The bouncers cast a disinterested glance as I moved through the club, Nikki continuing to punch at my back and kicking against my stomach, yelling at me to put her down. My jaw ached from how hard I ground my teeth together, the guilt and injustice of the situation stirring up the bile in my stomach and twisting my gut into knots.
Nikki didn’t stop fighting even as we broke out onto thestreet, the cool air assaulting my senses after the sweat and heat of the club. She wouldn’t still and screamed with rage when I shoved her into the back of the truck before I slammed the large doors shut and locked them. The drive back to her place was accompanied by the relentless pounding of her fists against the inside of the truck, screaming obscenities at me. There was no point in saying anything, and nothing I could say would douse the flames of hatred she had for me now.
This wasn’t what I wanted to happen.
Anger continued to bubble inside me, and my demon stirred.
I hadn’t given in to my need for sex or violence recently, and with all the emotions stirring inside me, I was on the edge of losing control.
Pulling onto Nikki’s street, the symphony of crashing and screaming from the back of the truck had subsided, and when I dropped out of the cabin, my boots sounding heavy against the road, and opened the back, Nikki was curled up in the far corner. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, her face was flushed red with her hair hanging around her shoulders, and her cheeks a sweaty mess.
But there was no more anger.
She was crying now.
Inside my chest, my heart simply broke.
I never believed it possible.
Everyone’s heard the figure of speech—your heart breaking—but I didn’t expect it to feel like this. It was like a cavern opened up behind my ribs, leaving a black hole that widened further as I reached my hand into the truck, and she cowered from me.
“Nikki, please,” I choked out, my voice hitching before I grit my teeth again. “I just wanted to bring you home.”
I expected questions from her, a barrage of screaming and accusations. But the way she stood and brushed the sawdust from the truck off her pants and jacket before striding past me,ignoring my outstretched hand and jumping gracefully from the truck, cut deep. Her lips were pressed together in a thin line, and she stared at me, a thousand things left unsaid running between us while the world of emotions played across her hazel eyes.
Without a word, she spun on her heel and stormed to her house, locking the door behind her with a definitive click.
I didn’t follow.
There’s a social norm for how to deal with many situations—how long you should wait before calling after a first date or sex, how to correctly respond tohow are youwhen asked by a cashier at a shop, how long you shake hands with a stranger before letting go.
But how long should you wait before contacting someone who’s just found out her father was a criminal, information which was revealed by the man she had been dating and trusted, who then kidnapped and threw her in the back of a truck? There was no social protocol for that.
I could only manage one night before I went back to her. While there wasn’t anything I could say to make things right, I simply couldn’t stay away. With an ache in my chest, I was drawn to Nikki, an ache I knew could only be solved by holding her against me and hoping she could forgive me as I tried desperately to shove away the reminder she didn’t even know the worse of it yet.
Would it have been better to reveal the full truth? I could feel Emrick’s eyes on me last night as I left out the information about what I was and how I knew Murphy, but he said nothing, instead throwing in some cryptic crap about the truth always coming out. What washistruth? I wanted to know because then maybeI could use it against him as he had mine. Although something told me there wasn’t much I could do or say to Emrick that would affect him at all, he was already surrounded by darkness.
Nikki wasn’t home, and I leaned against the truck thinking while trying to put myself in her shoes. I’d explained to Smithy I was havingpersonal issues,which somehow he knew meant it involved a woman, and he said as long as I completed my deliveries today, he was happy for me to use the truck to get where I needed to go to solve my problems.
At this point, I think I knew where I needed to be.
The truck rumbled along, the journey to the graveyard this time a stark contrast to my experience with Nikki’s driving when we went together. Even if I put my foot on the accelerator and pushed it to the floor, it wouldn’t reach the speeds her little car could on a bad day. This normally wouldn’t bother me, but today I was grinding my teeth because every second I was away from her after I’d decided to find her was grating against my nerves.
And my demon was stirring.
Demons don’t deal with emotions well. Hell, we rarely bother with them. But all this shit I was feeling was welling up inside me, and I had no idea how to cope with it. So my instincts told me to fight it out of my system or fuck it out.
I doubted Nikki would be in the mood to want sex with me right now.
Finally pulling into the graveyard parking lot, I sprinted across the field, ignoring the looks of indignation from the few mourners scattered around, and slowed only when the graveyard changed from the lush green grass to the broken garden beds and small stones.
Silence encased me once I stopped walking and the crunch of my boots subsided.
“No picnic this time?” I asked.
Nikki didn’t turn around. She was kneeling at her father’sgrave, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking at the headstone or the ground. Maybe she had her eyes closed in silent prayer, hoping she could reach him and get some answers.
“What are you doing here?”
