her still as I brought my face down to hers.

Before I could speak again, her mouth opened and she spit out an excuse that I assumed she felt would make things better.

“I – I didn’t know. I had no idea, Gabriel. You have to believe me. They fucked up my life too!”

Tears poured from her eyes, but they weren’t enough. Her pain wasn’t the same. Her life wasn’t as black as mine.

“No, Eleni. They didn’t fuck up your life. That would have been the case had you not become Just. Fucking. Like. Them. How fitting that demons breed more demons. I often wondered why I was left alive. Why a child was forced to endure the pain and heartache of EVERYTHING that was taken away. And – after meeting you – I know.”

The momentary silence between us felt like a lead weight on my shoulders – one that I would finally be free of now that I understood what fate had in mind.

“You still have light in you. Despite the life you were given, despite the life YOU believe they destroyed – you still live like NONE of it ever happened. You’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes and I was left alive because I’m supposed to destroy you, Eleni. I’ve been left behind to finally rid the world of the ONE FUCKING PERSON that keeps those bastards alive!”

Chapter Thirty-Five

~ Eleni ~

My pulse raced as his words splintered through my soul. Every secret he spilled was like a knife to the light left within me; the light he was clearly jealous of, the light he just destroyed. No matter what I thought or tried with Gabriel at that point, two things were clear: One, he was no longer sane. It didn’t take someone with my kind of background to figure that out. Two? There was no hope for my survival. I couldn’t persuade him with anything, including sex.

All in all? I was fucked.

I tried to wrap my mind around what my shit-bag parents did. I knew they were lowlife pieces of shit, but this was an all-new low; something I would’ve never pegged them doing. I was pissed off that my grandmother never told me the real truth. And after the years of their abuse, I didn’t have the desire to research their demise on my own. I just didn’t fucking care. Who would?

Guilt washed over me as I watched Gabriel pace back and forth across the small office. Papers were thrown haphazardly all over the room, causing chaos in every corner. It reminded me of how he must have felt internally. Scared, lost, pissed off at the world for how he was forced to be raised; all while I reveled in the fact that I was free from their abuse. Would I have lived so happily knowing Gabriel was out there somewhere, drowning in the pain he was forced to live with because of MY parents?

I wished I could save him. Turn back the clock and deal with their abuse over what my parents did to him and his family. I took joy in the loss of my parents - while his loss ruined his life.

“Gabriel? May I speak?” I quietly ask, praying he isn’t going to kill me right there, right then. Hoping I could get the words out, words he could replay in his head for as long he continued to live on this Earth; listening to the genuine remorse. Not that it would help.

“What Eleni?” his tone was short and clipped. He was annoyed and I knew it wouldn’t be hard for me to push him to the point where he snapped once again. But this time, I wasn’t scared. I knew what was coming, and I finally knew why. I didn’t blame him, I just wished that I could help him.

“I’m sorry for what they did. I know my apology isn’t going to matter, but I need you to know how much I regret the way I lived my life. Enjoying their loss, being happy they would never return to me when you were forced to live in the agony you experienced.” I took a deep breath and stood up straight, only mere feet from him as he continued to pace across the room. He never looked up to face me while I spoke.

“I am selfish, you’re right about that. Had I known you existed, had I known the truth about what happened, I would have been there with you every step of the way. Helping you through life. Things would have been different, Gabriel. I would have been there for you just like I am right now. Lean on me - be with me. Let me help you. Let me show you how sorry I am for what has happened to you.”

It wasn’t my fault. I tried to tell myself that. But the two very people that got drunk enough to create me, single-handedly ruined his entire life. I was all that was left of them, all that he could place blame on; and I can bet you, if I was in the same situation as him, I would place the blame on me too.

I stepped in his direction and simply watched him. I spoke no words and took in the sight before me. His sanity had slipped away. He was a desperate man; desperate for the voices to stop, for the pain to be gone, for the memories to stop haunting him once and for all. We were haunted by the same two people – the same loss caused by their addiction and mine. This was where we became the same person because I’d been there before, all at the hands of the people who did this to him. His gaze fell on me as I stood there naked as the day I was born.

His beautifully broken green eyes made their way from my bare pussy to the tears still slipping down my cheeks. I put my hand out and for once he didn’t move. I took a step closer to him and pressed my palm against his chest; once again committing the cardinal sin of touching him, but this time, I wanted to comfort him - like a mother would comfort her child.

“It’s okay, Gabriel. Everything will be okay. I’m so sorry.” As the last words slipped from my mouth, his hands slammed against my chest, pushing me across the room until my body collided with the hard office wall. The room went dark and that was the last thing I remembered.

* * *

I hated waking up in this cage. I missed the beautiful bedroom Gabriel allowed me when he first took me. I thought back to how much I absolutely fucking hated him in those days; how much I wanted him to die. But now, I just couldn’t bring myself to muster that deep hatred I had for him then. It was gone, like the time that I’d been here with him had stolen it away from me.