“Sounds like you have an amazing sister,” he said with a slight squeeze of his arms.
“Yeah, I do,” she said thickly. “That’s why I didn’t want her to know how bad things were after she left. I didn’t want her screwing up her new life to come back and try to save me.” A lump formed in her throat and hot tears pricked the backs of her eyes. “It wasn’t worth it; after the first time, there was nothing left to save.”
…
“Tell me.”
Aiden kissed her cheek in encouragement then rested his forehead against her temple. At this rate they’d both be prunes by the time they got out of the shower, but she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave the steamy sanctuary, so neither was he.
“My mom’s new boyfriend moved in after only a week of them knowing each other. He gave me the creeps the first time I laid eyes on him. He constantly looked at me like I was a fucking steak or something. After a while the looks were accompanied by touching. A bump here, a graze there. He always feigned innocence, and I was too chicken to call him out on it.”
Goddamn it. He knew where this was heading. If Vanessa was anything like him—and he expected she was—she definitely would have come back from college to bury that fucker.
The muscles in his jaw flexed as he tried to contain his anger. “You weren’t chicken, sweetheart. You were a kid up against a full-grown man with no one to help protect you.”
“Maybe,” she said hoarsely. “But maybe if I’d pitched a fit, or threatened to cut his balls off, it wouldn’t have gone any further than that.”
Aiden took a deep breath and asked the question he needed answered and yet never wanted to know. “How far did it go?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her voice had become monotone. It was eerie, like an automated, unfeeling account of horrifying events. “He’d been drinking and I’m pretty sure he was high, too, although on what I didn’t know. My mom was already passed out and I’d gone into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. I heard him come into the room, but I ignored him, hoping he’d grab a beer or whatever and go away.” She shook her head slowly, shaking loose more tears that got lost in the water cascading down her body. “But he didn’t go away.”
Kat started trembling in his arms. Reaching over, he shut off the water and grabbed one of the large bath towels from the rack. He wrapped it around her shoulders before fastening a second around his waist, then stepped out of the tub. With little effort, he picked her up and cradled her in his lap as he sat on the floor with his back against the wall. She drew her knees to her chest and pulled the towel around her so all that peeked out was her head and her toes.
With acid churning in his gut and the thirst for vengeance tickling his throat, Aiden held her in his arms while the details of that horrifying night spilled from her quivering lips.
She told him how her mom’s boyfriend had stepped between her and the kitchen island where she’d been slicing tomatoes. That he’d pulled her in hard and didn’t waste any time groping and fondling her through her nightshirt and pajama pants. She’d actually tried fighting him that first time, striking out to try and do as much damage as she could. But that’s when he grabbed the chef’s knife from the counter, effectively halting all her struggles.
Aiden heard the self-contempt in her voice as she recounted how she’d obeyed his every order after that. How she laid on the dirty kitchen floor and let him cut the clothes from her. How she stayed as still as a mannequin for the rest of the time, even when he forced himself inside her virgin body and the pain was almost too much to bear.
“He held the knife on me the whole time. He didn’t even stop when he accidentally cut me. The blood ran up over my neck and shoulders and dripped into my hair. I remember thinking it smelled like wet pennies.” Aiden watched in agony as more tears streamed from her blue-green eyes, falling silently from the edge of her jaw to the towel below. “I couldn’t get a full breath because of his weight crushing me. The little air I did get was thick with his sweat, stale cigarettes, Jim Beam, and blood. I thought for sure I’d suffocate. Sometimes I wish I would have.”
“Jesus Christ, baby, no. Look at me,” he urged with his fingers under her chin. He nearly broke down from the overwhelming despair staring up at him through her watery gaze. “Don’t you ever wish that again, you hear me? Not ever.”