Fourteen?
He’d suffered through three years of silence.
If possible, I grew even angrier.
“So, I told her everything.” His body shook against me. “It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“It wasn’t your—”
“It was my fault,” he replied, cutting me off. “Every single thing that happened the night she died is on me.” He was wrong. Granted, I didn’t know all the details, but no one was responsible for what happened to his mother besides his father.
Full stop.
Refusing to listen to him blame himself, I prepared to argue his innocence in the matter, but he kept talking, not giving me a chance.
“Mama never lost her temper. Hell, she rarely ever raised her voice,” he said. “But I should’ve known she’d go ballistic once the shame and fear were no longer enough to keep me silent, and I told her what he’d been doing.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Yeah,” he whispered, fingers trailing up my spine, “that’s what happened.” Staying as close as I could, I waited for him to continue as he rocked back and forth, swaying me in his arms. “Hell-bent on permanently erasing my father from our lives and eliminating any future threat he posed, she waited until he was in the shower the night after I confessed every shameful secret. Then, unable to keep her rage in check any longer, she grabbed a brand-new butcher knife from the kitchen and went after him.”
It sounded like something I would do.
I didn’t own a butcher knife, but my switchblade, as rusty as it was, worked just fine. It was a lesson more than one predator had learned the hard way.
Hope you’re burning in Hell, Emilio.
“She took him by surprise, but it wasn’t enough.” The heartbreak he’d kept hidden for who knows how long rose to the surface. When it did, the tears brimming in his eyes began to fall. “I tried to help her, I swear I did, but by the time I reached her, it was already too late.”
I bit down on my tongue to hold back the sob working its way up my throat. The taste of copper filled my mouth, proving I’d drawn blood. “I know, Guapo,” I whispered in reply as I slid my hands into his hair and dropped my forehead to his. “I know you did.”
“It was too late,” he reiterated. Whether he was trying to convince himself or me, I didn’t know. “Knife in hand, he was already on top of her.” Hands grasping the back of my dress, he clenched the fabric in his fists, pulling it taut across my front. “Over and over, he stabbed her.”
The sob I’d been choking down escaped.
One of James’s followed.
“I didn’t know what the hell to do.” He paused. “But I knew I had to act, so that’s what I did.” Dropping his forehead to my shoulder, he continued to pull on my dress as his scorching tears bled into my sweat-slicked skin, forever sinking into my pores. “Running on pure goddamned fear, I grabbed a lamp from their nightstand and hit him over the head with it as hard as I could, knocking him out cold. When his body went limp, I pushed him off her, but it didn’t fucking matter. She was already dying, already slipping away.”
My past further invaded my thoughts.
The sound of Alejandro’s terrified screams.
The smell of gunpowder.
The sight of Mamá’s blood.
Each memory rushed forward, ripping apart my soul worse than it already was. How long before it was destroyed beyond repair and not even the man I believed was meant to be mi salvacion could save it?
“I called for help and tried to give her CPR,” James continued, carrying us both deeper into the hell in which we lived and were barely surviving. “But it was no use. She was dead by the time the paramedics arrived, and I was the reason why.”
Yanking my hands free of his silky locks, I forced myself to concentrate on his pain as I looped my arms around his neck. “No, bebé, you weren’t,” I said, speaking a truth I’d pound into his hard head every single day for the rest of our lives if need be. “The only person responsible for what happened to her is your father. Not you.” Dropping my arms from his neck, I cupped his face and forced his head back, giving him no other choice but to look at me. “Never you.”
“You’re wrong.”
Leaning back, he looked up at me, his face contorted with so much pain and misery that I would have done anything, and I mean anything, to free him from the torment that held him captive, suffocating the light that shone in his whiskey-colored eyes more and more with each passing second.
“I’m responsible for what happened that night, just as I’m accountable for all the awful shit that happened in the years that followed.”
“James—”
“I kept drinking.” I snapped my mouth closed. “Even after I buried my mother and my father was thrown into prison for life, I kept drinking to—”
“Numb the pain,” I finished for him.
He nodded. “The state sent me to live with my late great uncle. He was a kind man who treated me well, but I still couldn’t cope.”
“So you self-medicated?”
Another nod. “I did. But I stopped when Dixie got pregnant with my boy.” My entire being hurt for him. So damned badly. Unlike the father who’d helped create him, he’d tried to be a good dad, but the deck was stacked against him from the beginning. Was that an excuse for the things he’d done? Absolutely not. But goodness, the man had barely stood a chance. “I fell off the wagon a couple of years after she left.”
“Why?”
“Because the nightmares came back.”
My eyes slid closed at his words.
Of course the nightmares had returned. Without alcohol to numb his mind each night, it was only a matter of time. It was a vicious cycle, and I wasn’t the least bit surprised that he’d hadn’t been able to break free.
I sure hadn’t.
Though it hadn’t been
