Page 48 of A Light in the Darkness
“Of course I knew her. You look just like her… such strong genetics.” He reaches out, running a finger along my jawline and yanking my chin up so that I have to tilt my head back to look at him. “Whoever your daddy is, I don’t think he contributed anything to your gene pool, poor fucker. Hell,Icould be your father. I sure fucked her hard enough.”
His laugh atwhatever fond memory he just unlocked makes my stomach drop and the bile rise. He hasn’t said as much, but the dread creeping through me is a good enough indicator that whoever this man is, he wasn’t my mother’s gentle lover. And though I know nothing about her, I imagine her going through what I did, being sold to a stranger, paving the way for me to follow in her footsteps all these years later.
Did this man buy her? Did he take her away from a family that loved her and get her knocked up with me through force? Do I have family out there somewhere—grandparents, siblings?
The air is too thin to breathe properly, and the tears that I’m stifling don’t help. I think my nose has stopped bleeding, but I can taste the copper at the back of my throat, mixing with the acid from my empty stomach. “You mean yourapedher?”
He rolls his eyes, dropping my chin and pushing me away from him as if my presence disgusts him. “That’s such an ugly word, Claire.Don’tsay it again.”
There’s a warning in his cold eyes, something hard and sinister that makes me think twice about saying exactly what I think of him. I’m opening my mouth to try again when he shrugs. “I took her, because she was there for the taking.”
It’s such a blasé answer that I can’t really tell if he’s serious. Apparently, he is, because he looks irritated with me when I stare at him, aghast. “It’s not like I hunted her down on the street and took her. Jesus.” He makes an effort to wipe away the pinched look of irritation between his brows. “Her life was already over. Why deny myself something so sweet when it was being offered to me?”
“Offered?”
“Yes, offered.” He looks annoyed with me. “It would have been rude to turn the host down.”
I realize why it looked like I was underwater when a tear rolls down my cheek and drops onto my chest, mixing with the blood that may or may not be still dripping from my nose. I didn’t realize I was crying, but the tears are a betrayal I can’t control.
I’d had a lot of time, both growing up and as an adult, to consider the mystery that was my parentage. Nobody ever knew how to answer my questions about who my parents were or what happened to them, so as a kid, I’d made up the best kind of fantasies, imagining that my mother was an aspiring actress who’d been too poor to keep me, but would one day get incredibly famous and come searching for me. I dreamed that my father was an astronaut in space, and when he returned, he’d search the whole world for his little girl.
When I grew up enough to know that the world wasn’t the beautiful, magical place I’d thought, I started to be more pragmatic. Maybe my mother couldn’t afford me, so she gave me up and moved on with her life. Maybe my father never knew about me and never would. Maybe my mother chose a life of drugs over her baby—that was the case for a fair amount of the kids I’d known growing up in the system. Maybe the drugs even killed her.
I gave up on the idea of doing an ancestry kit to try and find my parents when I met Rhea, because for the first time, with her, I didn’t feel like I was missing something.
But in all of my childlike dreaming and even my depressive teenage despair, I never considered that my existence was dark from the beginning—from conception. I suppose no one thinks about that possibility; it’s too painful to entertain.
I want to know as much as I don’t want to know, but what I want doesn’t matter to this man. There’s so much that I need to be told to make sense of this situation, but there’s only one thought I can articulate.
“Who was she?”
A thin eyebrow raises in surprise, and he appraises my face. “Does it matter?”
Clearly it didn’t to him. To him, she was just a warm body. But it matters to me. For better or worse, I need to know. “Yes.” My throat closes just as the word slips past my lips, and I choke on a sob I stood no chance ofstifling.
Of courseit matters.
He lets go of a heavy sigh that’s part irritation and part wistful. “Her name was Lauren. Like I said, you look just like her. From the moment I saw you pop up in that auction, I knew I had to have you… that was the best night of my life, you know? None of the girls after her ever did it for me the way she did. I tried so hard to replicate that feeling with her.” His tongue flicks out over his lips, and the groan as he adjusts himself tells me he’s getting hard just thinking about it. “But she was like lightning in a bottle. It’s been twenty-one years, and no one’s ever been able to hold a candle to her. But then I saw you…”
He's slow and deliberate as he reaches a hand up to the side of my face, watching to see if I cringe away from him, if I tremble under his touch as his thumb coasts over my dry, blood-crusted lips. But I only continue to stare at him with hatred, disbelief, and a broken heart sitting like stone in my chest.
“You are so beautiful, Claire. You’re a bit older than she was when I had her, but it’s okay. I’m sure that extra time has just given you more experience, right?” He laughs. “They said in the auction that you’d spent your whole last summer fucking Remington Boudreaux, and fuck, that only made me want you more. It made alotof people want you more.”
Hearing him talk about the night of the auction makes me tremble with rage or anxiety, but no matter what the cause, I’d take that dirty warehouse over this man’s basement. Even not knowing how it would turn out, that hadn’t been this horrible. That had been easier than being told that I am darkness itself, that my life exists because of a man’s vile actions. If I am darkness, there is no hope for me.
Darkness can’t touch the light. If I’m the product of this man forcing himself on my mother, then I am a black hole— a hostile, barren void. No light can exist in a black hole, and they’ll pull apart anything that dares get near them.
Maybe there’s a reason I’ve never known love… because I’d only manage to destroy those who give it to me. Because I’m not capable of giving it.
“I won the auction, though.” The man who may or may not be my father says proudly. “I made sure I won, put in a cap bid and luckily you were such a surprise, most people didn’t have time to hop in. I’d have spent every penny in my account to own you… and when my friend Alexandre messaged me to offer a discount if he got first dibs, I told him no because I didn’t want to share you with anyone. But then you fucking disappeared, so I had to get creative. Of course, I knew you’d be with Boudreaux. No cargo’s ever been intercepted before, so it was pretty easy to figure that much out.” He rolls his eyes, as though regaining my freedom was a mild disappointment for him.
“Do you know how easy it is to tap into digital files?” He asks, switching direction so suddenly that my head spins from the jolt. “Cameras, phones, smart TVs and smart cars. We live in a world where everything is just so fuckingeasyto take, if you’re smart enough to know how. Tapping into Jovich’s phone to fuck with Remington? That was just for fun… just a little attempt at keeping him humble. But breaking into the circuits in his security system? That was informational. I had to make sure you were there. And I got an eyeful.” He laughs. “Watching you two together only made me need you more. You make the prettiest sounds with a cock in your ass.”
There aren’t words for the horror that dawns on me at his admission that he’s seen me in my most intimate moments… my most vulnerable. It’s a different kind of awful than what he’s told me so far, different than whatever he plans to do to me. It’s a strange fusion of sexual assault and mental abuse, where I can’t simply retreat to some place in my head, because even that has been tainted. The best times of my life with Remy were put on display for some sick fuck to jerk off to. That knowledge makes me want to peel my skin off, particularly as he licks his lips.
“I can’t wait to hear it in real life, when it’s my cock ripping you apart.” He groans. “But you had to go and fuck everything up. You see, I was patient because I had to be… because I had to wait for just the right moment to have you. I wanted to go meet you at the airport, but it was too early, so I watched and waited. I saw all your internet searches, saw just how badly you wanted to find Wes.” He turns toward the workbench against the near wall, covered in shiny tools that don’t look as if they’ve ever been used.
It’s hard to see everything set up there, since the darkness of the basement swallows most everything. What Icansee isn’t exactly comforting. Hammer, nails, screwdriver and pliers and a wrench so big it could probably fracture my skull with a single tap. None of it sends the appropriate level of fear through me though— my brain is fuzzy, like it’s already trying to protect me from whatever could happen down here.
