“Is it true you got stabbed and almost died?” I asked, looking up at him in the dark.
He peered down at me, looking utterly shattered from today. “Yeah, that happened.”
“What happened exactly?”
“I was a street kid. I thieved and couriered drugs. One day a group of thugs decided to rob me halfway to the drop off point, and they didn’t want me to live through it.”
“So, they stabbed you?”
“I stabbed them first with this rusted knife I carried. I’d stolen that blade from an army surplus store when I was a kid and never could seem to let it go, call it silly superstition. I’d never used it until then. I knew they were going to leave me for dead, and at the time I had a reason to live. I couldn’t die. I needed to fight my way out of it or die trying.”
“And you fought your way out of it?”
“I tried. I got seriously hurt and I ran bleeding.”
“Until you broke into the clinic,” I finished for him, trying to piece the events together.
“Now, that’s not true,” he admonished, lightly. “The clinic was closed but the doors were still open.”
I cheekily said, “But it was technically closed.”
He smirked. “Then they should have locked the doors.”
“But you’d have died.”
“Sometimes I think I should have.”
My cheekiness died a sudden death. My heart ached at the thought of him dying outside the doors. “Why do you feel you should have died?”
“I had more goodness in me then.”
With a heavy heart, I considered that. Better to die with goodness in your heart than to die completely corrupted by the darkness. It was sad the way the world took you into its grip and chewed through your soul, blackening you, hardening you, changing you forever. And to have no choice in it, either. It was cruel.
“Was it cold?” I miserably asked, watching him closely.
“Freezing.” Noticing my deflated mood, he added, “Raining too.”
Okay, so now I was envisioning him bleeding to death in the cold and rain, and my heart couldn’t take it. “Oh, Nixon.”
“I ran with a twisted ankle too.”
My misery faded as I shot him a wry look. “I think you’re trying to make me feel bad for you.”
He grinned. “Is it working?”
I held back a laugh. “It was up until the end.”
He placed me down on my back and propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at me with a tender look. I covered my face because I couldn’t handle that look; it burned me everywhere. He pulled my hands away, though. “I want to see you, Vix.”
“Then stop looking at me like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“You know what.”
He gently brushed my cheeks. “I’ll stop if you kiss me.”
I dropped my hands and looked up at him, waiting for that kiss. He dropped his head to me, searing me with one last look – a look wrought with hunger, with need, with affection – and then he kissed me.
His lips moved tenderly over mine and didn’t last long. The second my heart started picking up, he pulled away and pulled me to his chest, leaving me wanting.
He always left me wanting.
Nixon…
His little vixen was falling to pieces, and he didn’t know how to stop it.
What triggered it?
Was it letting her walk away from him? Did she feel as ruined as he did? Did her heart burst with panic? Did she feel the urge to turn back and run to him the way he felt the urge to chase her?
He instantly regretted it when he couldn’t see her anymore. Nixon had paced, scratching at his jaw, rubbing at his face, feeling the maddening impulse to call his men out and chase her down and bring her back to him, where she belonged.
He couldn’t take it.
It went against his very nature. He felt like his limb was missing. This sick need to control her, to own her, wanting nothing more in life than to have her feel the same way he did.
And did she?
Behind her defiance, did she care for him?
Ever since he spoke to Hobbs that afternoon, he couldn’t think straight. He knew he had to hear the truth. Vixen was going to get worse. She was going to defy him more and push her boundaries and she was going to keep asking that dreaded fucking question: when will you let me go?
But how could he let her go when the mere thought of it left him feeling like he was being knifed through the heart repeatedly?
No, he had to do it a different way. He could try and loosen the leash. He might handle watching her venture just out of view, but anymore than that and it was intolerable.
He had calmed down, breathing deeply through his nose as he came to a stop and stared at the night sky, waiting.
She would have to come to him of her own volition.
She must.
If she ran away now, then this was all for nothing.
He was so tarnished, so sullied with death and violence. Vixen was the only bright part of him left.
How did this come to be?
If he hadn’t taken that job, she’d be six feet in the ground, and he’d have lived his life untouched by this rampant madness. It was like a disease. No, she was the disease. She bore her eyes into him, dug her nails into his flesh, pleaded for her life and he became infected by her. She had infiltrated his system, clawed through layers of monstrosity, until she’d found his soul and re-awakened it.
And Nixon couldn’t let her go since.
And she…
She needed to remember their beginning, or he might never be redeemed.
21.
Vixen…
I had the most vivid dream. I was in a coffee shop in Surrey and I was free. My heart was heavy with sadness and I didn’t know why. I saw Kimberly for the first time, and she cried. She said she missed me, that she never stopped looking for me. We embraced and I hugged her to me, breathing her in, missing my dear friend.
Then she vanished and I left the coffee shop alone.
I stood on the sidewalk, searching the crowd of walkers for Nixon.
I spun around in circles, my mind racing. I felt lost, confused. I needed to find him. He must have been close. I searched every face that walked by, growing panicked.
He wasn’t there.
And I distinctly knew why that was. I felt it in my bones. I was free for a reason.
I was free because he was dead.
*
I woke up with tears in my eyes. The morning was early, the sun hadn’t come up, and Nixon was still next to me, his arm wrapped possessively around my middle. I turned my head and looked at his sleeping face. His breathing was light. He was never a heavy sleeper. If I stirred the slightest, he’d know about it.
“I had a dream you were dead,” I whispered.
He was too asleep to hear me. Oblivious, his eyes remained shut; his peaceful, sleeping form concealed the arrogant, murderous man within.
But was that all he was? I swallowed the ache in my chest. I felt a strong desire to understand all of him. To know the other parts he’d hidden away. To know his former self.
“What’s your real name?” I wondered, looking him over, trying to put a name to him.