Page 69 of Perfect Sin
“It’s not a menu with a list of options that will appease me. The kind of trauma you’ve been inflicted needs to be dealt with. Besides, I don’t want you to do it for me. You need to heal, otherwise the fallout will continue to haunt you. I don’t want that for you.”
I have to force myself to swallow to fight the sudden urge to vomit. I don’t like to think about my past, let alone talk about it. The prospect of recounting the horrors I’ve endured on a weekly basis makes me ill.
“You need this,” she insists.
I grasp on to the only thing that might dissuade her. “I’ll do it, if you do too.”
Raven looks down for a moment before bringing her eyes back up to mine. “You’re right. For a long time I dealt with what Kyle did to me with denial. Now that I’ve stopped lying to myself, it’s harder to deal with.”
Shit. I can’t keep trying to find a way out of this. Even if I really don’t want to do this, she needs to. I don’t want her suffering from a lifetime of nightmares the way I have.
“Fine,” I croak. I clear my throat. “For you, anything.”
“Thank you. I know you don’t want to, but it means you’re trying. It’s okay if we break, as long as we break together. We’ll pick up our pieces and build a mosaic to form the rest of our lives.”
I hold her tighter, feeling my lungs inflate for the first time in days. I can do this for her. Maybe by the end I’ll care enough about myself to do it for me.
* * *
The front dooropens and slams closed. “Sorry to interrupt your reunion. Shane told me Raven came home, so put on some clothes and get your asses out here. We have to talk,” Lucien shouts.
Raven groans. “We should reconsider our living arrangements.”
“C’mon,” I urge, slapping her on the ass. “He’ll just keep bothering us if we don’t see what he wants.”
Lucien is leaning against the wall in the living room when we enter. “Martin Gerrick has requested another meeting with us, but he demands to see Raven too.”
I shake my head adamantly. “No fucking chance I’m bringing her there.”
Her eyes bounce between me and her brother. “Someone fill me in please. You found Martin Gerrick? When?”
“The night you left,” I mumble.
She bites her lip, and I fear we’re on the edge of another battle, until she takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “Fill me in now then.”
I squeeze her hand, silently telling her I appreciate her effort to move past something we would have fought about even an hour ago. “He opened a new club called The Dark Room. Lucien tracked down one of the bouncers and brokered a meeting with the boss. We tried to convince him to give us information, but he doesn’t trust us. We only got two things out of the meeting. A hangover and confirmation he isn’t Damien.”
“Well, that’s something at least. Do we know who he was before he became Martin Gerrick?” she asks.
Lucien shakes his head. “Nah, he’s got that shit locked up tight.”
“Why would one crime boss help us take down another?” Raven asks us.
I tug on her hand and pull her down onto the couch with me. She lands next to my side, but that’s still too far away, so I lift her and put her on my lap.
“Looks like you two made up,” Lucien comments.
He turns his attention to Raven. “Some things weren’t adding up the more I dug into Gerrick. When I started it looked like he was in the trafficking racket like Damien, but that was the previous Gerrick. There’s a gap in time about ten years ago, and then I can only find traces of money laundering.”
She looks between both of us alarmed. “Tell me you had more than this before you met with him.”
“It was a risk,” I admit.
“Ugh,” she groans and shoves herself off my lap. “You two take stupid to an entirely new level.”
I reach for her, but she jumps up from the couch and begins to nervously pace in front of the coffee table. She stops and whirls around to face us. “Okay, tell me about this club.”
Lucien and I exchange a look. “It’s a sex club,” I finally reply.