And it felt so amazingly right.
He cradled my face.
Softly.
Gently.
“Tell me who you are.”
Unable to remain standing, I slowly sank to my knees.
Without releasing my face, Lyrik followed.
Tears clogged my throat. “All I ever wanted to do was forget. But I can’t do that anymore, Lyrik. I feel too real. Too much like me. Who I used to be.”
He nodded like he got it, a prod of encouragement.
I found my voice. “You remember I told you…that I escaped. When I escaped, I escaped from Cameron Lucan.”
I hadn’t voiced that name in so long.
Lyrik gritted his teeth, the sound an audible grind as he clenched and winced and fought the anger the utterance of it so clearly evoked.
Anger for me.
Was it wrong to love him more for it?
My tongue darted out to wet my lips. “Like I told you, when we first got together, it was good and then it got to where it wasn’t so bad. Looking back now, I realize he was acclimating me to his lifestyle. Desensitizing me. Convincing me his twisted desires were my own. Robbing me of all my confidence and self-preservation until I’d completely submitted to his will.”
I drew in a breath. “It didn’t take him long to persuade me to cut ties with my family. He told me they were only trying to keep us apart. I’d moved in with him before things had gone bad…back when I’d willingly let him use me, even though I knew in my gut something was wrong.”
I glanced to the floor, before letting myself look back on the severity of those eyes that had deepened to pitch. “It got so horrible, Lyrik, so bad so fast and I had no idea how to get out. I’d pray for death.”
The words had gone raspy. “For it all to end. He’d leave me tied up in this room in the dark where I’d be disoriented for days. Hungry. Not sure when he would return and when he did return if he’d come alone.”
Lyrik’s muscles twitched. A palpable rage skimmed just below the surface. It lifted and rose and shivered in the air.
Yet there remained a gentle softness to him that had never been there before.
This beautiful boy had always been both cautious and heedless when it came to me. His touch gentle in its aggressive demand.
But I felt the shift as I took him with me to that place where I’d never wanted to return.
Images flashed. I blinked, viewing them like old, faded snapshots I hadn’t known were taken yet somehow intimately recognized.
“I lost sense of time, but I would guess it had to have been about six months after he started holding me in that room upstairs when I woke up to him dragging another girl into it.”
Old horror circled and circled. I could barely speak. “I guess in the time he’d been isolating me, he’d started the same process with Madeline. Making her fall for him and his lies. Cutting ties with her family. Convincing her she was nothing without him. Making her wholly reliable upon him until he had her where he wanted her. No resources. No fight left to fight.”
I squared myself, the words suddenly strong as I looked up at his blistering expression. Anger restrained in agony. As if he both wanted to stand up right then and hunt Cameron down yet refused to leave my side.
I touched his cheek. “But he hadn’t broken all my fight, Lyrik. It was still there, buried deep. I watched and waited. Listened. Counted the knots in my ties. Memorized them until I could untie them in my head.”
I gulped. “In the corner, he’d…left a video camera on a stand for days. Taunting us.”
My skin crawled with the thought of it.
“I waited until I heard his motorcycle start up and drive away. It was so clear in my head. Untying myself. Untying Madeline. Running. Jumping. But she seemed so shocked when I was suddenly out of my bindings, and she screamed when I smashed the window with the camera.”
On the waves of the memory, the words broke in my throat and I looked at the bare wall over Lyrik’s shoulder as I forced out the confession.
“Madeline…she was too scared, Lyrik. Too scared to jump. Too scared to leave. She begged me to stay. Begged me not to leave her there alone. I’ll never forget the defeat in her eyes when I looked at her one last time, giving her one last chance, before I climbed out onto the eaves of the second-story roof.”
Everything rushed out. “But I was the coward, Lyrik. I was the coward because I just left her. Left her without a word and ran. I never looked back. Madeline had made her choice and I’d made mine. I never picked up the phone because that would mean I’d have to voice what Cameron had done. It was so much easier to pretend it’d never happened. Easier to become someone I wasn’t. Someone no one could touch.”
No one until him.