Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(103)

“I shouldn’t have pressed. I’m sorry—”

“Dispatch called me the night before last.” He immediately stopped speaking when she interrupted him. “Dispatch is how detectives find out about cases and get assigned them. In the homicide division, we have a rotating schedule and whoever is covering a given night gets whatever comes in. You ever heard of that TV show Forty-eight Hours? Every second counts in the beginning, if you want to find out who the killer is, so you have to be quick about getting to the scene, finding witnesses, gathering evidence.”

She took another draw from the mug and didn’t taste a thing. “My partner, Trey, he starts lighting up my phone. He doesn’t want me to go over to Primrose. He tells me to stay away, he’ll handle it. I refuse to listen to him, and that was my first mistake. See, when dispatch rings, they’ll let you know basic details. Number of victims, status of victims, location, any preliminary suspects who may have been apprehended. There were four victims at the house. A man, a woman, and two teenagers. So I knew…”

As her voice trailed off, she had to clear her throat. “I knew why Trey was calling me and why he was probably right. That I shouldn’t go to that scene. That I wasn’t going to be an asset.”

A slideshow of images flickered through her mind’s eye, and with them came a hopelessness that fit her like a hand-tailored suit of clothes, covering the contours of her body as a second skin.

“I threw up in their bathroom. After I went upstairs to the girl’s bedroom. It was pink. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend raped her before she shot him. He’d murdered both her parents before he went upstairs to get her. She shot herself after she put two bullets in his chest, while she was on with nine-one-one.” Erika felt her brows lift. “Their bathroom was blue, now that I think about it.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“If the parallel is not obvious to you, the same thing happened to me. Except I survived.” As her heart rate sped up, she felt as though she were living through the actual events, for some reason. And she let her mouth go. “I’d forgotten it was my mother’s birthday and I was late for dinner. I stopped at a CVS and grabbed the first card that had the word ‘mother’ on it. I didn’t even bother to look at the message inside.” She shook her head. “That’s among the things that hurt the worst, by the way. Her last card, which she never read—and I didn’t even give a shit when I picked it out.”

Horrible, too-clear images assaulted her. “I parked outside the garage and walked to the front door. It was open, which was weird. As soon as I stepped inside, I smelled the blood. I ran back to the kitchen—and I slipped in the pool that was under my father.” She frowned. “I’m pretty sure I started screaming then.”

It was a while before she could continue. “Just as I was going to go for the phone, he dragged my mother in from the garage. I think… I think she’d been trying to run out. He had a knife to her throat.”

“Who was he,” Balthazar asked tightly.

“My boyfriend. Ex… I mean.” A lump in her throat made it difficult to speak. “He killed her in front of me. Disemboweled… her. He said he wanted to destroy any place I had ever lived and that meant he had to cut out her stomach. My mother… screamed and fought and… the next thing I knew… he was on me. With the knife.”

As her hands went to her collarbones, and then drifted down in between her breasts, she felt the white hot spears, the sting, the sudden sense of gurgling suffocation that had come when the stabbing had started.

“He told me my brother was dead upstairs in his bed. Johnny was nine.”

“How old were you?” Balthazar said in a rough voice.

“Sixteen. It was… right after school got out for the summer. I was going to camp out of state to be a counselor. He didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want me to leave him. He thought—well, in the end, it didn’t matter what he thought. He was crazy.”

“What happened to him.”

“He slit his wrists with the knife he’d used on me and my family. And when that didn’t go far enough, he took out what turned out to be his father’s gun and shot himself in the head.” She touched her eyelid as it started to twitch. Then rubbed the thing to try to get it to stop flickering. “He thought he’d killed me, and I played like I was dead. He was… utterly distraught. He didn’t want me to live, but he didn’t want me dead, either.”

“Here,” Balthazar said.

Erika glanced at him, and found that he was holding out the sweatshirt she’d given him from her dryer. When she just stared at the thing in confusion, he leaned in and blotted at her face with it.

“Am I crying?” As he nodded, she was surprised. “I don’t cry over this, you know. Ever.”

Well, if that wasn’t a stupid statement, given the tears he was mopping up.

“Can I tell you something I’ve never told anybody before?” she whispered.

“It would be my honor to hold your secret here.” He touched over his heart. “And keep it within me.”

She took her sweatshirt from him and moved up a little higher to a drier place on the sleeve.

“I just stood there.” Erika began to cry openly, the tears streaming down her face and dropping onto the blue bathrobe. “While he killed my mother. I just… fucking stood there as he cut into her and she screamed. She held her arms out to me, her eyes… they locked on me… she called my name…”