“When I met you,” he continued. “I didn’t know you were the one for me, but when we started talking, I saw that we were meant to be together. I wanted someone for my own, someone I could love deeply, and I found that in you. You love me, Noah. You do.”
My gaze bored into his. “It’s ownership, not love. You don’t hurt someone you love, not in the ways you’ve hurt me.”
He didn’t reply, he only watched me.
“I’m scared of silence because of you.” I clasped my hands together. “I remember the night of the crash . . . you beat me badly. I remember you were glad of the blackout the night I left you. You wanted things silent so you could hear nothing but my cries.”
“So you could hear them,” Anderson corrected. “So you could hear yourself be disciplined for your actions. You never understand that I do what I do for your own good, Noah. Please, believe me.”
My body began to shake.
“I won’t be like that again.” I lifted my gaze to his. “I won’t be the shell of a woman you want. You can beat me until I’m dead. I don’t care, I won’t be that woman.”
Anderson nodded his head slowly.
“I know,” he answered, surprising me. “You’re a different Noah from when I knew you; you’re strong of mind. I knew when you first looked at me in the hospital that you were lost to me.”
I frowned. “Then why keep me here? Why do this?”
“I said you were mine.” He got to his feet. “You’ll be dead, but you’ll still be mine. You’ll never be his. Ever. I told you in the hospital that this would all be over soon. I meant it. We’re going to be together forever. Just you and me, the way it always should be.”
I sucked in a breath when he pulled a piece of white material from the drawer of the coffee table and advanced on me. I screamed, but a punch to the face silenced me as blood filled my mouth and dribbled down my chin. Anderson made quick work of tying my wrists together once more, followed by feet. He pushed me on to the floor, and I stared at him as he reached behind the sofa and produced a jerrycan. I sucked in a breath and was about to scream, but one look from Anderson kept me silent. I was frozen as he uncapped the can, and the fumes of petrol stung my nostrils.
“Anderson,” I whimpered. “Please, don’t.”
He ignored me as he splashed the fuel around the room, then he went down the hallway and I heard the petrol sloshing around as he dispensed it in each room. He hadn’t poured it on me or on the part of the sofa I was near, and I wondered if he planned to do that last. I leaned forward to watch him and was gobsmacked when he went outside the flat and splashed fuel on the walls all the way down to the elevator. When he reached the door of his flat, he produced a lighter, flicked it, lit a newspaper and dropped it in the hall. The fuel on the ground ignited instantly, and it spread like wildfire down the corridor.
“Anderson!” I shouted. “Please, just talk to me. We can figure this out, things don’t have to be this way.”
“We can’t,” he snapped as he came back into the room. “I sensed the change in you the night you woke up and in the times when I finally got to speak to you. You made eye contact with me and questioned me . . . two things that you knew never to do. I touched your wrist and you still did all of those things. I knew your parents and that McKenna prick would never let you go this time, so I made a promise to myself that if I couldn’t have you then no one could.”
I began to cry.
“What does touching my wrist have to do with anything?”
“It was always a warning between us,” he explained. “When we were out in public and you behaved in a manner that I didn’t like, I would touch your wrist and you knew to stop whatever you were doing. I’ve kept you safe so many times by doing it.”
Horror filled my mind as I remembered all of the times that he’d touched my wrist when he came to see me in the hospital, and stared at me while he did it. He was trying to see if I had any memory of its significance so he could control me once again. I was flabbergasted.
“Anderson, please!”
“We’ll go together,” he assured me with a smile. “The smoke will kill us long before the fire touches us. I’m gonna carry you to our room and we’re going to go to sleep together one final time. Just the two of us.”
“You’ll kill other families on this floor, maybe everyone in the entire building!” I snapped, trying to make him see reason. “You’ll kill people.”
“They’ll get out,” Anderson said. “Don’t worry about them.”
I jerked my attention to the front door when I heard screaming and shouts. I heard fire alarms go off, but the emergency sprinkler systems never kicked in. Anderson saw me looking at the ceiling and laughed.
“The sprinklers have been broken from the second floor up for the last week now. They’ve been out daily trying to fix the problem, but they haven’t been able to do anything about it yet.”
His words were so exact that it made my skin crawl.
“Did you somehow disable the system?”
“Maybe.”
He was crazy. He was a raging fucking lunatic.
“I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for you.”
Disbelief was all over Anderson’s features.
“What?”
“During my time in the hospital I felt sorry for you – I felt like I was awful because I didn’t know that you were my husband. I thought I was being cruel because I didn’t want you,” I said with a look
