Love's Paradox

Chapter 14: Compelled to Murder

The soft tickle of fingers running down my spine wakes me. It takes me a second to realize where I am, but then Parker's steadying breathing beside me causes my muscles to relax. It's still dark out, and I have no idea what time it is.

"Are you awake?" he whispers.

"I am now," I whisper back. "What time is it?"

"A little after two. You haven't been asleep for long." His gentle touch doesn't cease, and chill bumps march up my neck and down my arms. "You're so beautiful," he murmurs.

I smile, though I doubt he can see that or if I'm beautiful at all.

"I want you to finish your story about Ass Face."

My relaxed and sublime mood promptly sours. "Now?" I protest.

"Yes. I want to know what happened after the stairs incident. You jumped from a moving vehicle to get away from him, Rae. There must be a reason beyond what you've told me so far to put yourself in that kind of danger. You could have died."

"That's a bit dramatic."

"Says the person who jumped from a moving truck."

"Fine," I huff and turn so I'm facing him. I can barely make out his outline, but I can certainly feel his tender strokes along my skin, his way of comforting me.

I inhale a composing breath and dive into my past. "For a while, I thought I was sort of at fault for what happened. It's the way our society is—how so many still perceive women as objects instead of people. To Ian, I was to be conquered and owned. So after my fall down the stairs, I quit struggling, quit fighting for the freedom I so desperately wanted. What I didn't know was what he had in mind for keeping me."

Parker listens earnestly as I continue my story, his warmth the only thing keeping me sane.

"Of all Ian's faults, he wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination. He knew trapping me in the house was a temporary solution." I shudder at the memories. "Now he had to convince me to stay. He tried virtually every subterfuge, every ploy, even begging and insisting he'll change if I just stayed.

"If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that people only change if they want to. In the end, Ian's promises meant nothing because he didn't want to change; he only wanted to possess me."

I've tried so hard to move on, to look at my past objectively, but something inside me has kept my history lurking right under the surface. I don't want Parker to see how broken I am, so when I speak again, I force my words to be clinical. "Then he admitted to tampering with the condoms he'd worn when we had sex. There was a real possibility that I could've been pregnant."

Parker's hand freezes mid-caress, but I continue in the same dispassionate voice.

"Ian did more than control my body; he violated my mind. He manipulated, coerced, and practically told me that I could never take care of a child without him. If I left, he promised he'd fight for custody. With his father's connections, I knew this wasn't an idle threat. Leaving him after that would be an unforgivable sin in our child's eyes—it'd be like leaving my child motherless. Or, at least that's what he convinced me to believe."

"No," Parker whispers in disbelief, head slightly shaking back and forth.

I remain silent, afraid to let him hear what happened next, to discover all I had to endure to escape or the indecent things I allowed Ian to do to me.

"Rae?"

"Yeah?" I whisper.

"I want to kill him." He says this so softly that it's barely a breath. "I need to know what he did to you."