Echo(99)

So I cry for fear as well.

Because I’m scared.

I’m so scared.

It’s always been there though—the unease, the worriment. It’s lain dormant inside of me since I was five years old, coming to life every now and then, but Pike taught me how to quickly silence it in order to survive. The dormancy is gone now. It’s a live wire of unfiltered anguish that pours out of me and into the arms of my prince on earth while my other prince exists only in the nirvana I’ve yet to become a part of.

Warm breath feathers over my ear with a tender, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s me,” I blurt out through the unwavering tears, lifting my head to look into his eyes that own responsibility for things he was never responsible for. “I’m the cause of everything, not you. It was all me.”

“You were just a kid. You didn’t deserve what happened to you.”

With his words, I reach out to his chest and run my fingers along the two bullet wounds that mark my deceit and give him my words, “And you didn’t deserve this.”

His hand covers mine, pressing my palm against his scars, saying, “I did. Because without it, I would’ve never found the truth in you.”

“But my truth is so ugly.”

“Like I said before, the truest part of a person is always the ugliest. But I’m ugly too, so you’re not alone.”

As the water cascades over us, I feel weighted down in guilt for what I’ve put this man through. Because none of it mattered when all I truly cared about was simply him.

“Tell me how to make you forgive me. I know I’m not worthy of your forgiveness, but I want it.”

“I wish I knew, but I don’t,” he tells me. “We’re broken people, Elizabeth. You can’t expect me to not have my issues, because I have thousands of them. But just because I hold a hate for you doesn’t take away from the love I have for you.”

His words might not make sense to most people, but for me they do. I just have to choose whether or not to risk handing myself over to him.

“Come here,” he says as he stands to help me up.

I take a seat on the built-in slate bench, and allow him to wash me as I sit here, drained to depletion. Closing my eyes, I relax into his touch while he washes my hair and cleans my body. But it’s when he opens my legs and curses under his breath that I open my eyes and tense up.

“What?” I ask, looking down at him as he stares in horror between my thighs.

Shifting his eyes up to mine, his jaw grinds before demanding, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

I look down to see the nasty collection of bruises.

“He raped you?”

I nod.

“What else?”

His hands remain on my thighs, spreading me open, when I admit, “He used his gun.”

“What do you mean he used his gun?” he seethes through his teeth.

“To f*ck me with. He used his loaded gun and then forced it in my mouth to suck.”

His fingers sink into my skin as he drops his head, and I can see the muscles in his shoulders and back flex in anger as he tightens his grip on me. His words strain when he goes on to ask, “And all the blood on your mouth?”

“He was raping me with his gun in my mouth, but I managed to get away and I bit him.”

“His dick?”

“Yes,” I whimper, and when he looks up at me, I reveal, “I wanted to die. I begged him to shoot me.”

“Don’t you dare think about leaving me,” he scolds.

“He told me you didn’t care what happened to me, that you weren’t coming.”

“I did come for you,” he affirms. “All I could think about was finding you. I was going crazy not knowing how to get to you.”

Grabbing a washcloth, he runs it between my legs and begins to gently clean me. Once he has me washed, he keeps me naked as he helps me up into his bed. Nestled in his sheets with his scent all around me, I want to smile, but I can’t. Regret consumes, hating the darkness I’ve brought to us, wishing I could erase it and go back in time to do it all over again.

“I need you to know something,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms. “I’m not the same as I was.”

But I already know that. It’s evident in his eyes. From the moment he stepped out of his SUV and I knew he was alive, I saw the corruption inside of him.

“I keep trying to process what I did to Bennett, find reason for allowing myself to lose control, but I can’t.”