But then I remembered the day with the broken vase, when I’d seen the beast in my father come roaring out as he bellowed at my mother. Tell me who it was! He’d been a monster then. Maybe he’d always been a monster.
“She was sleeping with that fucking filth I found her with. She didn’t have to tell me; I knew it. They were together, just like I knew they’d be. I found them, and I did what had to be done. I don’t regret it. She died like she should have—like a whore.”
The Russian man, Ivan, tilted his head to the side. “She was not cheating on you, James. Olaf was her friend. They had known each other for a long time. He told me often that a friend of his was in trouble, that she was trying to run away from an abusive husband. But he did not say it was you. Perhaps she made him swear to keep her secret safe; I do not know for certain. But I do know you killed an innocent man. One who deserved better than to die at the hands of a pig like you.”
I couldn’t keep everything straight. Revelations were being tossed around casually, but each one was exploding in my head like a hand grenade. My mother was a cheater—no, she was just scared. Ben had killed her—no, my own father had. I didn’t know what to think, how to feel. It was all too much. I felt dizzy and nauseating. And all this blood around me wasn’t helping.
“What are you going to do to me?” Daddy asked. “Take me to the police?”
Ben shook his head grimly. “Whatever Ivan has in store for you will be far, far worse than jail, James. I’d say, may God have mercy on your soul, but I don’t believe in the big man upstairs, and even if I did, I don’t think he gives a damn about you.”
Ivan’s men bent down and each took one of my father’s arms in their grasp. They began dragging him off to the side of the house, where a truck sat idling. Ivan looked at Ben once, nodded brusquely, then turned and followed his men to the car. They tossed my father into the backseat and climbed in after him. Then they shut the door. The car turned and disappeared around the bend in the road.
Ben turned to face me. I was still lying in the dirt. He walked over and reached down to help me up, brushing off dirt from my clothing as I stood. I felt weak and numb everywhere, like I could barely support my own weight.
He looked down at me, his eyes steely and soft at the same time, boiling with some inscrutable mix of love and distance, of fire, of glaciers. All of the things that made him who he was, they were visible in one way or another, or maybe I was just going delusional from all of the emotional stress.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“I know.”
“Is it true?”
He took a moment before nodding. “I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s a horrible thing to hear.”
I bit my lip, then fell into his chest. He wrapped his arms around me and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe, protected. Like the wildly pinwheeling world had finally come into balance and I could start trusting the things around me again. There would be a lot of time needed to recover. It wasn’t going to be easy to come to terms with the fact that my father had killed my mother, that he’d lied to me, that he’d used me as bait to lure his enemy here and try to kill him. I was an eighteen-year-old girl, not a war-hardened biker like Ben.
But somehow, being close to him made me feel like I’d find a way to make sense of everything. To find my feet again. I felt strong. Do you trust me? he’d asked when I stood on top of the rock and looked down at the branches hiding him from sight below me. I’d said yes, and I jumped. Wasn’t this just more of the same?
In the midst of the dizziness swirling through my head, I began to feel centered and calm. His arms around me were so solid; there was no way in hell I could doubt them. His breath was so steady, so easy to rely on. It was mind-boggling how quickly he had become my everything. In a world that refused to sit still for me, he never budged. Ben was a rock. My rock.
I leaned back and looked up at him and said the only thing I knew I could say in the moment. “I love you, Ben.”
He brushed his lips against mine. “I love you, too, Carmen.”