Sins of the Father (16 page)

Her eyes slid shut with the first brush of her lips.

Holy hell
. She tasted like sunshine and honeysuckles and all that other light and goodness crap I’d never once experienced in my entire godforsaken life. She felt like warmth and softness. And she smelled like fucking coconuts.

My tongue sought more, tracing the seam of her lips and when she opened them to let me in all my senses went haywire, frying my brain cells one after the next. This girl, this little Sparrow, she completely obliterated me.

My knees sagged, bringing me closer as I continued to devour her. My arms tightened, crushing her to my chest. I was desperate to inhale her, to imprint her on my skin and make her a permanent part of myself. I’d craved her like a drug right from the very beginning and now I was a junkie getting his first hit after far too long. Every cell in my body was strung out on her. I needed to take her and make her mine in every way. I needed to—

A tiny whimper slipped from her mouth into mine and my thoughts snapped back like a rubber band, slapping sense into me.

Oh, shit
. I’d have done anything for her. Anything she asked. Anything at all. Except
that
.

“Wait. Stop.” I pulled away, planting my hands on her shoulders when she tried to follow.

Her sweet mouth formed a perfect little O. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t.” I wanted to.
Dammit all to hell
. I wanted to more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life. And that was the problem. Retreating to the opposite side of the bed, I struggled to put more space between us before I did something we’d both regret. “I can’t do this to you.”

“Do what?” Her words were sharp, striking like a whip against my suddenly cold flesh.

“
This
. I can’t . . . I won’t . . .” There were a lot of things I found difficult to live with, but this? No. “I won’t
rape you
.”

Chapter 16

~Ophelia~

Was he kidding me with this bullshit? I finally let go of my fear, stopped worrying about what everyone else would think, and just went after what I wanted . . . and he pulls this crap? “It isn’t rape if I want it, Sawyer. I think I know the difference.”

“That’s just it.” His eyes flared and even in the dim light, I could see the emerald fire in them.  “You
think
you know the difference . . . but what if you’re wrong? What if you wake up tomorrow, or next week, or ten years from now, and realize this isn’t what you wanted? That it’s just some Stockholm bullshit? Or PTSD? That you were scared and hurt and willing to do anything to placate the one person you thought could help you?”

“Don’t you dare turn this around.” I wrapped my arms across my chest, humiliated to be baring myself to someone who didn’t want me. “If you don’t want me, you should sure as hell be man enough to—”

“Not want you?
Jesus Christ
, Sparrow, how the hell could I not want
you
? You’re beautiful, and sweet, and sexy as hell . . . I’ve wanted you since I spotted you dancing with your girlfriend at that party. You have no fucking clue how bad I want you. But not now. Not like this. Fi, you’ve just been through a trauma. This entire thing has been traumatic. You’re confused.”

He was wrong. I wasn’t confused. Stupid, yes, but not confused. Not anymore. Of course he didn’t want me. Especially after everything I told him. I was damaged goods. A means to an end. Period. What in god’s name was I even still doing there?

Snagging the shirt he’d left behind on the bed, I shoved my arms into the sleeves. They dangled past my fingertips, but the hem hung low enough to reach mid-thigh. “I’m leaving.”

“What?” Sawyer took a wise step to the side, placing himself between me and the door.

“I’m leaving. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to force me. Tie me up, gag me. I’ll scream, I swear it.” We weren’t in a deserted field anymore. There were other cars in the lot. Someone would hear me. “Anything you want from me, you’re going to have to
take
it. I’m done playing the good little captive.”

Sawyer stepped back. “Don’t do this, Fi.”

“Screw you. I should have done exactly this right from the beginning. I
never
should have trusted you!” The strike hit its mark and Sawyer flinched.

“Fi, you’re hurt. You can’t possibly get past me. Don’t . . .
Please
don’t make me do this.”

“Why should I make it easy for you? What have you done to make any of this easier for me?”

Sawyer straightened and at his full height he made the entire room seem to shrink around us. “I beat the one person who ever gave a damn about me unconscious tonight.
For
you
. You know what I’m capable of. Do not test me.”

He was all bluster. He wouldn’t hurt me. If there was anything I was sure of anymore, it was that. I took a step forward, but he held his ground.

“If you do this . . . If you walk out that door, it’s all over.”

What was over? Didn’t I want this to be over? And what the hell was wrong with the nagging part of me insisting that, ‘no, I don’t’.

“Move, Sawyer.”

“No.” He shifted his feet, planting them shoulder width apart. “I won’t make it easy for you, either. Not this.”

We were at a stalemate. Physically I didn’t stand a chance, but emotionally, I thought we stood on fairly even ground. Then again, he’d turned me down, so maybe not.

“What then?” I threw my hands up in exasperation. “If I don’t leave right now . . .” If I
chose
to stay everything would change. I’d no longer be a victim but a willing participant in . . . what? “What happens then?”

“For tonight?” He stepped toward me and when I didn’t retreat, I knew right then and there that I’d already lost. “We sleep.”

Sawyer turned to pull back the covers for me and a strangled sound pushed from my lips. Stripes of jagged, puckered skin covered nearly every inch of his back, some curling over his shoulders, others disappearing below his waistband. A brutal reminder that I knew almost nothing about this man.

Acid burned at the back of my throat and I swallowed hard.

“
Don’t
.”

Without realizing it, I’d reached out to touch him. Hand hovering in the air between us, my gaze traveled upward over his shoulders to meet his, reflected back to me in the mirror.

“Don’t,” he repeated, more gently this time, but there was still an underlying strain making his voice tight. “Don’t you dare pity me. Don’t forget who the victim is here. It sure as hell isn’t
me
.”

With that, he threw back the blanket and moved aside.

Sleep seemed impossible. Too many thoughts buzzing around my brain. Too many questions. Things were moving fast, racing toward some unseen finish line. I didn’t know where we were headed, but I was onboard until the end, now.

Sawyer flipped a switch and the room descended into darkness. Only the flickering light from the lamp in the parking lot cast an eerie glow through the curtains. The cot had been a tight fit, but when he lay on the opposite side of the queen-sized bed, the space between us felt far too wide. I inched backward—hoping he wouldn’t notice, afraid he might reject me again—until my back pressed against his, and I felt him sigh. It wasn’t until the bedside clock read 1:43 that I realized my hands were free and Sawyer wasn’t holding onto me.

Testing my boundaries, I scooted away from the warmth of his body just to see if he’d react. His breaths remained deep and even. I could get up and go, and he’d never know until morning. Had he forgotten to restrain me? Been too tired? Or had I somehow earned his trust? And why did that make me feel all warm and fuzzy instead of like the world’s biggest fool?

Rolling over, I curled into Sawyer’s back and rested my head on his pillow.

Sunlight waged war on my slumber. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the backs of my eyelids blazed a fiery red. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and threw my arm across my face.

“I got coffee.”

The word alerted my nose and I inhaled the fragrant aroma.

“Coffee?” It was the motivation I needed to drop my arm and risk peeking open my eyes.

Sawyer sat at the small round table, two lidded Styrofoam cups beside him.

“You’re not much of a morning person.” He glanced up from his phone to grin at me.

His observation earned him a half-hearted glare as I struggled to extricate myself from the tangled sheets. Not an easy task when I ached absolutely everywhere. I pried open the tiny spout in the lid and lowered myself carefully into the chair opposite him.

“How are you feeling?”

Like I’d been run over by an eighteen-wheeler.
Twice
. “Fine.”

Sawyer rolled his eyes and returned to scowling as his phone.

“What are you doing?” The hot liquid coated my mouth with creamy, sugary goodness.

“I’ve been trying to reach Frank all morning. He’s not answering.”

Not entirely incomprehensible. “Well, you did kinda kick his ass last night. Maybe he doesn’t feel like talking.”

“Maybe.” Sawyer poked at the screen, lifted the device to his ear and waited a minute before slapping it down on the table. “
Dammit
.”

“What’s wrong?” I didn’t like seeing Sawyer lose control. Especially when he controlled my fate.

“Everything.” Sawyer swore under his breath. “This is all falling apart. We need to put an end to it before it’s too late. Before it can’t be put back together.”

I got the impression that it was
me
he was afraid would fall apart, unable to be put back together. “Put an end to it how?”

“The only way it
can
end, Sparrow.” He studied my face as though he were trying to commit every last line and feature to memory. “But first I have to go back.”

Chapter 17

~Sawyer~

*6 months ago*

“Hey, Frank?” I braced myself against the kitchen island, hesitant to tell him, but knowing he needed to know.

“What?” He sat on the sofa, scribbling furiously on a packet of paper.

“Sylvie’s almost out of her meds.” I shook the bottle of Diazepam that read ‘take 2 every 6-12 hours’. The last two rattled around the bottom.

“I know.” He flipped the page and continued writing.

Of course he knew. Frank knew everything—right down to how many ounces of applesauce she’d managed to keep down for breakfast—when it came to his sister. There just wasn’t a damn thing either of us could do about it. The hospital bills drained our bank accounts dry and we still owed money. I picked up odd jobs here and there whenever I could around town, but neither of us had been to our actual places of employment in over a month. I doubted either of us had real jobs to go back to anymore. We were running low on food, behind on all of Sylvie’s bills, and rent was coming due in a few weeks. After that I had no clue where we were going to end up.

Sylvie couldn’t travel in her condition, and when the medication ran out, that condition would only worsen. My eyes drifted to her door where I heard her coughing again. She wasn’t getting better. Panic flared in my chest. An intense, sharp pain that felt a lot like grief, but it couldn’t be grief because Sylvie wasn’t dead. She wasn’t going to die. Not now. Not when we’d finally gotten her someplace that was supposed to be
safe
. Life could not possibly be that unfair.

I focused my attention back on Frank. “What are you working on?”

“Paperwork sent over by the lawyers at fuckin’ Paragon Gen. There’s enough here to destroy the goddamn rain forest. It’s bullshit. Busywork to keep me off their damn backs.”

He threw down one completed set of stapled pages and grabbed another from the stack at the end of the table.

I dragged a kitchen chair over and took the next packet. Line after line of legal mumbo-jumbo and obscure medical terminology. I could barely translate the line asking for her name. Frank was right, they were trying to bind and gag us with red tape.

“Sawyer!” Frank’s voice bellowed through the apartment, jolting me awake on the couch. “Sawyer, get in here!”

I jumped to my feet and bolted for Sylvie’s room. She was jerking around her bed. All of her muscles strained tight.

“
Sylvie
.” I lurched for the bed where Frank was watching her convulse.

He’d tucked a pillow against the wall to keep her from hitting her head, but there wasn’t much else he could do for her.
We
could do for her. Helplessness tore through me as I watched her eyes roll back in her head. I wanted to grab her, hold her,
fix
her. I fisted my hands in my hair to keep from reaching for her. The doctors all told us that touching someone in the throes of a seizure could only cause them more damage.

“
Shit
.
Fuck
.” Frank paced away from the bed and then came right back. “What do we do? Shit, Sawyer. What do we do?”

Frank handled feeling helpless about as well as I did.

“I don’t know.” My fingers pushed back through my hair and linked around the back of my neck. I couldn’t tear my eyes off her. “I don’t know.” I wasn’t a goddamn doctor. Cuts and bruises I could deal with, but this? This was entirely out of my league. “I don’t know.”

“I’m calling an ambulance.” Frank turned for the door, and suddenly . . . it stopped.

Just as quickly as it began, Sylvie fell still, slumped into the mattress, unconscious but drawing deep even breaths.

“Frank!” My hands flew where they needed to be. I held hers, caressed her cheek, swept the hair from her eyes. She was burning up.

Frank burst back into the room. “Sylvie?” He took her other hand and bent close to her face. “Syl, can you hear me?”

She moaned quietly, but didn’t rouse.

“Maybe we should let her rest.” My thumb swept over her knuckles.

Frank shut his eyes and dropped his head into his hands, scrubbing them furiously over his face. He was worn ragged. Hadn’t slept in days, hadn’t eaten. He’d barely left her side.

“Why don’t you catch some shut eye? I’ll stay with her.”

He looked like he was about to argue, but it fled on a deep sigh. Pressing a kiss to his sister’s pale
cheek, he dragged himself from the room. I heard the springs on the couch squeal in protest and a few minutes later the sounds of his snoring.

“It’s gonna be alright.” I squeezed Sylvie’s hand, hoping she could feel the comfort I wanted to give her. “You hang in there, Syl. You keep fighting. We’re not giving up on you, don’t you give up on us.”

She slept for several more hours. The sun was casting a pinkish-orange glow on the wall before I felt her begin to rouse.

“Sawyer?” Her voice cracked and I reached for the cup of water that was always sitting on her bedside table.

“I’m here, Syl. Have a drink.” I bent the straw and helped her slip it between her lips.

She only managed a little before she started choking. I set the cup aside and helped her sit up a little straighter.

“What happened?” She wiped some of the liquid from her chin. “I know something happened. I can feel it.”

“You had another seizure,” I told her gently.

Sylvie slumped. For a long time she didn’t say anything. She just stared at the comforter covering her legs.

“Sawyer?” Her head came up and I could already tell from the look in her eye that I wasn’t going to like whatever she had to say. “I need you to do me a favor. I need you to make me a promise.”

I wanted to promise her anything in the world. The moon if she’d only get well. But I couldn’t. “What kind of favor?”

“No more hospitals.” Her yellow-tinged eyes bored into mine. “I mean it. No more. I’m not going back. No matter what happens. I know the bills are piling up and—”

“Sylvie, you don’t need to worry about that. Let Frank and me—”

“I do. I worry about it. And I worry about Frank. And I worry about you.” She reached out and closed her hand around mine. “There’s nothing they can do for me at the hospital that we can’t do here. I talked to the doctors, Sawyer. I know what’s going to happen.”

“They have medicine. They can help you manage the pain. Make you comfortable.”

“In a hard bed with machines all around me and nurses poking and prodding at me all night long? No. I’m comfortable
here
, Sawyer. With you and Frank. In my own bed.” Her watery eyes pleaded with me to understand. “The pain isn’t so bad. I can deal with it.”

She could. She was raised to deal with pain. Something Frank and I devoted ourselves to sparing her. We’d failed.

“I’m sorry, Sylvie.” My fingers brushed over the rough patch of skin on her temple. “I’m so sorry this is happening to you. I wish there was more I could do.”

“I know.” Sylvie forced a smile that broke my heart. “You and Frank both. But there isn’t. There isn’t anything anyone can do. Except promise me that whatever time I have left, I won’t have to spend it in a cold, sterile hospital room.”

“Don’t talk like that. Syl, you’re not gonna—”

She pressed her fingers to my lips, silencing me. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” Her
fingers drifted over my jaw and across my cheek. “I love you, Sawyer.”

“I love you, too, Sylvie.” It may not have been romantic, but it was love and it was deep and it was fierce. “I always will.”

“Three goddamn days. They should have gotten the paperwork three goddamn days ago. And nothing.”

I was sitting on the sofa, watching Frank pace a hole in the floor. “What happened when you called them?”

“They put me on hold and then disconnected.
Twice!
” He slammed to a stop and spun to look at me.

In the quiet that followed we could both hear Sylvie wheezing. Her breathing had gotten worse and worse over the past forty-eight hours. Now she was gasping for every breath. It wore her out arguing all morning with Frank about going back to the hospital, but in the end
she’d won. Neither of us could ever deny her anything.

“That’s it.” Frank tagged my phone and stormed over to the file Steven Marsh gave us, lying open on the kitchen table. He started rooting through page after page until he found what he was looking for. “Screw procedure. Screw the fucking legal department. I’m going to the top.”

He hadn’t been able to reach any of the board members, but Frank honestly believed he was going to speak with
Reed Tanzen
, the CEO of Paragon Gen. The look on his face when he said it? I believed him, too.

We both would have lost that bet.

An hour later I left Sylvie’s room after she’d fallen asleep to find Frank zipping up his duffle. “Where are you going?”

“The motherfucker told his secretary to tell me he was out of town on business. I
heard
him tell her to tell me he was out of fucking town. Let him tell me that to my goddamn face.” He threw the duffle over his shoulder and collected his wallet from the end table.

“Hold on.” I stepped into his path to the door. “You can’t just leave. It could take days for you to get an appointment to see him. Sylvie needs you
here
.”

“I’m doing this for Sylvie. Now get out of my way.”

“Frank, don’t—”

A desperate, rattling breath crashed through the apartment. And another. And another. Tiny choking sounds in between.

“Syl!” We raced to her room, colliding in the doorway.

She was straining to breathe, her hands fisted tightly in the sheets at her sides. One moment we were in the door, the next we were at her bedside, each of us taking one of her hands. Her eyes went wide as they rolled from me to Frank.

I squeezed her hand tighter, terrified, paralyzed. I knew what this was. I knew it in my bones. “It’s okay, Sylvie. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.” Tears clogged my voice.

Her eyes slid shut and her chest deflated.

“
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
” Frank hit his knees, pressing her hand to his cheek. “No, Sylvie. No. Don’t go. Please, Syl, please, don’t leave me.”