“Give me your keys. I’ll drive you home.”
My thoughts bumped into each other in their rush to make sense of his offer. “That’s not necessary,” I assured him. “Derrek threw me off, but I can drive myself.”
“You’re shaking,” Killian pointed out. “And you look terrified. Let me drive, Vera, for my own peace of mind.”
“Your bike is here. How will you get home?”
“I’ll take an Uber. Stop worrying about me.”
My hackles raised, the hair lifting off the back of my neck in response to his pushy attitude. “You’re the only one that gets to worry? How are you the boss?”
“I’m the only one stable enough to drive. So, yeah, I get to be boss.”
“I’m fine, Killian.” And because that didn’t sound even the least bit convincing, I repeated myself. “I’ll be fine.”
“Did he hurt you?”
The darkness made the finer edges of his feature blurry, but the fury in his eyes was unmistakable. As was the harsh slash of his mouth and the rigid tension in his shoulders.
Still protecting my past, I tried an easy answer. “I left him, Killian. What do you think?”
He made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat. “Not in the generic sense, Vera. Not in the way that all bad relationships end. I mean, did he hurt you? Put his hands on you? Fucking beat you?”
How does he know? That was my first thought. I didn’t have scars. At least not any on the outside. I had been lucky in that.
And I meant that. As screwed up as it was to associate my relationship with Derrek with luck, I knew I had been. There were women far worse off than I had been. There were women who couldn’t just leave. Who didn’t have a savings account to fall back on. Who couldn’t get out. Who were knocked unconscious regularly—or worse.
When I looked at the grand scope of abused women, my case was mild in comparison to some of the true psychopaths out there.
That in no way made what happened to me okay. But I had perspective. And that was important to me.
“He got physical,” I confessed, my words frail and broken and dragged from the deep recesses of my soul, the place I put things I never wanted to speak about out loud. The things I wasn’t brave enough to face. “He didn’t like, I don’t know, hospitalize me or anything, but he was rough.”
“That fucking piece of shit,” Killian snarled. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. His chest lifted with his effort to breathe evenly. “What a slimy, lowlife piece of shit.”
I swallowed against the lump of regret lodged in my throat. “How did you know? I mean, how did you guess that he… that he…”
“My friend Natasha dated him for a few months a while back. She didn’t let it get serious, but she told me some things that bothered her.” He turned his head, showing me the full severity of his profile. “And I’ve worked with him before. We kind of, I don’t know, rose in the industry at the same time. I’ve wondered about him. He’s not right in the head, Vera. There’s something seriously wrong with him.”
I laughed, but it was a desperate sound, adrenaline fueled and easily broken. “Oh, I’m well aware.”
“So Europe?”
Hugging myself tighter, the truth spilled out. “I tried to leave him more than once. I did leave him more than once. But I was stupid. I was...” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, only just then noticing the tears leaking from my eyes. “I had convinced myself that I loved him. And he always convinced me that he would change. Every goddamn time.”
“Tell me all of it. I want to hear everything.”
So I did. While we stood behind my brother’s bicycle shop on a balmy summer night, covered in darkness and tragedy and mutual hate for the man that had hurt me so deeply, I told him every hard detail of the two years I spent with Derrek.
I opened up about how he’d pursued me while I was still in school. I had been enamored with the adjunct professor that was ten years older than me and so incredibly hot. He’d taken the time to invest in my career and skill. He’d helped me become a better chef, a better person. He’d been so attentive and sweet and charming. I didn’t stand a chance.
We started dating my last year. The day I graduated I moved into his apartment. He’d promised all these great things, everything I wanted to hear. He would keep helping me, introduce me to all the important people, get me into the best kitchens. I just needed a little more practice. I needed to establish a reputation first. So why not start somewhere small? Why not just work up slowly, so people didn’t think Derrek was the only reason for my success?
He tore apart my world little bits at a time. He didn’t like when I went home to Durham by myself, and since he didn’t have the time to take off to go with me, I stopped seeing my family. My friends were all so much younger than him. He didn’t have anything in common with them. So why didn’t we just hang out with his friends? Besides, they were connections I could use.
He needed to focus on his career, so I should probably just work part time. That way I could help him reach the next level. After that, he promised to help me. He promised to throw all his resources at helping me move up. Just after he got to where he needed to be first.
After he’d picked apart my life and isolated me from everyone I cared about or knew… that’s when the physical abuse started. Looking back, I realized the emotional and verbal abuse had started way earlier. He’d subtly slipped in his backhanded compliments and carefully woven doubts until my self-esteem had withered and died. I lost my confidence, self-respect and will to fight.
By the time he hit me for the first time, I’d been mostly convinced that I deserved it. It wasn’t until two years later when he told me to quit my job and informed me that I would be staying home full time, that I realized he was going to take away the only thing I had left—my career.
That was the final straw. I should have stood up for my friends. I should have fought like hell when it had been my family. I should never, ever have let him hit me. But it wasn’t until he threatened to take cooking away from me that I couldn’t stand it for a second longer.
Killian had been winding tighter and tighter during my history lesson. His entire body looked ready to explode, a ticking time bomb of vengeance and justice. Beneath the milky moonlight, he was an avenging angel, nothing but hard lines and solid, unflinching resolve. “So you fled the country?”
“It sounds more dramatic than it is. I wasn’t afraid he would hunt me down or anything.” I thought of him outside my food truck refusing to leave. “Although maybe I should have been. But Europe was more about finally doing something for me. Finally, just, I don’t know, crawling out of the hole I’d dug for myself. And cooking. It was a lot about cooking—the one thing I loved enough to protect from him.”