Page 263 of As the Rain Falls
I can see her.
I can seeeverything.
I can retrace my steps back to that night in October when I asked her to watch Lucia’s dog and how it wasn’t the bed frame that hurt her. I can see Cassandra Rivera, her face completely destroyed.
Bruises bloom along her left eye, and her cheek is blue. She’s swollen, her skin irritated, and a vessel in her left eye has popped off. Her lips are split, puffier than usual, and cracked open from impact. She tries to lick them and winces, realizing only too late that it hurts.
“Don’t,” I speak softly, catching how she makes a faint sound of pain. “Don’t do that, baby.”
The pet name makes her lean into my touch a little more. Cassandra just stares at me wide-eyed and fearful, seconds away from panicking. I can feel her nervous energy at the tips of my fingers, and how she’s ready to snap.
“You can’t tellanyone.”
“It’s okay.” I reassure her by pressing my hands against the sides of her face. “I won’t.”
“You can’t see me.” She shakes her head, gulping down. “You don’t understand.”
I tilt her chin up again, still cradling her face gently.
“What happened, and why didn’t you come to me?” I hear myself ask. Knowing I was always so close, she could have taken a chance. “Cassandra, you canalwayscome to me. I want you to.”
“You weren’t home.” She closes her eyes, her face falling. “I can’t leave the house looking like that.”
It shatters me. Rage building in my chest, simmering right above the surface. A slow sickness, coiling around my ribs, making me want to puke.
I’ll kill him.
I’ll kill them all for what they did to her.
“If Nathaniel even sees me knocking on your door…” Cassandra trails off. “He’ll do a lot worse than just kick me in the face.”
“Did he hurt you anywhere else?”
I let go of her, worried that I might be adding to the pain, but she grips my sleeve and nods, pressing her hand against my chest. It’s like a silent plea for touch, and I’ve always had complicated feelings about it. How it so often comes from a place of entitlement, ownership, and control. Hers doesn’t. It never has.
“Show it to me.”
“My… my ribs,” she sobs. “He kicked me there, too. It hurts so bad!”
“Shh.” I pull Cassandra into my arms, and all I can think about is how wrong this is. How is this a crime, and I need to callthe police, and each second that I don’t is a second in which I become an accomplice. “Okay.”
She starts sobbing harder, holding onto me for dear life, and I let her pull me to the floor with her. It’s messy and uncoordinated, but none of that matters. I just want to make sure she’s okay.
“It doesn’t matter because you can’t be here!” I hear her gasp over the sobs. “You can’t know!”
“It’s okay,” I whisper, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“No, no, no!”
Cassandra thrashes, her cries turning into panic breaths. She’s hyperventilating. I need to calm her down. I start to stroke her hair, one hand hovering around her wound and the other trying to keep her hands from her face.
We stay like that for a while, just holding each other. After a while, she calms down for a second, her crying reduced to only a few hiccups, before another wave of tears starts falling down again.
All I can do is hold her tighter, keep her close to me, and hope it’s enough, but I feel so goddamn useless. She starts babbling about how she’s terrible, how I should leave, and how she’s a monster for dragging me into this. I don’t know what to say to fix this.
“You don’t understand, Beckett. He’ll kill me. And if he finds you here, he’ll kill you too!”
I’ll kill him first.
