Page 38 of Traces of Her

Twenty-Four

ROWENA

GRIFFIN STAYS QUIET AS HE lazily traces patterns on my skin. His hand trails up over my shoulder, gently stroking my scars. “Why won’t you tell me anything about you?” he asks with a trace of anger. It’s the first he’s spoken since he fell asleep last night while he was still inside me.

I haven’t told him anything from my past, nothing from up until the moment he met me. I’m sure he knows at least what the newspaper said about my disappearance, but he doesn’t know the truth. No one knows the truth of what happened but me.

It’s time to tell him.

It’s time to let him in.

He’s slowly been working his way in since the moment I met him. His charisma and charm are superficial, right along with the coldness he harbors. Beneath it all, he showed me the caring, loving man that he refuses to accept. I never wanted to let him in, but I couldn’t have stopped it even if I tried. When I noticed it was happening, it was far too late but I tried to ignore it, we both did.

But now the ice has thawed, leaving both of us bare with our souls on full display.

Breaking the silence, I let it all out.

“I grew up in a wonderful home with two parents whose hearts were made of pure gold. Being an only child, I was the center of their entire universe. Looking back now, I know they weren’t perfect, but they were as close as one could get to that. Even still, I had an amazing childhood.” I pause quietly. “Until I turned ten.” Griffin holds me silently, waiting for me to continue and slowly strokes my arm.

“My best friend Maggie was hit by a car and killed, and I watched it all happen. My parents threw me into therapy, thinking that seeing that had messed with my mind. It did, but not in the sense they anticipated. I became obsessed with death and intrigued by the darker things in life. A year after it happened, they sent me to see Maggie’s parents and take them flowers as a last ditch effort to shock me out of this issue. It didn’t work. It made it worse. They drug me deep into the darkness of the world until I was face to face with monsters.”

My mind plays the events like a movie, except it’s one I didn’t star in. Long ago, I grew numb and detached, indifferent to it all. I shoved it into a box and pushed it into the darkest corners of my mind and now I was pulling it out, dusting it off and reliving it from a different perspective.

“Maggie’s parents, Phil and Janet, invited me into their home that night and never let me leave,” I tell him in a monotone voice.

“Rowena Petrov,” he says in a hushed voice, running his hands through my hair. “The missing girl with pale hair and ice blue eyes. Your disappearance was all over the news until they determined it was just a wild goose chase. Everyone chalked it up to you being a troubled child that simply ran away from home, but that wasn’t the case, was it?” he asks, slipping his fingers under my chin and tilting my head up toward him.

Griffin’s dark brown eyes are soft, searching mine, as I slowly nod. “No, it wasn’t,” I whisper. His lips brush mine softly before he tucks me back into him like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

“They held me hostage for six years, right down the street from my own home and no one ever knew. They kept me in Maggie’s room, and I was forced to become her. I was addressed as Maggie and had to take on her entire persona. Janet homeschooled me since I was never allowed to leave the house and Phil treated me as he would his daughter until Janet went to sleep,” I stop, feeling Griffin tense beside me, but he stays silent.

“He would come to my room most nights and touch me in ways a man shouldn’t touch his daughter. But he knew who I was, that I wasn’t Maggie, so that made it alright.” I roll my eyes to myself, repeating these delusions these people truly believed. Suddenly, I’m sitting upright facing the dark side of Griffin, whose eyes are clouded and black.

“What’s his last name?” he demands. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

Shaking my head, I give him a small smile, reaching up and cupping his cheek. “He’s been taken care of.”

Cocking his head to the side, he raises an eyebrow. “By who?”

I stare at him, biting my lower lip, waiting for him to catch on.

“It was you,” he declares, raising his eyebrows.

“There was a fire.” I shrug, looking at the scars across my shoulder and torso. “Although.” I pause, a smile tugging at the corner of my lips. “Their dead bodies would tell you an entirely different story.”

Griffin’s eyes fill with admiration as a smile forms on his face as he leans back down onto the bed, pulling me down with him. “Tell me all about it, love,” he says in his low, silky voice.

So, I do.

I tell him everything up until the moment he walked into my life.

The blood, the dead, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Griffin doesn’t hold me in an effort to comfort me for he knows that’s not what I need. He comes from a world filled with darkness and covered in blood. We’re both survivors who have found their strength in our journeys to hell and back.

Slowly slipping inside me, he shakes the dust from my heart and paints over my tainted soul with the dark colors of his love.

We’re simply doing what we do best.

Surviving.

But now we no longer have to do it alone.

It doesn’t take long for reality to rear her ugly face, drawing us back into our personal hell. Jared calls, ranting and rambling about some bullshit with their parents and sister, Lydia. I don’t complain as Griffin drags me back to Jared’s house, leaving me with the psychopath as he wanders into the basement to help her.

She never asked for any of this, yet she’s here for a reason.

I don’t know why but I will find out and do what no one ever did for me.

I will get her out of here alive.