Sweeter Than Sin (20 page)

Furious with herself and with him, she shoved her hands between them and her body shrieked out in rage as she managed to put a few inches between them. “Jackass,” she snarled, trying to twist away.

She never managed it.

He caught both her hands in his and pinned them her back. That brought his pelvis in line with hers and she had to swallow a moan.
Oh. Oh my.
She bit her inner cheek to keep from groaning and it was sheer will that kept her from moving against him. For that moment, at least. Because in the next moment the hunger withered away and died as shock grabbed her.

“The phone call,” he said again, his voice throbbing, full of anger. “That call from you the night you disappeared.”

Then he shoved his face into hers while she gaped at him. “
Two
phone calls, actually. The one where you first started to ask for help, then you hung up. A minute later you called again and told me to forget you’d called. When you told me to
lie
for you. Ringing any bells yet or has it been too long?”

She stared at him, feeling the strength drain out of her legs.

PHONE CALL—

She’d called him…?

Swallowing, she shook her head. “Adam…”

“You made me
lie
for you, damn it,” he snarled. “You have any idea how hard it was to look at your father and tell him that I hadn’t talked to you? How much he suffered? Everything he went through? And you still won’t tell me
shit
.”

“Adam—”

“I want to know what in the fuck happened that night!”

“I don’t remember!”

The words tore out of her, an almost-panicked scream, and she twisted violently against him, desperate to get away, and this time she managed it. Her lungs screamed for oxygen. The simple act of opening her mouth to drag air in was almost impossible. Stumbling away, she collapsed against the counter and slammed her hands flat against it. Head bent, she forced in one breath. Her throat felt like it was lined with razor blades, and that one act of breathing in was excruciating. She held the oxygen in for a few seconds, then blew it out, did it again.

None of the panic clawing inside her receded, but she did manage to think it through.

She’d called him.

Sometime that night, a night she’d never remember, she’d reached out … not to Noah. Not to her father.

But to Adam.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she whispered soundlessly,
I’m so sorry.
No wonder he was so angry with her. No wonder he watched her with mistrust and apathy.

Licking her lips, she forced herself to turn and stare at him. Her palms were slick with that cold, nasty sweat, the kind that came from shame, fear and humiliation. She felt all three now, crowding up her throat until she thought she might be sick.

His eyes cut into her, his face hard as stone. She had to give him something. Twenty years he’d lived with this and it had torn into him. She didn’t even understand how deeply, she suspected.

“I don’t remember,” she said again, keeping her voice level, although her voice was raw, her throat aching.

Adam was quiet.

Her heart thudded in dull, heavy beats against her chest, making breathing almost impossible. “You already know about Cronus,” she said.

She hadn’t—couldn’t—really share what she knew. It had been David’s secret. His horror. His fear. He hadn’t even known who all was involved. None of the other boys had wanted to speak, not after a very public example was made of David. He’d tried to get help. For himself. For the others.

He went to the police.

When Cronus was done with him, that night he had been nothing but a bloody pile of bruised and battered bones. It had taken four days just to get out of bed and it was more than two weeks before he could return to school.

The official reason for his absence was that he had the flu.

The beating had been recorded and he’d been unmasked, forced to watch as they caught his humiliation, his beating, his rape, on video, one that he was told would be shared with the other
initiates
.

So no other child makes your mistake, son. It grieves me to do this.
That was what David had been told by his father.

She closed her eyes, thinking about the scared, panicked words he’d whispered to her the night he’d finally agreed he had to leave, just a month after that brutal beating.

Leave, because going to the cops, trying to get help, just wasn’t an option. He’d tried that, already, and he’d suffered for it.

One of the club members was a cop.

Another had been a doctor.

And David’s daddy had been a preacher.

Yeah, the town had a cancer inside it and they were blind to the sickness.

The sickness had survived for more than twenty years. She swiped her damp hands down her jeans and took a deep breath, remembered the look in David’s eyes that night. Blank, unwilling to even hope.

“I … I
can’t
tell you all of this. It’s not my place to tell you. But it was about…” Her voice trailed off.

“David.” He bit the word off. “I’m not an idiot, okay? I can put two and two together. You don’t have to tell me the details, but I know it was about him. Was he finally going to run away?”

His voice was raw, ragged.

Swearing, she covered her face with her hands. “Fuck.
Yes.
”

Gentle hands closed over her wrists and guided them down.

Although the last thing she wanted was to look into those angry, dark eyes, she found herself unable to stop it. The anger, though, was gone. He just looked … empty. Drained.

He looked the way she felt.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice flat.

“We had it all planned out. He was going to run away. He had…” She paused, wondering how close she could come to the line without violating David’s trust. “We wanted to stop it. But he had to get out of town. Then … everything went wrong.”

It all got blurry after she’d pushed the backpack into David’s hands. She did remember seeing Diane, but the order of events was jumbled, hazed.

She
knew
what happened, technically.

She’d been told.

Diane was dead.

Her blood stained Lana’s clothes, her hands.

Lana had killed her.

“Just
what
went wrong?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, feeling impotent, useless. All those big plans. The determination to see it ended. “I gave him the backpack. He … well, David had proof. That was how he was going to stop it. I remember that. And then … there was a sound. I have flashes of blood.” She tugged her hand from Adam’s, touched the old, faded scar on her side. “I woke up and I had this, plus a knot on the back of my head. And…”

She stopped, uncertain where to go from there.

*   *   *

Guilt was an old friend of his, but just then it was taking a bigger chunk out of his ass than Adam was used to. Brushing her hair back from her pale face, Adam cupped her chin. “You don’t remember.”

“No.”

She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her. As he searched her grey eyes, that guilt twisted inside him, tighter and tighter.

All this time, he’d waited for her to reach out, to somehow let him know.

But she didn’t even remember.

Head injury, shock, fear. He didn’t know. And all the anger he’d been struggling with, it was useless. Misplaced, maybe. He should be pissed at the people responsible—Diane, who was probably dead, the evil fuckers of Cronus—and he was ready to kill all of them anyway, but now he had another reason.

Dragging his thumb down the smooth surface of her skin, he sighed, the sound ragged and broken in the silence of the room. “You sounded scared,” he said, still watching her. “When you called. You were terrified. I hadn’t ever heard you sound like that. I was about ready to call the cops, your dad. Then, barely a minute later, you called me back. Told me to forget you’d called, told me to lie if anybody asked about you. And you don’t even remember.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway. “No.” Under the thin material of her red shirt, her shoulders slumped. “No. I’d hit my head pretty hard—probably should have been in a hospital, but…” She shrugged. Her pulse beat a wild tattoo at the base of her neck. “I had a concussion—I’ve had them since, and once you have them you can’t mistake that feeling. The headaches were awful, and I lost a lot of that night. Memories that won’t come back, nausea. It was a couple of days before I could think clearly. By that time, I had to…” she stopped and blew out a sigh. “Had to leave.”

“Had to leave,” he said slowly.

Lana winced, nodded. “I was in the area for a few days, and then…” She closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her neck while a headache pounded. Those headaches always came back when she tried to think about that night, tried to pull it more clearly into focus. “I’d been … hell. Hiding. I couldn’t hide forever, not here, and everybody was saying the worst, right? So I had to bail.”

Lies … why are you lying to him?

She wasn’t lying, exactly. She just wasn’t sure what to tell him yet. Until she knew what she was doing, what she
could
do, it was best that she not drag anybody else into this mess. And she couldn’t tell him who all had been involved. Yeah, he knew about David, but she couldn’t complicate it any more than it already was.

“You had to bail,” Adam said, echoing her words yet again.

She grimaced, knowing how awful that sounded. “You think I don’t regret what happened?” she murmured, turning to look at him. “You don’t think I don’t look back at those days, at that night and wonder if there was a better way I could have handled it? I was a stupid, idiot kid. My dad always told me I could change the world … I … just wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help.”

“I’m not pissed about the fact that you were always out trying to change the world. I’m not pissed about the fact that you were always out there biting biting off more than you could chew … and I’m sure as hell not pissed off that you tried to help a kid in trouble,” Adam said, his voice stark and cold. “I’m pissed about the fact that you called me, asked me to lie … and then left me to worry and wonder for twenty years.”

She swallowed the knot in her throat. “I don’t remember calling you. I…”

She’d called him. Reached out to him. Oddly, now that she thought about it, it didn’t surprise her, not really. What bothered her was the fact that she had done something that had left him wondering, full of unanswered questions, for twenty years. She knew what that was like. The pounding in the back of her head increased and she thought she might be sick. Aware of the weight of his gaze, she looked up, met his eyes. “I don’t remember, Adam. If I’d known you were…” She stopped and blew out a breath. She knew what it was like to lie awake at night, wondering. She’d done it to herself. She’d done it to Noah, to her father. And apparently to Adam. “I’m sorry. I can’t undo it. I can’t take it back. I’m sorry.”

For a long moment, he said nothing. He didn’t move, didn’t even blink, as he studied her face. When he did move, it was to turn away. He stared out the window, his shoulders a rigid line.

“Why did you even
go
there?” he demanded.

“Because that’s where it all started,” she murmured. “That’s where they tormented him, where he thinks they hurt the others. It was his idea—he needed to see it, one more time. Face it, I guess. We talked about burning it down, you know. A nice, fitting statement. But we wanted to make sure he had a chance to get away before anybody realized what was up—that was what mattered. He had to get out, find a way to get people to listen, so he could make it stop.”

She laughed bitterly, the sound a hollow echo in the brightly lit kitchen. Too dark and too grim for the hot summer morning. “But it didn’t.… It was all for nothing,” she said softly. “We didn’t realize it, but it was only getting started. I killed her, you know.”

Adam tensed as she turned her head to look at him.

“I killed Diane Sutter.”

He just waited, uncertain what to say, what to do.

“I don’t know how, or why.… I don’t know what happened. But when I left that house, Diane was dead and I had her blood all over me. I had two choices. I could either stay … and
try
to fight, try to convince people that I didn’t
just
kill her … and nobody was going to believe Diane would ever do anything wrong. Or I could run, and give David a chance to get away, find a chance to start over. Because if I went down, everybody would believe he was involved, too.”

A bitter smirk twisted her lips. “She made sure of that. People in town
still
talk about it. Even now.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gary Quimby was not a nervous man by nature.

He had no sons, much to his displeasure. He’d looked forward to the time when he could pass that tradition on in the club, but Sandy had never been able to conceive and a few years ago he’d had to bury his sweet wife.

Gary Quimby was a private man. His visits to the club were discreet. He preferred to watch, and when he did participate he tended to be a shadow initiator, wearing a hood and mask, teaching the boys to submit to authority and letting them know how it would be when it was
their
turn to be in charge.

Gary Quimby was a
cautious
man. He understood that many would twist the beauty of the club, find something wrong with it, and he wanted to protect his … interests.

His need for privacy and caution had served to protect him, and many of the newer members hadn’t even known he was involved. It had been nearly ten years since he’d attended one of the meetings, and he didn’t even miss them. It had been going downhill ever since Pete’s death, but when Abel Blue had that heart attack and died so suddenly, that was when the situation had really began to deteriorate fast.

Jeb and Glenn had tried to do too many different things, change too many things. The videos, the webcams, all the photos. None of that was needed and all of it was risky.