Bound by Rapture (16 page)

“Fuck you!”

My fist slammed into his jaw instantly as if it was a natural reflex. I was done taking it easy, making simple moves to figure all the shit out. I wanted answers. I wanted vengeance. I wanted Kevin to pay for the shit he had done to Julia, even if he wasn’t the one behind all this, and I was going to beat the shit out of his abuser father until I got them. Michael spit blood onto the carpet and made a gurgling sound. 

“Oh, please don’t hurt him!” Elizabeth’s wails drew my attention. Another one of my guys was subduing her, holding her arms while she flailed and tried to come at me. There was hate in her cloudy gray eyes. Hate for me. 

“He hits you,” I said. “This piece of shit hurts you all the time, doesn’t he?”

She stopped her flailing and looked me right in the eye. “I love him.” 

I blinked, confused, and shook my head. “Fine.” I glanced between them, an idea popping into my head. “Tell me where Kevin is or I’ll keep hitting your loving husband.” 

Elizabeth’s mouth gaped open. “I really don’t know. I—”

I slammed my fist into Michael’s nose, my knuckles crunching against bone.

“No!” she wailed. 

“Then fucking tell me where he is!” I looked back at Michael, whose lip and nose were bleeding. 

“He’s not here,” Michael ground out.

“He’s really not. I’ve never even met him and we’ve been married for more than five years. Honest. Just please,” she wailed, “please stop hurting him. Please.”

I slammed my fist into Michael’s gut. It wasn’t good enough. They knew something.
They had to
. Michael slumped; the only thing holding him up were my men. “Tell me!” I shouted and punched him again and again. There was noise behind me. Wailing. Shouting. But I tuned it all out. I let it all go, let my arm think for me. My arm that was pounding into the body of the piece of shit before me. 

It seemed to last forever, my knuckles meeting wet flesh slathered over bone. I knew if I hit hard enough that bone would break. It would crack under my hand, give way like it had never been whole before. I punched Kevin. That’s who it was before me. I punched Victor Marlin. I punched my brother Garrett. I punched all of them over and over. 

Someone grabbed me from behind and I tried to push them away, but they were stronger. Multiple pairs of arms. Words being spoken to me over and over. None of them made sense until she was in front of me. My Julia. Like a bright shining star, she filled my vision. Her presence shouldn’t have calmed me, but it did. 

I love her. I love her so much it hurts. It physically makes me rot from the inside out because I know I’ll never be happy without her. I know I’ll never be able to make her love me the way I love her.
And that crushed me. It fucking destroyed me. Images of her with Victor entered my mind. All the times she’d fucked him. Of her waking up for him, of last night at Rapture. It was a montage of my downfall. The images that would haunt me forever. 

“He’s not here.” Her words broke through the haze in my mind. 

“What?”

“He’s not.” Randy stepped up next to her. “We’ve looked everywhere. The men are still double-checking, but there’s no sign anyone else is here. No clothes. No extra toothbrushes. No nothing, man.” He shook his head. “Looks like ya boy is tellin’ the truth.”

Michael was unconscious on the couch, Elizabeth crying as she hovered over him.

I walked over to her slowly. “He hits you,” I said again, and she glanced up at me. “He hits you and you still protect him.”

She blinked up at me through bleary eyes. “He’s all I have.”

“Leave her alone, Cole.” Julia stepped around me and touched Elizabeth’s shoulder lightly. “I’m so sorry this happened, Mrs. Malone.” Her voice dripped with sorrow. “We have to get him to a hospital,” she said to me. 

“No hospitals. I have a guy.” I snapped my fingers. “Bobby, go get Armstrong from outside.”

“They’ll get him patched up. He will be okay,” Julia said, rubbing her hand back and forth.

“Why did you come in here and do this? We didn’t do anything to you.” Elizabeth shook her head back and forth frantically, her red curls bobbing up and down. “We didn’t ask for this!”

Armstrong came in and knelt in front of Elizabeth and Michael, holding a large first aid kit. 

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. We just need to find Kevin. You have no idea how important it is.” Julia sounded like she was on the verge of tears. Unwillingly, my heart ached for her.  

Armstrong started pulling out gauze and antiseptic. 

“I don’t know where he is. I swear it!” Snot ran down her face from her nose. “Please don’t hurt him anymore.” She directed her words at Armstrong who had started cleaning the wounds.

“We believe you. But…” Julia got down on her knees. She looked uncertain for a moment. “You don’t have to stay here. We won’t hurt your husband anymore. But you can come with us and we will find somewhere for you to stay. Cole has connections.” She glanced up at me. The hurt in her eyes wounded me and nearly sent me staggering backward. 

I nodded my head. “Yes. I can get you the money and a safe place to stay so you can get on your feet.”

Elizabeth shook her head frantically, tears still running from her eyes. “I love him. He needs me.”

“He
hurts
you. Don’t deny it, because I know. His son used to hurt me, too.” Julia’s voice cracked at the end as she reached for Elizabeth’s hand. She squeezed it before pushing the woman’s sleeve back and revealing the dark purple bruise. It reached from her wrist to her elbow. Some parts of the bruise were darker than others, signifying it hadn’t all happened at the same time. “Love that hurts you like this will eventually kill you, Mrs. Malone.”

Elizabeth stared down at the dark spot for a moment before jerking her hand away and pushing the sleeve back down, covering it. “He’s my husband.” 

It was all she said. I expected more, an explanation. But she didn’t give it. Instead she turned her haunted gaze back to Michael. 

Julia stayed crouched there for several moments before standing. She didn’t say anything as she headed for the door. I followed her. 

“Go over this place ten times before you call everyone off, and make sure anything taken out of place is put back just the way it was when we came in,” I said to Randy as I passed him.

“All right, man. But I’m pretty certain this is a dead end. This house isn’t all that big.” 

I nodded, letting that news sink in.
This is a dead end.
What would we do from here? It was too good to be true. To find Kevin, find the answers we needed, and put everything to rest. But nothing was put to rest. If anything, the situation even more fucked up than it was this morning.
And I thought this venture would finally give us some answers.

FOURTEEN

Julia.

“What would you like, ma’am?” I blinked my heavy eyes as I looked up at the waiter in front of me. He wore a button-up shirt that said Callan’s on the left breast. I glanced at Cole across from me. “I’ll just have whatever he’s getting.” 

I didn’t care to search the menu and order something fancy at the nice restaurant Cole had brought me to. I was emotionally drained from the ordeal at Kevin’s dad’s house, which we’d left some thirty minutes ago. After I’d walked outside, Cole had been hot on my heels, following me out and helping me into the limo. 

I was fine with it. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck away from there. I’d had enough, seen enough. It had been so difficult to tell the story of my past; I hated looking weak in front of anyone, especially him. After all the things that had transpired between us, after him calling me a whore earlier that morning, I just didn’t want him to know the truth about how pathetic I had once been. But it was important that he knew. 

To see the twisted relationship Elizabeth and Michael shared, where she loved him in spite of the horrible things he did to her, took me back to those placed I’d left in my past. It took me back to the pain, the love I hadn’t wanted to let go of. It gutted me. 

“Are you okay?”

I glanced up at Cole, sitting across from me, surprised to see the waiter had already left. “I…” I didn’t know what to say to that. Was I okay? “No.” I answered myself and Cole all at once. “I’m not. I’ve had the worst month of my life. Not even the shitty moments I told you about before could compare with the way things have been this last month.” Tears pressed at the backs of my eyelids and I felt weak. Pathetic. “And Mrs. Malone—” I couldn’t even finish my sentence. I didn’t know what I wanted to say about her. 

“Shhh.” Cole reached out grabbed my hands in his. They were clean now. He had washed Michael’s blood from them; it was as if it had never been there. His movement rocked the little glass centerpiece that held water and a single, floating flower. The liquid sloshed back and forth and almost spilled on the tablecloth. “It isn’t your fault she didn’t want your help. You can’t help that. Some people are too far gone.”

“I used to be that person, Cole.” I blinked hard, trying to stave off the tears. “I used to be that girl who loved so hard it almost killed me.” I shook my head and snatched my hands out of his. “I’m
still
that stupid girl.”

His gaze softened. “Julia, I—” But I didn’t hear anything else he said. My full attention focused on the people who had just walked into the restaurant. Where Cole and I were seated, I had a perfect view of the front door. It was a family that came in. A man, two little girls, and a woman. A woman I knew. She had short, white blond hair that was cut in a swing bob-style. A black dress fit tightly to her slim, tanned body. 

“There’s four of us,” she said, smiling at the hostess. The sound of her voice made me jump. It was
her
. She was real. 

My mother. 

She had left so long ago when I was kid. Went for groceries one day and never came home. As if she’d never really existed. I never knew why she left, and my dad never had a good reason to give me. 

“Julia, what’s the matter?” Cole’s words drew me back to the present and I glanced away from her as the hostess started to guide them toward us. 

I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t form the words. It had been more than fifteen years. Fifteen years since I had seen my own mother. Fifteen years since she’d walked out of my life and never looked back. I never knew what had happened to her. For most of my life I had thought she was dead. It was easier to think of her as such than to accept the truth—that she didn’t want me. But she was very much alive. 

I looked down at my hands just as I heard her laugh. The sound made my head jerk up again. Her laugh was the same, it hadn’t changed a bit. I could remember when we rolled around in my bed, her tickling me while we both giggled uncontrollably. It sounded the same. It was brought on by the pinch of the man’s hand on her side as she walked in front of him. 

“Julia?” Cole asked.

“Hush!” I whispered intently at Cole. He frowned and glanced over his shoulder. 

They came closer and I realized the hostess was going to lead them right past our table. Panic bubbled up inside me along with fury. It blasted through me like storm. This was where she had been? She had been in New York state—doing what exactly? What was so much better about this place than home, than her husband, than her own mother? What made this place better than her own daughter? What was it? 

I’d asked myself those questions a lot right after she left, but then I had closed them off and pushed them away, knowing I would never have answers. But it looked like tonight was the night. Tonight, after fifteen years, I would have my answers. I kept my gaze glued on her as she moved closer with utter fluidity. The smile on her face was easy-going and carefree. 

“Oooh, pretty hairs!” The squeak of a voice had me glancing away from my mom. I immediately came face to face with a little girl. I had noticed her when they came in, but I’d been so focused on my mother that I hadn’t thought much about her or the other little girl. But now, as I stared into dark eyes with white blond hair framing a heart-shaped face, the same as my natural color, the same color as my mother’s, the truth set in. It burned my skin as it baptized me in its burning waters. This little girl, who couldn’t have been older than six, was my sister. 

“Sissy, mommy, look! Look how pretty!” She reached out and grabbed a lock of my aqua blue hair, which cascaded down over my shoulders. “It’s so blue.”

Another little girl, who looked to be maybe a year or two older than her stepped up next to the first one and smiled at me. Her hair was a little longer, but the same color as her sister’s. “It is pretty.”

“Oh, girls. Leave that poor lady alone. She’s trying to enjoy her dinner. Not be hounded by y’all!” The little bit of twang in her accent made my heart ache with a new kind of hurt. It took everything in me to smile at the two children before me instead of bursting into tears. 

These two little people were related to me. There was no denying it, their likeness to one another, to her. To me. Two little people I didn’t even know existed. It was suddenly hard to breathe and I had to suck in a big gulp of air. Neither of the girls noticed. They both smiled back happily. It was the kind of smile that lit up their entire faces, leaving me even more breathless than the moment before.