Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (23 page)

She kissed the side of my ear. “I’m not going anywhere, Tristan.” She caressed my cheek. “You were such a sweet little boy, Tristan.”

“Only you would know.”

“You were fun that I could have all by myself. Do you remember how special our first night together was?”

I did. I remembered the night she crept into my room. She had appeared from no where. I had gotten in trouble for some reason. I couldn’t remember, but I was sure that whatever I had done, wasn’t enough for the beating I had gotten. My father had screamed at how he hated me. I was, after all, one of the smartest kids in the school, won the most awards and gold stars on the chest, but my father talked to me like I was nothing.

Back then, during my childhood, my life had been a living hell. My brothers hated me, would hit me when they could get away with it, which was all the time because no one cared.

Lulina was the only one that had been nice to me.

Lulina didn’t even have to give the pedofile speech of never telling anyone. I would not. She was my friend, my only friend and I would’ve done anything for her as long as she continued to be my friend. I did not have a mother, and knew that Lulina was not her replacement, but the feeling of her was a mother’s touch.

It only happened that once but I had been ruined by it. I was convinced that I had not been good enough. I strived to be better. Paid for my first whore four years later at the age of thirteen – lied and said I was eighteen. The whore didn’t care. One whore turned to dozens and the dozens turned to a blur of very old faces, some bruised, some pinched up and pissed at how sour life had gotten.

But, finally, at age nineteen, Lulina slithered back into my bedroom, curious on how much of a man I had become.

And I hadn’t disappointed.

It had been so long since I thought about it all. I had dismissed the crucial moment at the age of nine that had began a very ugly cycle for me. Lulina had showed a very unloved boy a bit of kindness and it wrecked his life.

She whispered in my ear, “I even remember the present you left me after our first time.”

I closed my eyes and breathed, “What are you talking about?”

“Same drive leads you to the same destination,” she said.

“Lu, I’m tired of the metaphors.”

She cackled. “Trust me, I love you too much to clarify. I’ll bare that secret on my own.”

I told her, “I don’t want anymore secrets.”

“You’ll want this one.”

“You don’t love me,” I argued.

“I love you,” she retorted, “Who said love was flowers, rainbows and candy? Sometimes its hard, cold and available only when it’s convenient, and you’ve always been convenient for me, Tristan.”

I gripped my sheets, my hands curling into fists. I lifted my head as she continued to kiss and nibble. My teeth came together and I clenched them, starting to grind them.

It wasn’t pleasure of her kisses I was feeling, it was rage. It was rage: pure, raw and dangerous. I could feel it bursting from the nerves in my brain and spreading over my body.

Nothing had changed. Fifteen years later and I was still the little boy being kicked by everyone. And, here, Lulina was playing pick up the pieces to Tristan, only because it suited her purposes.

Dominique had used me. She had gotten what she wanted out of me and now I was done, through, over, and she was off to her father, preparing, tying up loose ends, and getting ready to walk through the front door of a very wonderful future.

And I was enraged at how blind and stupid I had been.

There was no way in hell Dominique could have walked out the front door and hop into one of my father’s most treasured cars to chase after me without anyone noticing.

Like mother, like daughter, I was an easy, delectable play thing. And the world worried about men dressed in dark clothing hiding in an alleyway, but not about a woman who knew how to smile right before she sliced your throat.

Women could be so evil, so cruel.

They could build you into a King.

Or pound you into nothing.

When I spoke, my voice was still lifeless and subdued. “I’m tired of being used, Lu.”

Lulina still had her head buried against my neck and could not see the color draining away from my face. She couldn’t see as my teeth were rubbing against eachother, or the way my eyes were rolling in the back of my head as the rage was building in me, driving and barreling against me.

“I’m not using you Tristan; I’m loving you,” she answered, and dragged her tongue a little harder against my skin, “I should be the one mad. You took my daughter’s viginity.”

“You took mine.”

“Are you complaining now?”

“You and Dominique are no better than my father or Papa.”

“I guess not. We all get to screw Tristan Rogue.”

My knuckles cracked as I squeezed the bedsheets. I hissed a breath and tried to fight to breathe again but the rage choked it away from me, and was left in my throat.

Lulina mistook it for pleasure.

She chuckled and bit the side of my neck hard enough to draw blood but I barely felt it. “Relax, baby, I’ll make you feel better.”

Lunacy was so sweet as I tasted it against my tongue and felt it move through all my senses. Good, bad, and evil and the difference between them became blurred lines. My mind ripped apart and I was lost in a very dark, ugly world. My heart was slowing, no longer beating as fast as I was arriving to a very evil destination: insanity driven and loved by rage.

The world was turning red, all of it, a deep red and I felt oddly at home. Not a murder - killed a man but not a murder but I could feel the change. I was now one with the men who beat the life out of Jimmy Ricky and laughed as they did it.

I understood them now.

It was pain, all about pain and the pain they caused was an art. You protected your art, you built on it, and you were happy as you were creating it.

You were free.

It was apart of you, the coldness, and you enjoyed it as much as you enjoyed breathing after being surmerged for so long.

Lulina had pushed me over the edge and she was too busy, sucking and teasing to know it.

If she had, she would have screamed and ran.

And I would have chased her.

Lulina was still talking. “I let my daughter borrow you, Tristan, but let’s be clear about one thing: you’re my dark secret, mine. You touch my daughter again, and I’ll tell your father and grandfather how we fucked behind your dead brother’s back.”

And then the world went from red to black.

I reached and grabbed a handful of her hair and curled her hair over my hand and yanked her head back, making her sit up on her knees. I glared into her face and she looked away. Her mouth opened and I knew she was going to beg.

“No,” I said evenly, “You get to see the monster you all created.”

Then I shoved her away and watched as she flew over the end of my bed and hit the floor.

I was on my feet, walking slowly and calmly around to the end of the bed.

The world was sideways and on fire.

Those expensive panties that Lulina loved to spend my family’s money on broke away as I tugged on them.

Lulina met my eyes as a tear slipped down her cheek. “Tristan, I – I didn’t mean what I said.”

I slapped her, hard.

Her head flung violently to the left, hitting the hard floor. Her bottom lip split at the impact.

I hit her again to make it bleed harder.

I flipped her over to her stomach. Her head smacked the hard floor again. I grabbed her by the hips and pulled her to her knees. Lulina was mumbling something, but my guess was that she couldn’t talk because her jaw was either aching so much that talking was forfeited or it was broken.

And I didn’t care at either junction.

I leaned in close to her ear. “I’m going to ride you like a horsemen rides a horse. So Giddy the fuck up, bitch.”

She whimpered in response and I could hear the tears in the back of her throat.

It did nothing for the rage.

The world is too crooked for me to walk a straight line…

Lulina had passed out at some time.

The rage drained away as suddenly as it crept up and the world righted itself and the colors of life returned.

There was blood on the floor, blood from where I had penetrated her, blood from her scraped knees and elbows.

There was blood on me.

I was tired, exhausted, and cleaning anymore blood tonight was not going to happen. I collapsed on my bed and pulled a secret stash of whiskey from my night stand and sipped slowly on it.

My knuckles were torn and broken from the many times I had hit her. I had only remembered a couple of slaps and maybe one punch and everything else was a blur.     

When I had sucked every drop from the whiskey bottle, I could barely keep my eyes open. I felt it slip from my grasp and I heard it shatter on the floor and figured I would cut myself on the glass if I didn’t clean it up right away.

I fell asleep before I could put more thought into the idea.

*

I wasn’t sure how long my eyes had been open.

My mind didn’t snap awake until I heard my own ragged breath escape from lips and crying from somewhere in my room.

I turned and looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was five in the morning and I was still exhausted.

And there was a bit of after taste of rage from earlier, but it was being shadowed by disgust for my ownself.

I wasn’t a good man…

Yet, eventhough I wasn’t a good man, the world was just as rotten. Beaten and kicked so much that I had finally kicked back.

But, I had been a better man than a woman abuser for twenty-four years, but tripped up and became the mere definition of an monster.

My memory was foggy but slowly coming back.

I remembered muffled screams and the flow of blood.

I sat up, swung my legs over and cut my foot on a piece of glass from the broken whiskey bottle.

My head throbbed and my vision blurred. It felt like my skull was too small for my brain. I winced in the darkness as the pain in my head seemed to build. Then I went back to feeling the glass in my foot. Through clenched teeth I pulled it out.

The night, the brutal rape, my involvement, my enjoyment to it all, came back to me.

My life, as screwed and misconstrued as it was, now was over. I, at least, wanted a say on just how over my life was and when.

And I didn’t want to fall from the graces of life alone.

My hand was in my nightstand before I knew it. I stepped over the glass as I walked around my bed, leaving bloodly footprints, following the whimpering and crying.

I looked my aftermath of my actions right in the eye: Lulina crying on the phone as she was knelt down in her own blood. She wore nothing more than her bra, but even that looked like it had been caught in a tornado. Her hair was matted and frayed, and her make up on her eyes were wearing strongly on her cheeks from the shed tears. She stared back at me but did not disconnect her phone call.

She continued to talk even after I put the barrel of the gun against her forehead. “I don’t want to talk about that, Jarred.” Her lips were quivering as she spoke. A stream of spit drooled from her bottom of her split lip. “I just need help.”

She listened on the phone for a moment. I could hear Papa’s loud, angry voice on the other end. I instantly knew that she was calling him and telling him everything I had done. She would bare her soul, and return fork mine right over to my blood thristy Papa who wanted nothing more than to banish the son he wished my father never had.

I pulled the hammer back and felt my trigger finger tensing.

“No. I don’t want anyone to see me like this, Jarred.” She listened a few moments more on the other end. “Tristan is close to me. I want him to come get me.”

Lulina ended the call and the phone slipped from her fingers and clattered against the floor. The room was as silent as it was dark, and it mingled well.

I had questions about the call, about what I heard, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wasn’t sure if my mouth opened that I would scream, or I would fall to my knees and cry and beg for something that I had no idea what it was.

Hope?

Acceptance?

Happiness?

I wasn’t sure and at this moment I didn’t care. I was done with the pursit and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that I was hanging on by a very thin sting that had already been chewed on and burned.

“You’re about to get a call from your father, Tristan,” she spoke to me.

And as the words had finished the phone rang. It sounded loud, shrill and annoying as the lights blinked on my pre-paid and vibrated on my night table.

I ignored the call.

“What do you plan on doing, Tristan?” She asked.

I pushed the gun harder into her forehead, “I plan on putting a bullet in your head then put the gun in my mouth and doing the same.”

She laughed softly then stopped and touched her swollen cheek. “Here I am, protecting you after what you did to me.”

The phone started to ring again and I ignored it.

Lulina met my eyes again. “If you want to die so bad then do it and save me the speech, but if you want to live then answer your fucking phone.”

I closed my eyes, dropping the gun away from her head and tried to think but temples flared in pain.

I opened my eyes and stared at her long and hard.

“I don’t want to live anymore, Lu,” I said.

A sob spilled from her mouth but she covered her mouth with her hand. “I don’t believe you.”

And neither did I believe myself anymore. The quiet buzz in my head slowly disappaited, the metallic taste in my mouth went away. The world that was so closed off just a moment ago, creaked open and I saw life again.

Lulina had mentioned life after this, after what I done and the self survival and perseveration started to churn inside me again.

Self preservation is an act we all share, but that doesn’t excuse it from being cruel and damning.

The phone rang again and I answered it.

“Lulina’s hurt. She’s driving to your house and I need you to bring her here,” my father commanded.

“Whats wrong with her?” My voice was hoarse, and it sounded bad in my own ears, but I noticed you could easily mistake it for someone waking up.

“Just get her over here.”

“My car died on me.”

“Did I not mention that she was driving over to you?”

“I’m just waking up. I didn’t hear you.”

“Let me make this extra crystal clear. She’s in her own car and she’s parked outside of your apartment. Go down stairs, get in her car and drive her here.”

My father hung up in my face.

I fell down on my bed. My head hit my hand, while my free hand dropped the gun on the mattress.

“What’s your game?” I asked Lulina after an exhausted bout with my thoughts.

“You better hurry, Tristan. Your father and Papa is waiting for you to bring me home. Any longer they will suspect something.”

“I’m not afraid of dying, Lu.”

“Yes you are. Here’s the golden chance for you to save your own ass while you still can, but first, Tristan, be a doll and clean my blood off you.”

I realized then that you were only truly powerful when you had nothing to lose - when you felt nothing.

Now I was feeling so ashamed and disgusted at myself that I could barely swallow around it.

I was disgusted at how the people in my life latched on to me and drained me of every single thing I ever held close.

And I was ashamed because I had become a monster when I lashed back.

I had confused monster with mobster.

***

I snuck small glances at Lulina as she watched the world pass by her window. Her eye had been blackened, her lip – both bottom and lower – had been split and bruised. Her cheeks were swollen and discolored, and they seemed to glow under the new falling of her tears.

When I had first looked at my destruction of her, my dismantling a woman I had looked at as my replacement mother – of course this was before she crept into my bedroom, and, as I thought about it, after – I was appalled at the lengths I had went to gain control of a relationship that had proven cruel and unbalancing. It wasn’t until I saw her in this light, bathed in her own blood, sweat and tears, did I become more angered at myself and sorry for her.

She sniffled and carefully tried to wipe tears from her eyes, and she gave up when her cheek proved to be too tender and bruised to touch. Finally, she looked her age; she looked like the woman she had hidden under make up, hair and tight, sexy clothes. The bags under her eyes seemed to dance under the streetlights we passed as we drove down the street.

Life had been its own hell for her.

Where Dominique flourished, Lulina had failed.

Lulina was not respected in my family, and maybe looked lower than me and Zander. She had been barely out of her childhood before she was married off to a mob boss to be nothing more than a woman to birth his child, and suck his dick without being asked. She used her face, sex and manipulation to get a mere fraction of respect and placement, but even what she did have in that department didn’t seem quite enough. My father avoided the woman for her prowess, and my Papa acted as if she didn’t exist. In this light, I wondered if Papa feared her. Lulina was much like him.

Papa used blood and bullets as his voice where she used sex and cleavage for hers.

No. Dominique would never know her hell. Dominique was smart and efficient. She could be feared and respected and earned her keep, as whereas, her mother had been the running joke. Lulina had been the scribbled messages in dirty bathrooms and lustful gaze of a man who just wanted sex and nothing more.

Dominique used me for her own purposes, and like Lulina knew, and I was soon to find out, that I was no more use to her. She had asked for a taste, gotten it, and now she could move on.

Waking up in the hotel room alone had been proof enough.

Lulina came to me tonight to help with my perception of reality.

Dominique, and thinking there was a life somewhere to be had, was a dream.

Lulina, complying with our old age affair behind the backs of the men who would kill us both, was reality.

And as for Lulina, well, she had her own reasons why she dug her hooks into me.

And here she was still trying to hold on, eventhough I had slept with her daughter and fell in love with her as salt in the wounds.

Another tear cascaded down Lulina’s cheek. She didn’t bother trying to wipe it away, the pain not worth it.

Johnny had been Lulina’s protection. He had been her key card to this family, and now that he was gone, there was no reason for her to remain. She had no one and she was pushing almost fifty. Her daughter did not love her. When I saw Dominique look at her mother, I saw nothing but quiet rage and unfamiliarity with the woman who shared her blood. When Dominique hugged Lulina, it looked like Dominique was better off hugging a tree. Lulina couldn’t have missed it. I didn’t miss it and I had been across the room, and borderline drunk, seeing the hostile, voiltile of unspoken abandonment and resentment to the relationship that was supposed to define mother and daughter.

And the more I saw, the more I wanted to look away.

Rape was about taking away by force and I had done that. It was about power and rarely ever about sex. Cruel men partook on the act, but cowards owned the word. Men raped when they had nothing left to hold onto.

And I had just wanted control over my life. Yes, I had forced myself inside her, but I was really fucking my own world, the people in it - the people who affected me.

I had more intamicy with my own demons than I did with the woman I was destroying on my hard floors.

***

There were two nurses and one fat doctor with thick glasses waiting out front as I drove up to the compound. Lulina flinched again as the car came to a stop. In the very near future, Lulina would have to take her clothes off and be examined. She would have to relive the horror all over again and reconstruct the scene.

And maybe as this happened, she would finally tell who had done this to her.

And then it would be my turn.

The nurses hung back as the doctor slowly opened the door. Although I could hear his knees crack from where I was sitting, he bent down low. Past the thick glasses, he had kind, brown eyes. His face was compassionate and sensitive as he studied Lulina.

He was all too careful not to touch her.

“Ma’am, you’re going to go with these nurses and their going to take care of you. You don’t need to worry anymore. Your ordeal is over.” His voice was smooth and precise. He was working for us, so I know he was highly paid, but he took time with his work and did it right. “I promise that we will make this as quick as possible, and we will respect your body. It’s your body, ma’am, and we will do what you allow us to do to help us.”