Page 130 of A Dark Fall

And there it is. It’s not as much of a shock as I expected. There’s no crashing down of hopes and dreams at his confirmation. I guess I’ve known since 3:00 p.m. this afternoon that Mark wasn’t lying. Hearing Jake confirm it doesn’t have any effect other than my finally being able to accept it as the truth.

“Why the fuck did he come here with this, Alex? Did you ask him to find out about me? Didn’t you trust me to tell you?” His voice is still angry, but there’s a measure of hurt there too. “You went behind my fucking back?”

“What? No! Of course I didn’t go behind your back!” I feel upset he’d think I would. “I never asked him to find out about you. Of course I didn’t. He came here with this of his own volition.” I hesitate, not sure if I should say anymore. In the end, I decide Mark’s motivations are important somehow. “He said he was worried about me. Worried I had no idea what I was getting myself involved with. That you weren’t who I thought you were ...”

Jake inclines his head slightly. “Oh, that’s what he said, did he?” He sounds entirely unconvinced about Mark’s motives. “And let’s not kid ourselves here, baby, yeah? You hadsomefucking idea what you were getting involved with. You’d need to be a fucking idiot otherwise.”

His snide tone makes a chill sweep over me. This person again. The one with the cold smirk who says things to hurt me.Thisis the Jake I have no idea about.

“Oh, really? You think I had an inkling you might be a violent criminal who beats and rapes women?” I hiss, cheeks burning with rage.

He flinches back, frowning.

“Yes, you’re right, Jake. I knew that, and I let you into my bed anyway because I love a bad boy.” My voice is laced with disgust, and he seems to shrink back from it. His face rearranges into something like abject confusion.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asks.

I say nothing and hug myself tighter.

“What did that fucking pig say to you? Alex, I’ve never hit a woman in my life. Did he tell you that? Seriously? Fucking hell.” He sounds almost scared as he takes a step toward me. Instinctively, I move back from him as he does.

I can’t let this man near me. Not until I know who he is and what he’s capable of. Not until I’m clear which version of him I’m likely to get from one moment to the next.

“Baby, please tell me what he said to you.” His voice is softer now, the Jake I know seemingly back.

“I presume it was the woman who hurt you. He said the wife of an associate. She was assaulted badly. They think she was raped too. I don’t know any more than that,” I tell him. I know I should keep looking at him, watching his eyes for the truth or lies that may be written in them, but I can’t. Itphysically hurtsto look at him, and so I look down again.

“Alex, I promise you, I never laid a finger on her. That didn’t happen. I never hit her, and I certainly never ...” He can’t even say the word, and when I look up at him, he’s shaking his head. “I never touched her. I never did that.”

He looks and sounds so sincere, andgod,I want to believe him. But something niggles and gnaws away at me.

“I asked you that night here why you would let the person who stabbed you get away with it. Do you remember what you told me?” I ask him. I do need to see his eyes for this, and so I watch them closely. The sad, lost look that comes into them tells me he remembers exactly what he told me that night.

He shakes his head, eyes and mouth hard. “That’s not what I meant, Alex.”

“Convenient, you saying that now, don’t you think?”

“Oh, come on! Seriously?” he cries. “You think I’m capable of that? Of doing something like that! Baby, please, you know me. You know I would never do that. You know me.” His eyes implore me.

I huff out a small, sad laugh. “Oh, I think it’s abundantly clear that I do not know you, Jake. That I’ve neverknownyou. Not really.”

He looks hurt again as he shakes his head. “I never touched her, Alex.Fuck,you have to believe that.”

“Then tell me what you meant,” I snap. “That night, next door, you insinuated you’d meted out some justice of your own for what she did to you. What was it?”

He sighs deeply and squeezes his eyes shut with his fingers again. When he opens them, he looks resigned. Still, he meets my eye unflinchingly.

“What I meant was that she was going to have to look after her cunt of a husband for a very long time. Because I put her husband in a coma, Alex. That’s what I meant.”

I swallow, my anger dissolving on my tongue. He beat a man into a coma? Is that more or less acceptable than beating and raping a woman? My mind thinks it’s more acceptable, but since I met him—or, more accurately, since 3:00 p.m. this afternoon—my mind hasn’t been processing things like a normal person’s would, so I don’t know that I trust it.

“Were you sleeping with her?” I ask for some reason.

“Jake was known to have had ... relations with this woman.”

When his eyes flicker and blaze, it’s all the confirmation I need. Oh, he fucked her all right.

“Well, they know you were, and they think it has something to do with all this. They don’t know about your little debt-collecting visit to her husband,” I tell him.