Everlasting - Christine Michelle Page 0,73
she wouldn’t be able to unsee the way you were obviously suffering.” He turned then and opened an envelope, searched through it, and then tossed a couple 8x10 images on the bed beside me. “That’s what she saw, the first-time pictures showed up.
I wanted to fucking cry, kill someone, hell I wanted to punch myself in the fucking face for ever ending up in a situation where Ever had to see something like that.
“It didn’t stop there though. Three more times she was sent pictures of you with another woman. In some of them, it was obvious you were still being treated poorly. After I cleaned you up and Sasha got a hold of you again though…” he shook his head as he slid the rest of the images out and handed them over to me.
I shuffled through them, looking at them as if I were Ever. As if I were the woman worried her husband might come home in a casket. Then I realized that she probably had at least a moment or more where she debated whether I’d choose to stay away and she’d have to live with the fact that I was out there, still alive, and had simply fallen for someone else. On first look, there was one image that stood out. I was sleeping in a bed and my hand was stretched out, cradling another woman’s pregnant belly. That one. That one image had to have broken my wife in some way. I knew that as surely as I knew I needed to breathe air to live.
“It doesn’t end there, with those pictures though, Deck. Her suffering?” He questioned and waited until I glanced up, eyes barely able to focus on the man because of the tears swimming in them. I didn’t care if he saw them or not though. Durbin had seen me at my absolute worst. He could have my emotions too. “She gave birth to your son without you there.” He cued up a video that was shot from the door of the birthing suite. Whoever had taken the video, she hadn’t known they were there. She was begging Lucy, the doctor, nurses, anyone who would listen to please make it stop that she couldn’t do it without me. My heart fucking shattered listening to her, begging for them to stop her labor.
“I get it!” I shouted at Durbin as I swatted the phone away from my face.
“Not yet, you don’t. Because your wife? She wasn’t done suffering.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Your son spent his first two weeks without a name, did you know that?”
“What the hell?”
Durbin nodded his head at me. “Yeah, poor girl, refused to name him until you were here to agree to whatever she had picked out. I guess you guys hadn’t agreed on names yet before you were nabbed. When her family finally convinced her to name him, she did, and just a month and a half later, your wife had to bury her mother, the one person she leaned on the most. Your girls understood loss then and started asking her all the time if they had to put you in the ground too or if you were really coming back.”
“Lucy?” I questioned. “Lucy’s gone?” Durbin nodded. “No one said anything to me.”
“You’re not exactly taking a whole lot of visitors, now are ya? Your woman, the one you keep turning away because you think you need to suffer alone with what happened to you? You’re still putting her through this shit. In her world, you’re still out there, lost, and she’s still concerned you’re never coming back to her.” He stood and pointed to the door, but that wasn’t enough, so Durbin moved to it, opened the damn thing and there stood an angry, red-faced Kane staring at me. It was obvious he was listening to everything. “You know why he’s here, standing outside your door?” He asked and all I could do was shake my head. “Because someone in this fucking club of yours is a rat and the same woman you keep tossing away, the same one you keep forsaking in favor of your own misery, she set up a goddamn security watch for you with people SHE trusted. They’re here to make sure no one comes in and tries to steal you away or off you in retaliation for the club taking Sasha and killing her little brother.”
I knew the club had Sasha hidden away somewhere. They were waiting to