She didn’t cry. Her eyes just filled and held and she blinked once and the tears stayed where they were. She wasn’t going to let them fall. That was Mehar. Even now, even after everything, she held the line.
“Thank you,” she said.
I kissed her left wrist just above the raw skin. Then her right. Then I stood up and held my hand out to her.
“Come on. I’m running you a bath.”
10
Mehar
The water was so hot it stung the cuts on my wrists and the bottoms of my feet and I didn’t care. I sank into that tub until the water hit my chin and let the heat do what it wanted to me because pain I chose was different from pain that was chosen for me.
Quest had left me alone. Closed the bathroom door behind him without being asked, because he understood something about me that most men never figured out: I didn’t need company in my worst moments. I needed space to fall apart privately so I could put myself back together before anyone saw the pieces.
The tears came as soon as the door clicked shut. I pressed my face into my knees and cried harder than I’d cried in years. Not the pretty, controlled crying I did on Janelle’s couch. This was ugly and raw and it came from somewhere deep in my gut, the crying that makes your whole body shake and your nose run and your throat close up until you’re gasping between sobs.
I cried because I let my guard down and got kidnapped. Because I trusted a woman with everything I had and she used it to chain me to a ceiling. Because I killed a man tonight andfelt nothing and that scared me more than the warehouse did. Because I’d been fighting since I was a little girl in my father’s house and I was tired of fighting and I wanted to stop and I didn’t know how.
From somewhere down the hall I heard a cabinet open and close. Then the sound of a pan on a stove. Then oil hitting heat. Quest was cooking.
I sat in the water and listened to a man make me food without being asked and without wanting anything in return and something about that broke me open all over again. Ahmad used to cook for me and then remind me about it for days. Thad never cooked at all. Every man I’d ever been with treated care like currency, something they spent so they could collect later. Quest was in the kitchen at two in the morning making a plate for a woman who was covered in another man’s blood because she was hungry and that was reason enough.
I stayed in the tub until the water went lukewarm and my fingers were wrinkled and my eyes were swollen and the tears had emptied out of me completely. Then I pulled the plug and stood up and dried off with the softest towel I’d ever touched in my life. This man had nice shit. I looked in the mirror. My face was a mess. My wrists were the worst, raw and angry circles of torn skin that were going to scar.
I opened the bathroom door and found a pair of his sweatpants and a white t-shirt folded on the bed. I pulled them on and the shirt smelled like him, that cologne I’d been pretending I didn’t love since the first night he held me in a parking lot and my body decided to trust him before my brain gave permission.
He was in the kitchen plating food when I walked in. Salmon, rice, and asparagus. At two in the morning. I sat at the island and he set the plate in front of me and sat across from me with his own plate and we ate in silence for the first few minutes becausewe were both starving and the food was good and sometimes silence between two people who’ve been through hell together is the most honest conversation you can have.
“You’re not gonna kill my brother, right?” I said between bites.
“Hell nah. Justice has him in hiding. He’s safe.”
“Then who?”
“Mega. He’s the one behind all of it. The casino shooting, the warehouse robbery, Zephyr being paralyzed. Mega pointed your brother and his crew at my family. That’s who has to pay.”
I nodded. I couldn’t argue with that. Mega had Serenity hooked on coke, was beating her behind closed doors, and was using kids like Bryce as pawns. Whatever Quest did to him, he earned it.
“I want a normal life,” I said. It came out quieter than I intended. “I’m tired, Quest. I’m tired of cages and dungeons and guns and warehouses and men who want to hurt me. I want to finish school. I want to open my spa. I want to be somebody’s mother and cook dinner and argue about what to watch on Netflix and just be regular. I know that sounds crazy coming from a woman who just beat a man to death with a chain but I mean it. I want normal.”
He looked at me across that island and his eyes did something I’d only seen once before, that night on the overlook when he told me about Quindon. They softened. Just barely, just enough for me to catch it before he put the mask back on.
“You’ll have that,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
We finished eating. He washed the dishes while I sat on the counter and watched him because I didn’t have the energy to help and he didn’t ask me to. When he was done he dried his hands and turned to me and I reached for him. Grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and pulled him between my legs where I was sitting on the counter and kissed him.
He kissed me back carefully at first, mindful of my split lip, his hand cupping the side of my face that wasn’t bruised. Gentle. Patient. The same way he’d cut the chains off my wrists, like I was something he didn’t want to damage further.
“I’m not gonna break,” I said against his mouth.
“I know you’re not.”
“Then stop kissing me like I am.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. The gentleman stepped back and the man I’d been craving since the first time his mouth was on me stepped forward. He kissed me harder, deeper, his hand sliding from my face to the back of my neck and gripping, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him closer until there was nothing between us except his clothes and mine.
He carried me to the bedroom with my legs still locked around him and my arms around his neck and lay me on the bed and pulled his shirt over his head. I’d seen his body before, but not like this, not with him standing over me with his chest bare and his eyes locked on mine and an expression on his face that told me tonight was going to be different from every other night we’d had.
