STORM: A Standalone Romance (116 page)

Levi half turned before there was sickening thud, and his face registered a moment of confusion and pain before nothingness.

I didn’t understand what was happening until I saw Levi tumbling heavily to the bed beside me, his lips parted in surprised and pain, his hand attempting to explore whatever pained him but falling uselessly on the mattress. There wasn’t any blood, but then again, I knew that you could die without it. My mother had seemed for all the world to be asleep in her bed when I knew otherwise. My eyes bore holes into Levi until I saw the rise of his back, a tangible sign he was breathing.

“Meagan, look at me.”

The voice alone was enough to make me scramble off the bed, away from Levi, running mindlessly into whatever room I could find — the next bedroom adjacent to Levi’s that I used to keep my growing collection of belongings. He’d bought me so many clothes and shoes and purses and accessories that I’d have overtaken his closet long ago before he assigned me a room-sized closet.

But none of that was important right now. There wasn’t an exit in this room. There wasn’t an escape. My panic had run me right into a dead end. I didn’t have time to dwell on the discomfiting fact that I’d run away from Levi after he’d been hurt, leaving him to whatever fate might befall him. His attacker was in the room with me.

“Look at me.”

I whirled around, standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by everything Levi had given me, to face the problem.

The problem didn’t look very threatening. He was just a man — not very tall, not remarkable in any way other than the fact that he’d come into the townhouse, hit Levi, and chased me into this room. He smiled like he recognized me, like he expected me to know who he was, but I couldn’t place him. Where was the security team? Where were the police? This place was supposed to be tighter than Fort Knox. That was what Levi had put into place after I’d found the note on the bed, on the pillow where I’d laid my head to sleep. He’d had the place turned upside down, considered installing security cameras, but stopped at my behest. Was this my fault? Could we have been safer if I’d just been able to suck it up and deal with the cameras?

Everything was my fault.

“You got my note, didn’t you?”

I still didn’t understand how that voice — so dead, so relentless, so familiar — was issuing forth from that body. The body didn’t look like anyone I recognized, but the voice was there.

“And you had to have heard that I killed your brother by now, right?”

I flinched and breathed harder. Levi had said there was a good chance Carl was the one behind Matt’s shooting, but it hadn’t seemed plausible until now.

Now, when Carl was standing before me.

I set my shoulders and lifted my chin. “Why did you kill my brother?” If I was going to face this thing instead of running away, I wanted answers.

“Because I could.” That voice was so maddening. It made me feel like I was going crazy to hear it again. “Because I knew it would flush you out. Because he would’ve been a threat. Because I wanted to.”

None of them was the answer I sought, the answer I wanted to hear. My brother had died for nothing. He’d died because Carl had some abstract thought that Matt would try to protect me here in New York City, but now I had Levi, all of his security team, and a good portion of the police force — for what little good they’d done me. After all of the measures, Carl had still been able to weasel his way inside.

“Why are you here?” I asked, my voice quavering even thought I didn’t want to. I still hadn’t been able to look fully at the body filling the doorway, trapping me inside this room. Part of me still didn’t want it to be real. I expected at any moment to wake up from this latest nightmare from my past, but I knew I was living it. There wasn’t an escape from this reality.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d come back for you, Meagan?” he asked, his lips curling upward into a grin. He was very pleased with himself.

The reality was so ludicrous that I studied the man in front of me, my stomach tense but not churning, for a long time. He didn’t look like the Carl that plagued my mind, both awake and asleep. The Carl who’d invaded my innocence had an innocuous bald spot, a soft, pudgy belly, and a pervasive overall feeling of being non-threatening. It was the reason my mother never suspected anything, the reason my brother didn’t try take me out of the house sooner.

It was the reason I didn’t understand just what was at stake until it was far too late.

But this man standing in front of me, claiming to be the man who’d ruined my life, didn’t look like Carl at all.

This man was slim, wearing a nice, dark suit like everyone else on Levi’s security team, fitting in perfectly — right down to the closely cropped hair, which didn’t add up. He wasn’t bald at all. I couldn’t see that shiny spot I’d so often stared at.

But there were things that added up all too well. The height factor was something you couldn’t really fake. Carl hadn’t been that tall — about as tall as I was — and he was easily the shortest person on Levi’s security staff.

And then there were the eyes.

I knew those eyes so well that it was almost as if they were my own, staring back out of the mirror at me.

Those eyes had watched me asleep and awake, watched me even when I wasn’t aware they were watching me — in the shower, getting dressed, interacting with other people, playing outside in the yard. They’d watched after Carl had asked me to do horrible things, watched the aftermath of those events, watched me struggle to have semi-normal relationships and conversations with people, watched me fight with myself. Those eyes had continued to watch me long after Carl had left, on the myriad videotapes he’d taken of me to use for his own foul purpose. To continue to control and terrorize me with their presence, knowing they were out there, squirming at the fear of what would happen if he’d show them to someone. To anyone. To Levi, to show the man I loved just how obedient I’d been, just how complicit I’d been in my own abuse.

I’d done everything he asked on those tapes. There was no proof of the time that I’d stood up to him — except for my mother’s grave.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he asked, and I finally did. He was different, but it was Carl. Those piggish, garbage eyes had given away his ruse. If only I’d been able to accurately describe them to the police sketch artist, if only I’d been able to get anything right, then maybe Carl wouldn’t have been able to so successfully infiltrate the safety netting Levi had so carefully put into place around us.

“What do you want?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice casual, detached, forcing my tone to be even while the rest of me trembled.

He laughed. “I see right through you,” he told me, and I believed him. He knew me better than anyone, knew me in ways no one else ever would. He could see I was trying to be brave, and that false emotion made me look even more vulnerable.

“Leave me alone,” I tried again, but it was an even feebler attempt.

“No, this has been too long in coming,” Carl said, shaking his head. “I’ve waited too long, left you alone too long, gotten distracted, sidetracked for too long. But now we’re here, together, and we’re going to make up for some lost time.”

I tried to still myself for what was coming, for the steps that Carl starting taking toward me, my heart hammering in my chest. I tried to take heart that Levi was only a room away, unconscious but still alive — for the time being. He said he would always be here for me, and he was, but it was different. I needed him. I really, really needed him, and he wasn’t there.

“Touch yourself, Meagan,” Carl purred, that suggestion chilling me to the bone, making me shiver. I gagged at my own body’s helpless reaction to those words. It had been conditioned to react to that command, and I was ashamed to realize that I was wet between my legs, unable to resist to what had been ingrained in me even as it made me want to vomit.

“Don’t disappoint me,” he said, making me jerk in sick reaction, stumbling backward, away from him. He’d gotten so close to me while I’d been stuck in place, paralyzed with self-loathing. “You do what I say. You know what happens when you don’t.”

“You can’t take anything else from me,” I told him, unable to conceal my voice’s shaking. “I can’t be hurt anymore by you. I refuse to be.”

He threw his head back and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re an idiot. Of course I can take things from you. Don’t you understand what you have? You’re in love.”

My breath caught in my throat. Carl was right. I was in love. I loved Levi, the man in the other room, injured only because he loved me.

“Don’t you see?” Carl prompted me. “Everything you get close to — everyone — turns to shit. You’re not allowed to be happy unless I say you are. You’ll never be normal again. You’re a broken-down girl, Meagan. You should be put out of your misery — but I love you too much for that. I love that misery. I crave it. You should watch some of the videos I took of you. Your eyes hate me the entire time you’re touching yourself. And then, right on the brink of your climax, they change. You don’t hate me anymore. You love me for letting you feel good. You love me, and you hate yourself. It’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

My knees were in danger of giving out. If I fell, it would all be over. I wouldn’t be able to resist Carl. As repulsive as he was to me, as badly as I wanted to push him away, I couldn’t. He was inside of me already, inside of my head, and I couldn’t get him out. He had always been there, and would always be there. He was the hole I always struggled to fill. The one that always cried out for relief.

But if I fell, everything would fall down around me. The progress I’d made, the steps forward I was continuing to take. Levi. Carl wouldn’t let him live, no matter what I did. He’d controlled me for so long with the threat of taking my mother from me, and I knew that even if I did what he asked of me to try and protect Levi, it would only be a matter of time before Carl ended him anyway.

I knew it was more than a possibility. Carl was capable of it, and all too willing to do it. He’d killed my mother because I didn’t do what he said. He killed my brother just to flush me out into the open again. And he’d kill Levi if I didn’t obey him — whether I obeyed him or not. Just to make me come undone.

Levi’s life hung in the balance, and I was the only person who could do anything about it.

That much was clear to me, now. Yes, Carl was the person who was responsible for all of this pain and turmoil. I wasn’t the responsible party. My doctor had been working on that point with me — that I wasn’t responsible for what had happened. I hadn’t asked for bad things to happen to me. I’d coped with the situation as best I could for as long as I could until I tried to do something about it. Carl had been the one behind all of it.

But I couldn’t turn away from the idea that I was the one who would determine what happened next. If I didn’t make my stand now, there wouldn’t be a way to come back from it — no Levi to help me pick up the pieces, no doctors to help sew the parts back together, no police to put the bad guy in jail. There would only be Carl. Carl and me.

I was done backing away from him. I was done orbiting around his horror. If I was ever going to get as close to normal as was possible for me, I needed to dig my heels in and face this.

I had weapons in my arsenal this time that I didn’t have before — a better understanding of what Carl was capable of, a burgeoning strength inside of me from the sessions with the doctor, a literal weapon, the gun I’d used to pepper a target with holes, and the love of the man in the next room, above all else. I loved Levi with everything I had, everything I could give him. I would do anything for him, and I knew what I had to do.

“I’ll do what you want,” I said finally, forcing my eyes to meet his.

“Of course you will. I’ll kill Levi Morgan if you don’t.”

“But I want to do it in the other room. So I can see him. Make sure he’s all right.”

Carl paused for a moment to consider this while I inwardly cringed. Was it too obvious that I wanted to be in the other room? That was where my purse was that I carried today — and, by extension, the gun within it.

A laugh jolted me from my anxiety. “You sick little whore. You’re hoping he wakes up in the middle of it, don’t you? You want him to see you touching yourself for me.”

“I just want to make sure he’s okay,” I said again, lowering my eyes. He had to let me into that room. I wouldn’t be able to do this otherwise.

“Let’s go, then,” Carl said, making me stifle a sigh of relief. “I’ve waited long enough for this. I won’t wait any longer. Look. Look at what all this waiting has done.”

He grabbed my hand a pressed it against his crotch, and I gagged again at the feel of his erection. God, I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t strong enough to do this, to face him. But I didn’t have any other choice, now. Levi needed me. Carl would kill him if I didn’t do this, just like he’d killed my mother.

“Go on,” Carl egged me on. “Get up there on the bed next to your asshole rich boy. I hope he wakes up right as you’re coming.”

My eyes darted around the room until they fell on my purse, resting on the bedside table on my side of the bed. It was too much of a stretch to get it without arousing suspicion, and I couldn’t risk Levi’s life. Not now. Not when I was so close. I got up on the bed, looking at Levi, who was still passed out. I hoped he was okay. I didn’t know how hard Carl had hit him. All I could do now was what I’d done for so long and hope for the best.