Bound by Rapture (21 page)

The next few hours ran together. I moved his body. I put him in a wheelbarrow and dug a hole in the pasture behind my mother’s home. I buried him in a shallow grave, and I spit on it before I walked away. 

When I got back to the house, Mom was there. I was surprised. She wasn’t supposed to be home yet, not until tomorrow. 

“What did you do, Cole?” She looked at me with wide eyes and I blinked at her, wondering what she’d seen. Wondering if she could see the truth of what happened, if she could feel it like I did, the weight of his blood and sins pressing down on my skin. 

“He did this.” My voice didn’t sound like my own, but someone else’s. 

“Who, Cole?” She dropped her purse on the ground and looked around frantically. And that’s when I saw it. The blood trail. It was all over her pretty stone floor. 

“Where’s Garrett?” She turned away. “Garrett!” she screeched and started following the trail. “Sandy!”

Something in me told me to stop her, but I didn’t. Instead I rubbed my hands back and forth on the top of my damp pants and followed her. 

When she got into the living room, I watched her face instead of staring at the scene before us. I knew what it looked like. I had made it. It was just blood now. Lots of red-brown blood drying on her expensive furniture and floors. 

“No.” The word emerged like a plea. “Where is he, Cole? Tell me where he is!” She stood in front of me demanding answers, though she didn’t touch me at all. Her bleach blond hair was styled up on her head and I could smell her expensive perfume. It twisted with the coppery flavor embedded in my nose.

“He did it,” I said. I couldn’t get the image out of my head. Him fucking her. 

“You killed him, didn’t you?” She ran her shaky hands over her face. 

“He did this,” I said again, staring down in her eyes. Eyes so much like my own. 

“
You
did this! You did. You!” Her hands trembled as she looked at me. The horror on her face was something that would be imprinted on my brain forever. She looked at me, at my blood-covered clothing, at the horror scene before us. “How could you? How could
you
?” Her words boomed around us, seeming to melt into the expensive stone walls. The home I had built for her. Her stare was frantic, wide, looking everywhere and at me all at once. “Where is Garrett, Cole?” 

Why is she home?
She should have been gone until tomorrow, until I had the chance to clean everything up, get Sandy on a plane to some place that could help her emotionally.

“Where is he, Cole?” I wasn’t going to answer, because she knew. I know she did. Why she asked, I don’t know. I don’t know why she bothered to pretend we weren’t both standing here in this house of horror.

“You didn’t. You wouldn’t have.” 

She’d always loved him more. Even when she left us all to starve. It was him she held when she came home. It was him she said she was sorry to. It was always him. For both her and Sandy. What it was about Garrett that made them love him more than me, I never figured out. Even after I made my money and gave them all a better life, I was still last on the totem pole. 

But the blood on my hands changed that. 

“Where’s Sandy?” 

“I don’t know.”

“Did you catch them? Is that why?” Her voice trembled as she turned away and started heading up the stairs.

“
Catch
them?” But she didn’t answer. And I followed after her. “What do you mean, Mom?”

I didn’t get my answer because she screamed. It was one of those sounds that rips from the innermost part of a person, from the very core of them. It’s the scream a person gives when their life has been ripped apart. I knew it well; Sandy had screamed and pleaded in my ear for what had seemed like hours. But it wasn’t Sandy’s screams anymore. It was my mother’s. Sandy would never scream again. Her body dangled before us from the exposed ceiling rafter. An orange extension cord was wrapped around her neck, a chair turned over beneath her. 

Her skin was purple and white, patchy and foreign-looking. Her eyes were open and vacant. And she was gone. I watched my mother run to her, collapse at her feet. But I didn’t move. I just stood there and stared into those vacant eyes. Eyes that had looked up at me with innocence as a child. Eyes that had pleaded for Garrett’s life. I was sucked into the blackness of them. Into the emptiness. Sucked in until that black was all around me, suffocating me. Until I was gone.

EIGHTEEN

Julia.

I stared at Cole in disbelief. It was the look I had been giving him all night since he’d told me the truth on the Ferris Wheel. We’d rode it five times, me giving the guy more tickets each time so we didn’t have to get off. I didn’t know what I had expected from the story. I thought it would be different. That he would be removed from it all. That the story would be like tabloids and newspapers made it sound—detached. But it wasn’t. 

He’d finished his story and then all but ignored me. I had seen the tears, yellow carnival light reflected in his shiny orbs. They made my heart ache for him. They ripped me apart from the inside out. I had known he was broken by his past, but I had no idea how much. No clue how much the people in his life had hurt him until he lashed out and hurt them back. Hurt them until they were dead.  

He sat across from me on a leather couch in his penthouse. He clasped the black bottle of obsidian whiskey in his hand and stared blankly at the TV hanging over the mantle. A hockey game was on, but I couldn’t tell who was playing. My gaze never strayed from Cole, not for more than a second. 

“Cole—”

“Don’t.” He didn’t look at me, but his tone was final. 

It was the same reaction he’d given me since he’d finished his story. He’d spoken every word with such heart-wrenching sorrow that it made me flinch to hear him act so cold. We’d left the carnival after the Ferris Wheel ride, and he hadn’t so much as looked at me since. 

“It’s okay.” I moved to sit next to him. 

He snorted and took a swig of his whiskey. “Is that what you’re telling yourself? That it’s okay that I murdered my own brother, that I forced my sister to commit suicide?”

“You didn’t force her to do anything.” I reached out and touched his arm, brushing my fingers over the image of Sandy’s sad face staring back at me with dark-inked lines. “She made that choice.”

“Yeah, well, she wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t killed him.”

“You didn’t know she would do that.”

“Nope. And there’s no changing it.”

“This is why you got these.” I touched my fingers to the Old English lettering of the word
them
on his knuckles. 

“In prison. Yeah. Just before I got out.” He let out a deep breath. “I love them. Both of them. My mom too. I loved them until I hated them and it broke me. I have to remind myself of that. That I still love them, her. Even though she killed herself. I want to hate her so much. But I don’t. I
can’t
. It wasn’t her fault.”

I mashed my lips together and studied his profile. His dark hair was disheveled from running his fingers through it over and over. He had the scruff of a three-day beard shadowing his cheeks. He was beautiful. It was ridiculous to call a man beautiful, but there was no denying it. He was perfect. The sleeves of his dress shirt were unbuttoned, haphazardly pushed up to his elbows. The top few buttons at the collar undone as well. 

“Would you change it?”

He looked at me now for the first time since the Ferris Wheel ride. His dark blue eyes seem to swirl with an inner storm so tortured and ravaged that it seemed never-ending. “No.”

“Really?” I was breathless, shocked. 

His eyes searched mine. “I wouldn’t change it because he would still be alive. That piece of shit who fucked my sister when she was just a little girl.” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “I would kill him over and over again for that.” He squeezed the liquor bottle in his hand. “Over and over and over.” His voice was hoarse, his eyes distant, lost somewhere in a past that would haunt him forever.

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pulled him into me, pressing his head against my chest. He let me with no resistance. “I love you,” I whispered into his hair. “I love you so much, Cole. Your past is your past.” Something inside me told me I was crazy, but that something was small and insignificant; I ignored it. I loved him. There were no if ands or buts about it. I didn’t care that he had killed his brother, or that he had stalked me. I loved him, every broken piece of him. I didn’t know how long he would love me back; maybe I was just the flavor of the month, but I didn’t care. Not right now. I was with him and that was all that mattered—the here and now.

After several minutes, he looked up at me, his eyes glassy and red-rimmed. 

What if he doesn’t know how much I really do love him?
He’d spent his entire life being hurt repeatedly by the people who were supposed to love him. And suddenly I needed to show him my love. I needed to give him all of myself. 

I leaned in and pressed my lips against his and he kissed me back, his firm mouth melding to mine, like we were made for each other. 

“God, I love you,” he moaned against my lips. 

His words made an involuntary sound gush from my mouth and into his. I tangled my hands in his hair and kissed him with everything I had. With every ounce of love I had in my heart. I wanted to consume every part of him with my love. I wanted to drown him in it until he was so deep he would never question true love again, because it would surround him in everything he did.

I wanted him to feel it the way I did. Something crashed into my mind. I recalled my body pressed against Cole’s under the warm spray of the shower, his arms around me, his words consuming me. 

“I was right, you know, when I told you that I ripped women apart.”
 

But then it blurred out of focus and I remembered laying on the bed staring up at the ceiling with Cole next to me, whispering in my ear. Telling me about all the things he felt when he first saw me. Telling me how he was lost then, from the beginning; he belonged to me. And then he was singing to me, some song I didn’t know. He sang quietly and then loudly. He was all over me, in my head, even though I didn’t know. He was everywhere. His love was everywhere. Swallowing me up, comforting me while I was lost somewhere in my mind.

I pushed him back on the couch and got on top of him, devouring him with my lips. Kissing his mouth, his face, his neck. “You took care of me,” I said between kisses. “You loved me. You stayed with me.” Something hot pressed at the backs of my eyes. I kissed him harder, faster, needing him to know. My hands were all over him, pulling at his shirt, tugging at his pants until I had him naked before me. His big body was spread across the couch, utter perfection of sculpted muscles and tattoos bulging from tanned skin. 

And this beautiful man loved me. He was mine.
Mine!
My heart cried out as I fell to my knees before him and wrapped my lips around the hard cock between his legs. 

“Julia,” he groaned as I sucked him to the back of my throat. It only spurned me to take him deeper, until I was gagging around his thickness. He tried to pull back but I wouldn’t let him. I followed him down, desperate to take every inch of him, to show him I would, that I could do anything for him. 

He fisted his hands in my hair. “You have to stop, Julia. I want to—I need—”

“Do it.” I leaned back and looked at him. “Fuck my face, baby. Do it.” I met him with challenging eyes. He’d wanted it that day in my bedroom, but he’d held back because he was afraid of hurting me. 

His hands shook in my hair. “I can’t.”

“You will.”

He closed his eyes and I saw a tick in his jaw. “I wanted to show you there was more to my feelings for you than just this. Sex.” 

I smiled up at him, my hand wrapped firmly around the base of his dick. “I know you love me.” I licked my lips. “And now I want you to force your cock down my throat. I want you to make me take it.”

His jaw went slack. “Are—” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Are you sure? Even after…” 

I blinked at him in confusion. He really thought I wouldn’t want him after this, after hearing the truth about what happened?

“I want you more than I did before. I don’t care what you did, so long as you never stop loving me.”

Something soft twisted across his irises before he clenched his jaw shut. I didn’t wait for another cue. I sucked him back into my throat, loving every single thick inch of him as I explored him with my tongue. I swallowed him whole, gagging over and over on his long length, until he was moaning and bucking beneath me wildly. His hands in my hair, forcing me to take all of him over and over until he cried out my name and pumped his cum into my throat, making me swallow every drop. 

And when it was over, I looked up at him. I stared into the eyes of the man who loved me, and I hoped he could see my love reflecting back.