Page 56 of Save You

“Oh, sweet baby girl!” she mutters to herself.

“Don’t,” I cry, “please don’t tell me how awful it is. Leo, please tell me something…sweet. I don’t want to cry anymore. I need something good. Please?”

It takes him a few moments to snap out of his fury, but when he does, he loosens his hold of my hand and smiles softly. He looks like he does when we’re taking one of our walks through the park.

“When Max was three, he couldn’t say ‘cucumber’, instead, he said coobumbers,” he says with a flash of his teeth, smiling over the memory.

I return the facial expression over his jovial anecdote, relieved that his story is half-working in trying to cheer me up; to try and relax me.

“I’m afraid of spiders,” he laughs softly, “and if I see one, I army roll it right out of there, no joke!” This time I laugh a little with him and notice my legs have finally begun to still. “I own a neon green mankini, which I wore to a Halloween party one night,” he says, now blushing a little, “my balls had been hanging out the side of it for about an hour before someone had the heart to tell me.”

Pru tuts from the end of the bed as she readies a cloth with cold water, but I let out a laugh that begins to warm me from the inside. Leo chuckles too, with his eyes crinkling in pure joy when he sees me returning to something a little more human.

“I’ll go and tell your boy you’re still alive, just give me the word and I’ll do it!” he whispers with his face turning serious and his eyes telling me he’s being more than genuine with this offer.

The urge to tell him to go and find my white knight, my Xander, is so strong, I have to swallow back a few times before I eventually sigh and shake my head.

“No, I’m the sacrifice here,” I mutter sadly, “I’m doing this to give him and our daughter a life out of hiding. To keep them safe from all of this! I can’t risk them taking her; can’t risk what they’d do to him.”

“I understand, Beth,” he mutters as he looks down to our clasped hands, “I just wish I could do something, anything?”

“There is,” I tell him as I place my other hand on his cheek and rub away the tear falling into his whiskers.

“Anything, sweetheart, anything!” His face is dead serious and with a strong look of determination written across his manly features.

“Do you think you could find out what he called her? I just want…I need to know her name, please?”

“It’s done!” he says with a firm nod of his head, and I smile in thanks to him.

“I’m sorry, Leo, Beth, but two minutes have been and gone. If he doesn’t see you on your post outside, he’s going to get suspicious. I’ll look after her, Leo, I promise.”

Leo glances over his shoulder at a worried-looking Pru, then nods slowly before returning his gaze to me. I smile and mouth ‘thank you’ to him.

“One day, sweetheart, remember? I promise!”

He kisses me on the cheek before reluctantly getting up to go back into the hallway.

Pru waits for Leo to close the door before crouching down to where Leo had just perched, looking very much as sad for me as he did. I thought she hated me, that she was someone who was a staunch Mayfield traditionalist, yet here she is looking beside herself with worry over me. I frown in confusion and when she sees my puzzled face, she takes my hands inside of her cold ones and squeezes them tightly.

“I’m sorry, Beth,” she says a little sheepishly, “I had no idea this is what Oliver had become; I thought he was different. He told me he had finally found the girl he had been pining for since he was twenty. Of course, when I saw you, I immediately had my suspicions. You looked so young, but I thought maybe you were just lucky…had good genes!” She laughs a little over her mistake. “But when I tracked down a photograph of your grandmother, Rosalie, I knew straight away who you were. Still, he seemed besotted with you, so who was I to question it? I thought that he was telling me the truth when he said he wanted to change things, to bring down the man who, over the decades, has been accused of the most wicked of crimes.”

“Like what? What has he been accused of, Pru?” I ask as I try to lift my head but end up dropping down again when my body complains with an aching all over it.

“Many things, Beth,” she says with a sad smile before starting to apply fresh compresses to my welts. “The first of which, was destroying one of your grandmother’s school friends, long before he had even made his intentions toward Rosalie known.”

“I don’t understand.” My family history keeps twisting and turning; it’s no wonder I’m in a constant state of vertigo. “What happened to her?”

“Her name was Lucy,” she explains, now focusing on her task rather than looking at me, “she was very quiet, very shy, and very beautiful. Her family wasn’t particularly high up in Mayfield, so someone like Carl Steele would never have considered her anything more than someone to take for his immediate gratification.”

“Oh,” I reply and begin playing with the sheet again, squeezing it tightly between my fingers while feeling deeply uncomfortable over being related to such a monster.

“She was fifteen when he attacked her. He raped her and pulled chunks of her hair from her scalp; he must have been like an animal,” she says with a sneer as she talks. “Of course, her parents lodged a complaint with the police. This soon got back to Carl and his parents; consequently, she vanished, as did the formal complaint. Her family became even lower in the pecking order, not that they cared about that, they just wanted their little girl back.”

“You said she was, like she’s no more? What happened to her?” I ask nervously because I think I already know.

“She was locked away, for years,” she says as she turns to look at me, like her words are a warning, “in a psychiatric facility. Probably to endure the same fate she had faced on the night she was attacked, over and over again. Ten years after she managed to get out, she hung herself, in the woods near to where her parents lived.”

“Oh, God!” I gasp in shocked horror. “How do you know all of this?”

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