Page 89 of Under Your Scars
Christian gives him a strange glare back. “No. I don’t think so.”
I try not to cringe at their attempts to make small talk with each other. Mercifully, my father’s phone starts ringing. I see from the contact photo that it’s my mom. As soon as he puts the device to his ear, I can hear my neurotic mother practically shouting at him for information. I hear him mutter off the room number and directions on how to get up here, and my mother comes running in. She looks wrecked like the rest of us, her deep brown hair sticking out in every direction, but her presence instantly has me weeping all over again. She pays no mind to my dad or Christian, coming straight to me and holding me in a tight, loving hug that only a mother could give.
“Oh,Ellie.” Her warmth brings me comfort and it feels so relieving to be able to embrace her without wanting to crawl out of my skin. She shushes me and strokes my hair while I crumble into tiny pieces. I cry until I have no more tears left to give. My dad trades places with my mom so that she can sit in the chair next to me while he stands at the foot of the bed and lightly rubs my feet on top of the covers.
Even though the room feels crowded with my parents and Christian here, I’ve never felt safer than I do right now.
I catch a glimpse of my dad. His eyes are red. He must have started crying again. I’m sure the only thing he’s thinking about is wrapping his hands around the neck of the men that raped me and killing them himself. He’s thinking about all the ways they violated me and how he plans on making them suffer for it. He’s extremely sensitive to seeing his family in pain. It’s the entire reason he begged me not to move to Meridian City. I remember the fight we got in over it so vividly. He said, “mark my words,Elena,by the time you realize that city is killing you,you’ll wish you had listened to me.”
It sounded so cruel at the time for him to say that to me. I wasn’t moving out here because I wanted to experience the world. I moved here because of my dream school and to work at Reeves Enterprises. I know he hates this city. It took his first family from him. I could never ask him to let that go for my sake, but now that I’m in a hospital bed with a broken spirit and three broken ribs, I wish I had just listened to him. While he’s got tears in his eyes, I know that the second I’m discharged from the hospital, he will start dangling all of this over my head until he manages to guilt me into moving back home.
My mom holds my hands tightly and kisses my knuckles. “Ellie, what happened?”
I take a shaky breath. To be honest, I don’t know what to say. Kate told the hospital staff when she brought me here that she found me in the locker room at the Hellfire Lounge naked and beaten. I haven’t had a chance to try and fill in the blanks yet.
“Back at the beginning of September…I broke my phone walking home from work one night. I couldn’t afford to fix it and I didn’t want to ask you guys for help.” I take another deep breath and look at my parents, who seem offended at the premise that I didn’t want their help. “So, I got a job at this nightclub as a bartender. The owner really liked me. He offered me a promotion to be his personal bartender.” I look away from them to blink away tears as my voice cracks. “He and his friends started touching me. Meridian City has this serial killer called the Silencer. I guess he had something against the owner of the club, so he killed his friends one night after I left. I think the owner assumed I had something to do with it because of the timing. I got in a car accident with my old boss, Neil, and I guess he knew the owner of the club and brought me to him. That’s when they…they…” I swallow the bile in my throat. “That’s all I remember. Everything is kind of fuzzy.”
I hope they won’t ask any more questions.
My parents look at me with wide-eyed panic at my story. I dare a glance in Christian’s direction, and he tightens his jaw. I can’t read the emotion on his face, but his brows are knitted together in a way that screams ‘guilt’.
My dad stiffens, fury brewing in his veins. “I’m going to kill them,” he spits out like he’s making a promise to himself.
“Neil is already dead,” Christian interjects, pulling my dad’s attention to him, as well as my mother’s. Christian’s gaze flickers to me and then back to my dad. He takes the TV remote from the table next to me and flicks it onto a local news channel. It’s an interview from a police officer. In the background, the Hellfire Lounge can be seen engulfed in flames. On the ground behind him, Neil’s body is covered in a white sheet. The police officer describes the scene using words like ‘brutal’and ‘inhumane’and ‘the most disturbing thing he’s seen on the job’.
The room goes silent. My mom looks horrified. My father looks pleased. Christian turns off the TV and introduces himself to my mom.
She smiles warmly at him and gives him a hug. He accepts it awkwardly. Dr. Portman comes back into my room, elated that my support system has arrived. My dad asks her five million questions, and she answers them all graciously.
She tells me that I’ll be in the hospital for another 24 hours to finish out my round of intravenous antibiotics, and after that she’ll send me home with several prescriptions so I can continue to heal in the comfort of my own bed.
“We’re staying here, Elliot,” my mother says once Dr. Portman leaves the room. She pulls out her phone and announces that she’s searching for a hotel to stay in. “I’m calling the office to let them know I’ll be out for a few days.”
“Sorry to interject,” Christian gently says to my mother. “You’re more than welcome to stay with me for as long as you want. I have plenty of rooms. If you give me a list of things you need, I can have them waiting for you when you get there.”
Christian’s offer is so generous that my mother beams. It’s not until this very moment that I realize why my father fell in love with her during the worst period of his life. Her energy is so positively radiant that it’s hard not to feel better. Before my mother has a chance to accept, I speak.
“Mom? Dad? Do you think I could have a few minutes alone with Christian?”
My parents hesitate at first, but my mother nods and tugs my grumbling father out of the room to give us some privacy. When it’s just the two of us, Christian stays quiet, giving me a chance to collect my thoughts.
“I was on my way to the police station,” I finally admit, unable to look at him. “I was going to tell them everything about you.” Christian bites his lip and nods. “Can you even begin to understand how utterly hopeless I felt to press that tracker? To know that I hated you in that moment, but you were the only person in the world that could help me?”
He looks down and then back up at me, trying to be brave and hold my searing, furious gaze.
“Why would you manipulate me like that? All I think about when I look back on our relationship is how it all feels fabricated now. None of it feels real.”
It’s the one question I’ve had bouncing around in my mind since he told me the truth.
Why would he do that to me if he truly loved me?
“Itwasreal,” he says, and I roll my eyes. “Just…listen. I didn’t want to manipulate you. You saved my life, and from that moment, my heart belonged to you. I guess in the beginning, I thought that if you couldn’t love one side of me, maybe you’d love the other. And then when you started falling for me, for Christian, the Silencer got jealous and just…lost himself.” He takes a deep breath. “You have to understand, Elena, who I am when I put that mask on, isn’t me. We may occupy the same body, but we’renotthe same person. He’s the man looking back at me in the mirror. My alter ego. The devil that wears me as his shell. I can’t escape him any more than you can.”
“Why are you talking like you’re two separate people, Christian?”
“Because I am!” he growls through gritted teeth, though not in anger. Inanguish. “You’re scared of him, right? Well so am I.I hate him. He hates me just as much. I promise, I swear on my life—on my parents’ graves—that if I could go back in time and not become this monster I would. But if I wasn’t the Silencer, I never would have met you. I owe you my whole fucking life and I would doanythingto keep you in it.Anything, Elena.”
I take a deep breath and stare at the wall in front of me for a long time, feeling numb and empty on the inside.
