Torn - Cynthia Eden Page 0,65
her. He didn’t treat her well enough, and I wanted to get Amy away from him.” Wade shook his head. “But it was her life, her decision, and I’d given up any rights I might’ve had . . .”
“You . . . never told her how you felt?”
“There wasn’t time. Because one day she was just gone.” His hands had fisted around the sheets, and he made himself ease his too tight grip. “We were friends, never more than that . . . because I held back.” He wasn’t making that same mistake with Victoria. He wanted her to know just how much he wanted her. “I looked for her. Searched fucking desperately because I had promised Gabe I would take care of his sister. I swore I would look out for her.” He gave a grim shake of his head. “But I let him down. I let her die and—”
“You blame yourself for what happened.”
“A sick freak at her hospital—he became fixated on her,” Wade said. “She was his nurse. He took her, he kept her, and he killed her.”
“Just like our perp did with Kennedy and Melissa?” Her question was little more than a whisper.
“Pretty damn close, yes.” But Amy’s abductor hadn’t kept her alive as long as Kennedy had lived. She’d died . . . and he’d watched Gabe splinter apart.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her hand curled around his and she squeezed, ever so gently.
His head tilted toward her. How had this become about him? About her giving comfort to him? Wade shook his head and decided to ask her the same question she’d posed to him. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I . . . can’t be.”
That wasn’t the answer he’d expected.
“It’s too dangerous.” Victoria said the words in a rush. “Because what if he was right? What if I am just like him?”
“You aren’t like your father.”
“He was a brilliant man,” she said, voice gone flat in an instant. “Respected, admired. Maybe that’s why it took so long for the police to believe me. They bought the story that my mother had left on her own. That she’d just turned and walked out on her family. When the months turned into years, they finally listed her as missing, when she never contacted anyone. Not me. Not her cousins. Not her friends. It took that long for the cops to believe that something might have happened to her, and it took them even longer . . . to understand that my dad—my father—he was the bad thing that had taken her away.”
Wade’s fingers curled around hers so that he was now holding her hand. Trying to give her some comfort.
“Turn out the light,” Victoria said. “It’s . . . easier for me to say this in the dark.”
He kept his hold on her fingers, but Wade’s other hand reached out and turned off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness.
He heard her suck in a quick, sharp breath. Then Victoria said, “Love can go bad.”
Such sad, stark words.
“In the beginning, I do think my father loved her. And she loved him. But something changed, and it—it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t happy. She . . . I know she found someone else. I knew because she’d started to smile again.”
Each word that she said pierced him to the core. There was so much pain in Victoria’s voice, and Wade wished that he could take it away.
“She was going to leave my father. He . . . he didn’t want to let her go. She was his. Like a possession.” Her fingers squeezed his. A quick, hard squeeze. “No, an obsession. That’s what she’d become to him. He couldn’t let her go. I saw it on his face. So much darker than love—so much harder. Evil . . . I knew, I knew, he wasn’t going to let her go to another man. If she wasn’t with him, then she wasn’t going to be with anyone.”
Christ. Reading details of her mother’s murder online was one thing, but hearing the pain and desolation in Victoria’s voice was something totally different. Screw just holding her hand. He pulled her against him, cradling her as close as he could get. But she was so stiff in his arms.
“There are no strings,” Victoria said. “There are never any strings because I won’t . . . I won’t become obsessed. I won’t do that to someone.”
“You aren’t your father—”
“I’ve never been in love because I am too scared to be. Too scared of