Deep (Pagano Family #4)(84)
Still staring out the window, though now there was nothing much to see but their own reflections on the darkened glass, Bev told Nick a story.
“When I left home, I got a job at a big yoga and meditation studio in Boston. I was just a receptionist at first, part-time, and I made extra money coming back in and cleaning the place in the evenings. I was renting a room from a couple of grad students, so I was living cheap, and it was enough. Anyway, I got free classes. I’d never done yoga or meditation or any of that, but I was fat and trying not to be, just trying to lose everything I could about my life with my mom. Yoga is an eastern discipline, so there’s a lot of eastern spiritualism. Hinduism, mainly. But not solely.
“Anyway, one of the instructors was a sort of equal-opportunity spirit. Whatever felt good and right to him, he went with. He started every class, just before the warm-up, with a prayer. He said it came from the Lakota Indians. The first time I heard it, it spoke to me. More than any of the other things I’d learned about centering and meditation, that hit me right in my heart. Since then, I always start every meditation with that prayer.”
“Tell me.”
Nick had directed, not asked, in as few words as possible, which was very much like him. It made Bev smile. Meditation was a private, solitary thing, and if he’d asked in any other context, she would likely have refused. But she was telling him this story for a reason, even if she wasn’t yet sure what the reason was.
She closed her eyes and recited, “Teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit. Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my sacred space and love beyond my fear and thus walk in balance with the passing of each glorious sun.”
When she opened her eyes again, Nick’s expression was stunned. That surprised her, and it worried her a little, too. She didn’t understand why that prayer would have hit him so hard. “What did I say?”
He shifted, moving his hands to cup her face. “I think often about what it is about you that’s so powerful—why it is I love you the way I do, and why you so easily turned what I wanted in my life inside out. And that prayer is it. It describes you perfectly. I’ve never known anyone else who was so instinctive and in tune with themselves. You lost that because you love me. But I felt it in you today, in the shower. You’re getting it back, bella. You’re stronger than all of this.”
“Maybe. I’m so tired of being scared and sad. Numb hurts. That sounds stupid—”
“It doesn’t.” He gave her a tight smile, almost a grimace. “Making somebody numb can be a powerful way to cause pain. It’s counterintuitive but true.”
Nick had still never told her, straight out, what his job was—except for being the chief of operations at the shipping company. He’d just let her come to know that he killed and tortured people. No big revelation, no gnashing of teeth, no shock. It was something she simply knew about him, organically. Like knowing he had a long scar across the back of his left hip. Like knowing the dark hair he kept short had a lot of curl in it. Like knowing his green eyes turned dark and almost grey when he came. And when he was angry.
And she’d accepted it just as easily. Even with everything that had happened, even knowing that who he was had put her in the position to be hurt, even in her deepest suffering, she’d never been able to sustain a serious question about her commitment to him. She loved him. He wasn’t a ‘bad boy.’ He wasn’t a bad man. He was a good man who did dark things.
That didn’t even feel like a rationalization. It felt like the truth.
“I want myself back.”
“Then trust yourself. Find your sun.” He pulled her close, and she snuggled against his the hard muscle of his bare chest. It wasn’t so easy a matter as simply making a decision.
Or was it? Wasn’t that the whole point of that prayer, and of the feathers on her wrist? To remind her that how she saw her life, what she felt, what was important, that these things were her choice?
oOo
Two weeks later, Bev pulled her Prius into the parking lot of Pagano Brothers Shipping. Nick had obviously been waiting for her; he opened the building’s front door and was crossing the lot to her before she’d turned off the car.
He opened her door and gave her his hand, helping her out of the car. “What is it, bella? I’m worried.”
She’d called him and asked to see him right away. Still dazed, her mind a muddle, she wasn’t sure how to explain. “He…he…”
“Who? Beverly, what is it?” His hand was clamped hard around hers.
She swallowed and forced her brain to make a complete sentence and send it to her mouth. “He left me everything.”
Nick frowned. “What? Who? Mills?”
Hearing his last name like that sounded odd. “Chris, yes. He left me everything. His life insurance was in my name. The bookshop. Everything. He left it all to me.”
Still holding her hand, her car door still open, Nick stared at her. Then he blinked and closed her door. “Okay. Come in. We’ll sit. You’ll tell me everything.”
She’d never been to the warehouse before. Frankly, she was unimpressed. The front office and reception area was modern and tidy, absolutely normal for a successful but not massive business of its sort. Bev had plenty of office work on her résumé, and it looked perfectly familiar to her. Then Nick led her past a closed set of wide, walnut doors and down a hallway and through another set of double doors.