Echo

  The car moves slowly up the winding road that weaves through tall, snow-covered trees. When I reach the top, I pull in front of what was once promised to be my safe haven of escape. This should’ve been my home with Declan; instead, he’s my lost love, and I, his enemy.

  Gravel crunches beneath my feet when I step out of the car. I stand, looking up at the three-story estate that’s secluded up here. Majestic and alone at the top of this hill, the only sound is the wind that howls between the trees and the swirling of snow that blows from the bare branches. I look over to the grand fountain and imagine the sound of its trickling water in the summertime.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turn to the house and see Declan standing at the front door in a pair of tailored slacks and an untucked button-down. My heart’s beat immediately responds to him, and I murmur, “Nothing. Just looking at the grounds,” while I walk over to him.

  He looks down at me as I walk up the steps leading to the front door, and when I get a whiff of his cologne, I want so badly to jump into his arms. To make this all disappear. To go back in time so I can do it all differently. To save him from the cliff of goodness I shoved him off of.

  But he doesn’t say a word as he gestures with his hand to enter his home.

  It takes nearly all my strength to stay on my feet when I step inside the massive entryway. Looking up and around, everything has been remodeled in an elegant, contemporary flair of whites and ivories. The foyer spans the length of the house, and you can see straight to the back where it opens up to the large, glassed atrium. Everything is bright and peaceful, except for the man who walks past me.

  I follow as cold darkness leads me into an elaborate sitting room, which has yet to be remodeled. The walls are lined in aged wooden bookshelves that hold hundreds and hundreds of books. So many you can smell the pages and leathered bindings. An antique chandelier hangs over the large seating area of leather wingback chairs and a tufted chesterfield sofa that’s identical to the one he had in the office of his loft back in River North.

  Declan takes a seat in the center of the couch, offering no welcome when he speaks. “Say what you need to say.”

  And suddenly, everything I thought about saying last night is gone. I have no words as I look at him. I walk closer, and instead of sitting on the couch with him or on one of the chairs, I sit on the wooden coffee table right in front of him, and when I do, he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

  We don’t speak for a while; we just look into each other’s eyes. Mine filled with pain and sorrow; his filled with chilling anger. Threatening tears prick and burn, but I fight to remain strong, when truthfully, I’m a shattered little girl, yearning to cling to the solace that’s right in front of me and never let go.

  With a shallow breath, my eyes fall shut, pushing a couple tears down my cheek and I whimper, “I’m so sorry.”

  I can’t bear to look at him in my insurmountable guilt for what I’ve done. My head drops to my hands as I will for strength, but it doesn’t come. That’s the thing with Declan, he’s always had a way of making it difficult for me to lock up the truth of my emotions. He’s the one person who was able to strip down my barricade and make me feel—truly feel.

  When I finally open my eyes, he hasn’t shifted. His hard face remains, unaffected by my tears.

  “Say something,” I whisper. “Please.”

  Creases form along his forehead, and his eyes look to ache, when he finally does speak, asking, “Why did you do it?”

  I vow to myself to stop all the lies. To give him transparent truth about everything. If that makes me a savage in his eyes, which it undoubtedly will, then fine. Because if he’s going to judge me, I at least want him to do it honestly.

  “Revenge,” I finally admit.

  “I want the truth,” he demands.

  “I married Bennett with intentions of destroying him,” I say, and then pause before adding, “I married him to kill him.”

  He releases a heavy puff of air in disbelief. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “What I told you was a lie. The story about me growing up in Kansas and my parents’ death. It was all a lie.” The guilt has festered long enough, and I crack. My words bleed from the cobwebs of my soul, and I cry as the wounds shred apart. “I don’t know how to make it right, but I want to. I never thought I would fall in love with you the way I did.” My words spill out through my constricted throat.

  “Tell me why,” he snarls. “What did he do to you that you’d want him dead?”

  “He murdered me. I wanted payback.”

  Declan’s jaw grinds, and I go on, explaining, “I was happy . . . When I was a little girl, I was happy. I lived with my father, and then one day . . . ” I choke on the agony of my words. “ . . . One day he was taken from me. Arrested. I was only five years old when it happened. It was all Bennett’s fault. My dad was sent to prison and I was sent to hell.”

  I stop when I can’t speak anymore and simply cry. Choking in broken gasps of air while Declan just sits here—a stone of a man with eyes of disbelief, confusion, anger. It hurts to look at him, but I do it anyway.

  “I never saw my father again, and when I was twelve years old, he died in prison. Killed by another inmate.”

  “What did Bennett have to do with this?” he interrupts.

  “Because . . . it’s a long story,” I exhaust.

  “You owe me the truth.”

  “He . . . he thought I was being abused by my dad, but it wasn’t the truth. He told his parents, and the authorities were called to investigate, but instead they uncovered that he was trafficking guns and arrested him. I know it sounds bad, but he was a good man and I had a good life with him.” My cries erupt harder, blubbering, “He wasn’t bad, he was perfect and loved me, and Bennett took it all away. In a single moment, he set fire and incinerated everything in my world. That asshole stole my life!”

  Shaking his head, Declan mutters, “Doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.”

  “It was his fault,” I press, but his response is sharp when he moves on, “I don’t want to argue your fucked up rationalizations. Tell me . . . what was I?”

  “Declan, please . . . ”

  “Tell me. Tell me what I was!” his voice booms off the walls, demanding to know.

  “In the beginning . . . in the beginning you were the pawn,” I confess.

  “More,” he urges.

  “Declan, you have to understand that it changed and—”

  “More!”

  “Okay!” I blurt out and then repeat in a softer, defeated tone, “Okay. Yes, you started as the pawn. I was going to use you to kill Bennett.”

  “Why not you?”

  “Because I was afraid of getting caught if I got my hands too dirty.”

  His teeth grind as he begins to clench and unclench his fists.

  “I’m sorry,” I breathe. “But when I got to know you, and we connected so easily, I fell for you. You make me feel something that no one has ever been able to do. No one has ever looked at me the way you do—the way you did. I’ve had a hard life, but—”

  “Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you excuse your fucked ways because of the life you’ve had.”

  “I need you to know that what we had, the feelings that I had for you, were genuine. I truly loved you. I still do. I was trying to find a way out of the scam. I was giving it all up so we could be together.”

  Pinching the bridge of his nose, he takes a moment before speaking. “I need to know something . . . ”

  “Anything. I’ll tell you anything to make this right.”

  “Was it true? Bennett beating the shit out of you, was that true?” His voice strains on those words, and I hate the witch I am and having to admit, “No. Bennett never hurt me.”

  “You fucking bitch!” he scathes through a severed cry.

  I see how deeply I’ve hurt him. I
t’s all over his face and it cuts through his voice. He rests his head on his tightly fisted hands, shaking in horror.

  “Tell me what to do. Tell me,” I beg, needing to take his anguish away. Needing to make this whole situation just disappear.

  “You can’t do shit, Nina.” And the instant he says my name, he winces, squeezing his eyes shut and then asking, “What the hell do I even call you?”

  A muted stillness lengthens between us as we look into each other’s eyes—completely demolished. Seconds that feel like hours pass.

  And for the first time, although he already knows it from the file, I give him my name.

  “Elizabeth Rose Archer.”

  “ELIZABETH ROSE ARCHER,” she tells me on soft words after a long span of silence.

  How could Satan own such a beautiful name?

  I keep my hands fisted tightly so she can’t see them shaking, but the roiling fury that runs thick through my blood has me on the verge of detonation. It’s all I can do to hold myself together right now. This woman, the one I loved not so long ago, is like gasoline dripping on my burning heart.

  Her name was already known to me. I read it in the file I found on her husband’s desk after I shot and killed him. Seeing her pictures covered in a spray of his blood destroyed all my trust in the world. It was only a couple hours later after getting home and digging into that file when I soon realized I’d been scammed. Scammed by the only person who had ever been able to seep into my heart so entirely. I’ve never loved the way I loved her. And to know it was all a lie, the deceit of being played, was more than I could take.

  I know I murdered an innocent man, and now, hearing her crazy explanation has my mind so fucked up. How could I have been in love with someone as psychotic as her?

  What the fuck is wrong with me?

  “Declan, please. Say something. Anything,” her tiny voice requests.

  My body is a mass of tense muscles I refuse to relax for fear of what I’ll do. So I keep myself locked and stern when I speak. “So he never hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Never mean to you?”

  “No. Bennett loved me. He didn’t know who I was.”

  “How’d you get the bruises then?” I ask, remembering how God-awful she would look, covered in horrifically grotesque bruises. Sometimes her skin would split from the swelling and bleed. The battered blood that pooled beneath her skin’s surface always stained her body. It fucked me up. Rage and fury for a man I believed was inflicting the abuse, lamenting heartache for the woman I loved, and guilt from not being able to protect her. The emasculating position she put me in, knowing damn well she had me fooled. And now I sit here feeling like a pussy that got manipulated by nothing more than a runaway street kid.

  “My brother.”

  “Brother?”

  “He was in on it too. I would go to him to get the bruises.”

  “It was your brother who beat the shit out of you? On purpose to fool me?”

  She nods her head shamefully in response.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re sick.”

  I watch while tears drip from her chin and wish they were the acid she filled my heart with so connivingly.

  “I know. But—”

  “Just stop,” I bark. I can’t take any more of this shit, but she doesn’t stop.

  Her words come out in a rush of panic, “When I told you I loved you, when I gave you those words, I meant them. I didn’t want to use you, not at that point. I wanted out and to keep you from doing what I initially wanted you to do.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?!”

  “Everything spun out of control so fast.”

  “Were you happy? When you found out Bennett was dead, were you happy?”

  “It destroyed me to know I pushed you so far,” she counters.

  “Answer my fucking question!” I belt out, standing up and searing my eyes into hers as I look down on her. “Did it make you happy?”

  Her body trembles when she closes her eyes and admits, “Yes.”

  “So you got what you wanted?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  She tilts her head back to look up at me, and my bones beg to impale her, to beat the living shit out of her, a punishment she’ll never forget. One that would mutilate her for life.

  “No. It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t worth sacrificing you because saving you was all I wanted to do at that point.”

  I sneer at her ludicrous words. “You wanted to save me so much that you left me in a pool of blood to die?”

  Her eyes radiate horror.

  “That’s right, darling. I was conscious. I felt you, your touch, your kiss. But all it took was for that guy who shot me to say Go for you to leave me to die. Was that your idea of saving me?”

  “No, Declan,” she says through her tears that never stop. “I was scared. It all happened so fast. I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought you were dead!”

  Her words spit venom, and I can’t look at her face any more without hammering my fist into it.

  “You fucking left me there to die, you bitch!” I roar, grabbing her arms with force and yanking her up, shaking her as I fume, “Your words are lies. Nothing you say makes any goddamn sense.”

  Rage takes over and I lose it, slinging her body around and throwing her to the floor. She crumples, falling hard to the ground. I step over, grab the bitch by the sweater and yank her back off the ground as I hunch in her face. She doesn’t protest my afflictions; she takes them willingly, the same way she has the past few times I’ve been rough with her, and I take advantage of her submission.

  Her hands clamp around my wrists as I rip her off the floor and shove her away from me.

  “Get the fuck out!”

  “Please!”

  Her voice pierces my ears so harshly I can feel the razor of it in my gut. The pain rings sharply in my head, and I boil over in red-hot revolt, clenching her frail neck in my hand, choking her. My body burns in a pyre of grief and fury as she clings to my arm, and her touch spurs me to plunge my fingers deeper into her flesh, clamping the trachea that lies beneath, cutting off her air supply.

  A hoarse gurgle is the only sound she makes as her tear-filled eyes lock to mine. They shine bright from crying, and my tendons yearn to squeeze even tighter. There’s so much colliding inside of me, I can feel it in my teeth, so I grit them to keep myself from biting and ripping the skin off her.

  I want to kill her. I want to punish her in the worst way possible, but when my arm begins to violently shake, her mouth and eyes instantly pop open wider, and I release my hold.

  I can’t kill her.

  She falls to my feet, gasping and coughing wretchedly as I rake my hands through my hair.

  What the hell is happening to me?

  The touch of her hands around my ankles gets my attention. Looking down on her, she’s resting her cheek on top of one of my loafers. My breathing is heavy as emotions swarm, and it’s in the moment she looks up at me, broken at my feet, that I give my final word.

  “Leave.”

  I kick her hands off my legs and walk out of the room, leaving her to show herself out because if I have to look at her for one more second, I won’t be able to forgive myself for what I might to do.

  This woman has ruined me.

  I’m a fucking monster.

  Obliterated beyond my own recognition.

  And it was all for naught.

  MAKEUP COVERS MY marred neck as I give myself a once-over before heading out. My body is wounded in delicious bruises and scabs from the man my heart still yearns for. When I look at them, it’s like he’s still with me—his lingering touch I feen for on my body.

  It took me a while to collect myself and leave his home the other day. Hopelessness consumed every inch of existence—it still does. I was weak, curled at his feet, sobbing on his perfectly polished shoes when he kicked me away and left me lying on the ground. My words did nothing but enrage him to the point he lost contr
ol. Declan never loses control—he thrives on it, needs it to function. But I could see the chaos swimming in his eyes as they bore down on me while he strangled me.

  I didn’t panic because I’d gladly take a death upon the hands of true love.

  My ticket is booked to fly back to Chicago. I don’t want to go, but I also don’t want to continue hurting Declan. He’s not the same man anymore because of me. His warmth has wasted away—no spark, no light, no love.

  Nothing waits for me back in Chicago aside from a penthouse of hidden skeletons. I have no home. There’s no one waiting for me anywhere. I figure I’ll slip into town, pack up my belongings and leave the state. No longer can I live there because I’m no longer Nina. It doesn’t matter where I go though, and that thought is utterly depleting. So, I decide to attempt to escape my pitiful reality and go to Edinburgh for the day to meander around.

  I drive in silence, taking in the landscape, and before I know it, I’m in the city. After parking the car, I wrap a scarf around my neck and pull my coat tighter around my body. I begin wandering around the Grassmarket with the Edinburgh Castle towering above. The cobbled, winding streets are lined with a vast array of shops from designer to vintage. I pick up a few things from various stores: soaps, perfumes, a pair of shoes, and an old necklace with a weathered lotus charm. I’m not sure why I bought the lotus necklace, knowing the sadness it’ll undoubtedly bring when I look at it, but I just had to buy it regardless. I buy because I don’t know what else to do.

  My gut is hollow. I’m in a never-ending state of anxiety, and this is my attempt at distracting myself. It’s not helping though, so I find a pub to grab a drink, and when I walk into The Fiddler’s Arms, I immediately make my way to the bar. The place is filled mostly with men, drinking lagers and whiskey. I spot an empty stool and take a seat.

  The bartender places a drink napkin in front of me, saying, “What can I get you?”

  Taking a quick look at the tap handles, I don’t recognize the names, so I randomly pick one. “Stropramen.”

  He gives me a nod, begins to fill the mug, and then sets it in front of me. I slip my coat off and hang it on the back of the stool, and then take a long, slow drink in hopes that it dulls out the intensity that’s inside of me. I lean forward and close my eyes, focusing on the noise around me, wanting to get lost in it, and when I open my eyes, I spot familiar ones staring back at me from the opposite side of the bar.