Eternally North (34 page)

Samantha stood beside
me rubbing my arm. “He did. You made him very happy while it
lasted.” she delivered with a tight smile. I swallowed the lump in
my throat.
He had told his family after all.

“Tash, just go and
come back later, please.” Henry pushed once more.

I shook my head. I knew
Tudor needed me, and I wasn’t going anywhere. I was nothing if not
stubborn (thank you, Scottish genes!). "I want to see him,"
I whispered.

Henry groaned and
turned away, sitting back on the stairs. Samantha touched my shoulder
lightly. "He's struggling to rein it in, Natasha, it's probably
best to wait a while. Tudor had to deal with everything that happened
today. Again. It’s too much."

Still absolutely none
the wiser as to what had actually happened, I hugged her quickly
before walking towards the door, the three-inch piece of wood that
stood between me and whatever was happening on the other side.

I took a few seconds to
work up the nerve, swore quietly, put my shaking hand on the handle
and pushed. The door creaked open slowly, noises of anguish
amplifying as I stepped through.

I peeped my head
cautiously around the door just as a chair hit the wall to my left.
Undeterred, I slid through and carefully shut it behind me. In the
centre of the room stood Tudor, my Tude, with his back to me, in a
bloodied white T-shirt, ripped so badly that the scratched skin on
his back was visible, gashes peppering his beautiful tattoos.

I inched closer to him
as he kicked broken furniture, cushions and other debris around what
I assumed was once Boleyn's pink-and-white bedroom. I noticed that
the cream carpet had patches of blood in certain areas and the
furniture was now mostly in pieces, photos scattered around like
confetti.

He didn’t know I was
there.

"Tudor?" I
spoke in a shaky voice, worried at his reaction to my intrusion.

He stilled, his back
muscles bunching, his shoulders high and his breathing erratic. He
slowly turned to face me, his upper lip swollen and smeared with
blood, a black eye forming on his beautiful face and red welts carved
into his cheeks. He turned white and just stood there, watching me in
silence.

I held out my hand,
willing him to take my offered comfort. "B-Babes, are... are you
okay?" I was moving slowly towards him, hands still
outstretched.

He released a painful
cry and practically ran the short distance between us to wrap me
tightly in his arms. I began to cry with him as I held his injured
body in my arms. I couldn’t even comprehend what he must have been
through.

He was shaking and his
head was tucked into the nook between my neck and shoulder. He was
crying, crying so hard. I stroked his closely shaven head, trying to
soothe him.

His legs buckled and he
collapsed onto his knees, taking me with him, all the time gripping
me tight. The fight in him instantly drained away. His hands slid to
my waist and he wept – all I could do was hold him close.

It took ten minutes.
Ten minutes to let it all out, ten minutes of holding him tightly in
my arms and ten minutes to stop the crying. With a final shudder, he
pulled back and lifted his head, his eyes severely bloodshot from all
the released emotions and his face all battered and bruised.

I sat staring at him,
trying to control my rage towards the man in the police car who I
assumed had hurt him. He tried to read my eyes, searching my face for
a sign that I still wanted him, before tentatively leaning forward
and kissing me. It was soft, brief and full of need, and this time, I
kissed him right back.

He pulled away, his
hand pressed to my cheek as he looked around the room. I followed his
gaze with my own, surveying the chaos and destruction. Tudor cleared
his throat, his voice cracked and strained. "I need to get out
of here."

"Of course,"
I whispered, and I stood and took his hand leading him out of the
carnage.

When we were out in the
hallway, Samantha and Henry rushed over. Henry wrapped an arm around
Tudor's neck and pulled him into his chest. They were both struggling
with their emotions and clung onto each other for support.

Henry pulled back,
bracing Tudor in his arms. "Are you okay, little bro?"

Tudor nodded weakly.

Henry swallowed and
whispered. "Thank you, again. You shouldn’t have to keep
dealing with this shit. Somehow it always falls on you."

Tudor bowed his head
once in acknowledgement.

Samantha moved in and
kissed his cheek and then moved to kiss mine. I smiled weakly at her,
and Tudor took my hand in his, leading me to a door that led to the
basement. “I need to be alone right now with Tash, I… just need
some time away from all that,” tilting his head in the direction of
Boleyn’s trashed room.

Henry tapped him on the
arm and let us past, and we descended the stairs to Tudor’s
basement. It was unlike any basement that I had ever seen – it was
practically a palace. It was bigger than most houses and it was
decorated with wood and leather. A total man-cave, complete with
separate kitchen and living area, but I loved it. In any other
circumstances, this would have been a total turn-on, but these were
not normal circumstances… These were unprecedented, these were…
Well, I wasn’t entirely sure. I was still completely in the dark to
exactly what
had
happened and what it all meant.

Tudor led me through
the dark-wood-and-chrome kitchen and sat us down on a huge black
L-shaped couch, never once releasing my hand and never once uttering
a single word. I rested my head on his shoulder, giving him the time
he needed to talk, or not talk – I wouldn’t push this time. This
time it was up to him.

I honestly didn't know
how long we stayed in the same spot, my head on his shoulder, his
hands holding both of mine as if they were a lifeline. It was obvious
that he needed time to cool down, and I was happy to just be there as
a support.

The sun had begun to
set when he shifted and for the first time since we moved downstairs,
Tudor relaxed some and settled back against the cushions, tucking me
under his arm, desperately close. I looked up at his face and his
eyes were closed and tense, like he was battling with the image of
something. When he finally spoke, his voice was gravelly from the
strain of the day’s events.

"When I was
younger, things were okay at home; at that time we lived in Victoria,
BC, that’s where Henry and I were born and raised, and we were a
typically normal family. As I grew up, I realised all was not as it
seemed, not at all. I first noticed little things, like my mom would
sometimes walk funny, like with a limp or a twisted ankle, and then
sometimes she would have these bruises on her arms and legs, but I
was too young to know what was really going on.

“I was about eight;
Henry, ten, when we walked in from hockey practice to see my father
pinning my mother down to the floor and beating her, punching her
over and over with his fist while he was practically raping her. We
didn't know what to do, we were so young – we didn’t even know
what sex was, for Christ’s sake! Henry pushed me back to protect me
and tried to pull him off her but my dad just swatted him away like a
fly. The man we idolised, our hero, was hurting our mom and we didn’t
know how to stop it. It was after that when we left the first time.
We lived with our grandparents for a few years in Kelowna, BC, and
then one day he showed up again, right out of the blue. We had no
idea how he had found us but he said he'd changed, he
seemed
to have changed and my mom took him back. She wanted us to be a
family, for her boys to have a dad.”

He sucked in a breath,
and I slipped my fingers underneath his T-shirt to run my fingers
over his stomach to comfort him. I didn’t want to push him. In my
wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined that this was his secret.

After a couple of
minutes, he lifted my chin and kissed me softly on my mouth. I smiled
and cuddled back in, and he picked up where he had left off.

“At first everything
was great, he was the perfect father, but then the signs appeared
again: the flinching from my mother every time he moved, the bruises
in places people wouldn't check and the baseball bat he started using
to keep me and Henry in line. We were bigger then, both of us
teenagers who trained hard at hockey. I was starting to get into
weight-lifting to help with my junior varsity career and I was
gaining strength by the day. Henry and I both knew how to handle
ourselves, but he had my mother wrapped around his little finger, and
if we stepped up to him, she would beg us to stop. He used her to
control us. It went on for years and there was nothing we could do.

“I was fifteen when I
found my mom crying on the bathroom floor, holding something in her
hand – a pregnancy test. My father was at work. She was pregnant
with Bee and that was the day we left for good. We got in the car,
without any of our possessions, and moved to Vancouver and never
looked back.

“Years went by and we
heard nothing from him, life became normal again and the fear of him
turning up went away. Bee didn't know much about Dad, we told her he
had left us when she was a baby and, with two big brothers around
helping Mom raise her, she didn't want for anything. She was happy,
at least for a while.”

He began shaking again.
I sat up and took his face in my hands. “Tudor you don’t need to
keep going, it’s okay,” I reassured and I moved in to kiss his
forehead.

He pulled away. “No,
I want you to know, I need you to know. No more secrets, Sunshine.
Never again.”

I sat back and he
stared off, not looking at anything in particular, eyes unfocused. “A
few years back, I got my big break – you know how, I told you
before – and I moved to LA to be closer to the studios. I’d been
there a few months when I got a call from Henry saying that Dad had
been back in touch. It just brought all these fears and feelings
back, and I didn’t know how to deal with this new career and the
fact that… that… that
monster
was trying to weasel his way
back in our lives after everything he’d put us through.

“In LA, if you’re
known, everything is available to you, so I turned to alcohol and
tried to drink my problems away. You know the drill: I slept around
and drank for nearly a year before my mom called and told me to stop
being stupid and to come home. So I did. My dad had stopped calling,
finally getting the message that he wasn’t welcome, and things were
looking better again.”

He rubbed his hand
across his face and his eyes once again welled up with tears. I used
my thumb to rub them away and waited for him to finish the story.

“Bee was twelve when
he showed up. He knocked on the front door, as brazen as all hell,
like he had every right to be there. She answered and, having never
seen him before, not even a picture, let him in. He claimed he was a
family friend. I arrived home half an hour later, I’d forgotten a
script that I was supposed to be reading for producers in downtown
Vancouver, and walked in to find my father assaulting my baby sister
on the living room floor. He didn't manage to rape her, but if I
hadn't got there when I did...”

He let out a strangled
moan and I held him tighter in my arms.

He tucked his face into
my hair. “I saw red, Tash. I pulled him off her and began laying
into him; I was well into bodybuilding by then and outweighed him by
at least fifty pounds and could have easily beaten him to a pulp. It
wasn't long before Henry came home and dragged me off him and in all
the commotion, the bastard managed to get away. The police have been
searching for him for over three years. God knows where he was hidden
but could we hell find him. Bee took it badly and was diagnosed with
an anxiety disorder; she struggled to go out of the house and would
get night terrors and such high anxiety that she had to be sedated on
more than one occasion. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We
spent over a year trying to make her better. Half the problem was
that he was still out there and she just couldn’t move on. The
doctors advised a change of scenery. I wanted to help her, so we
moved here, the last place anyone would expect and hopefully the last
place he would think to come looking.

“From that moment on,
I purposely fell off the radar. I kept working on my films but all
social engagements and interviews were cancelled. I had the worst job
in the world for coping with this type of situation, any social media
post or gossip site could give away where we lived at any moment.
There are thousands of pages out there solely about me and several of
them only exist to track my every move. It’s beyond fucked up to
have fans acting as a personal GPS, especially when you have a father
who is trying everything to seek you out and destroy your family.
Anyway, the money from my films has helped us buy the best lawyers,
private eyes and security, but my job has also made it easy for him
to threaten us too.

“On movie sets, or
when I’ve been on location – all public knowledge of course –
he would send notes through the runners telling me that he would find
us and finish what he started and that he blamed me for everything,
for stopping him and his right to have his own daughter.
My fault!
All the police and specialists on the case warned me about involving
other people and to not risk telling anyone but family about our
situation, and I didn’t for years.

“He was spotted a few
times around Canada, but he always managed to evade the police just
in time. The notes became more threatening as time went on and he
made it clear that if he got the chance he would ruin my life, in any
and every way that he could. He described explicitly what he would do
to my girlfriend if I ever I got one, if I loved anyone as much as he
‘
loved
’ Bee – he’s a sick bastard! I knew I could
never get into a relationship until he was caught. I didn’t want
to, I honestly thought that relationships just seemed to destroy
people, rip them apart.”