Chapter 281

“I need to show you.” Alexi gets up quickly, eyes still avoiding me, and walks off toward his room leaving me to sit here like a confused idiot. Watching the direction he went in and straining to listen to sounds as he disappears. I expect to hear a drawer open or something similar, but it sounds like he’s punching in the digits on his safe keypad instead. Whatever he wants to show me he keeps in his bedroom safe.

Now I’m worried.

He doesn’t use that thing like an extra cupboard; he uses it as its purpose intends. To store things you wouldn’t want others getting hold of.

I wonder if it’s something sinister or creepy; I mean he is the master at shocking me to the core with the lengths he goes to with his devil side. I’m not sure what I’m expecting but my gut says it’s not good at all.

I fidget, fingers itching, so I pull a cushion into my lap to focus my nervousness. I blow out some air to try to expel the tension and tap my foot absentmindedly, so wrought and tied up with angst.

Alexi reappears quietly, startling me, carrying what looks like a black shoebox only a little squarer, and comes around to lay it on the coffee table in front of me. He slides it towards me, a heavy-looking offering, and stays standing, towering over me and looking a lot like a little boy in a lot of trouble.

My stomach turns over, skin prickling once more, and I just blink at it. I glance from him to the box, lungs struggling to function as anxiety sits on my chest like a baby elephant and I sit back nervously, steeped in mistrust.

“This better not be a severed head or something weird … like a hand.” I blurt out stupidly, nerves frayed, imaging some oozing past enemy or maybe Tyler, dismembered and bloated as some weird mob boss love token and Alexi just frowns at me so hard his eyebrows almost touch his nose.

“What?” It’s all he says and with such disbelief, I try to smile and shrug like I was joking but still lean in tentatively and prod the box warily with my foot in case it’s about to implode on me. I’m sure body fluids would be seeping out of what looks like cardboard, so maybe whatever it is dry…like a shrunken head or a jar of body parts.

“I swear to God, it’s not a human limb. I think you need to steer clear of watching gangster movies, London.” Alexi sighs, and flips the lid off for me rather dramatically, causing me to panic gasp and lean back, revealing something I never thought I would ever see again.

It’s a sight that makes me shoot forward again and sit upright like a statue, as though someone just fired a rocket up my arse. My stomach somersaults fully and my heart literally stops beating as I’m winded so badly, I exhale sharply. It’s so much worse than a severed head.

I actually wish it was a bloodied limb sitting there instead.

Therein lies several journals of my youth. My long-lost diaries all tattered and worn and displayed in tissue paper like he is presenting me with the crown fucking jewels.

I would recognise them anywhere. A sight worse than any I could have imagined.

I long ago left them in a damp-ridden, mouldy flat in London, hiding under a crooked floorboard when I ran away. I should have destroyed them instead of leaving them to rot along with everything I once held onto. I left every possession and tie to my mother in a building that was practically derelict thinking they would rot with her.

How he came to have them in his possession is beyond me. I don’t even know how on earth he could have them or if they are even real.

What kind of witchcraft is this?

I gawp at him, so sure I’m dreaming and should pinch myself to break this god-awful nightmare once and for all.

Diaries of years and years of having no one else to turn to and offload the horrors of my life. This was how I got it out of my head and battled on to breathe another day. I put everything into these dire little notebooks. Every woe and dark secret. Every confession and dying dream. It was my outlet to stay sane, and I used them to tear the ugliness out of my brain and lock them away to burden the books instead of me.

These journals contain every horrid, dark and painful memory I never want to examine again. Almost like cutting open my skull and letting the pictures pour out across the floor for him to see in all their detailed glory. I was always a good descriptive writer; it was my therapy, and now sitting here, it’s the worst thing I ever did. I never intended for anyone to see them, let alone Alexi.

I shove the box away hard with the flat of my foot, so it slides hard off the other end and almost topples off, but he catches it quickly. Scooping fast and righting it back onto the table with a wary glance at my face. He seems unsure how to react to me and just stays calm and still.

The icy coldness sweeps over my entire body as the blood drains, I must be white as a sheet with the horrors of seeing the ghost of my past on the coffee table. What’s left of hope and warmth dies an immediate death.

“How did … where did … why, you … I …?” I’m babbling, confused, brain chaotic as I try to think of all the things I wrote within those pages, and he has them all. Words tumbling off my tongue which suddenly seems to not work.

It’s like giving him every single humiliating, painful thing out of my head and laying it bare. Loading a gun for him and holding it right at my heart.

I held nothing back in those books.

From long before the first time she let Rick touch me while I was her emotional and physical punching bag. The reason her life was so shit. All the blame laid on a child for merely existing. She hated me so much. My own mother, the woman who gave me life. I used to wish she would take it away again and relieve me of a life that was wracked in misery just to stop her loathing me with every fibre.

Those books chart a life that’s so shameful that no one should be cursed to read them. Details of things that make me sick to my stomach just pulling back what they contain. I’m surprised they didn’t burn out his eyeballs as he flicked the pages.

I pushed away all thoughts of salvation at 16, accepted my fate and turned myself into a numb whore to make enough money to plot an escape. It’s all in there. Right up to the day I let the pen drop and stopped writing it all down. The moment I died inside and never needed it anymore. The day I left them in that hole to never see the light of day again.

Every tiny, dirty little sad sentence which opens all my dark past and illuminates every cobwebbed corner. The death of a child. The rise of a worthless shell.

Pain, plans and promises.

It’s how he knew about my dandelions and their meaning; now lying in tatters on the table in the form of the bracelet he gave me. Now even that weighs with significance, knowing why he picked them of all things to gift me.

It’s why he sees me in a different light.

Alexi knows the worst of my years. The worst of me.

He knows things I would never tell another living soul. If he wants to destroy me, then he has had the power to do so for however long he has had these books. More fodder than I would have given him in a lifetime of living in this club, all in a concentrated powerful dose. He knows everything he could use to snub out the last of me.

Yet he has done nothing except avoid it. He had so much ammunition, so much he could use to wound me, and yet he hasn’t done a thing with this information, except avoid hurting me with it.

The opposite of what a devil would do.

“I’ve had them since you went missing, and yes, I have read them all. I’m not sorry about that but I am sorry I didn’t tell you before now.” Alexi has the sense to look ashamed, down to the floor, frowning so boyishly. Like he has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but all I can do is tear myself apart and cry, that he of all people knows everything.

Every sordid evil thing that Rick and my mother put me through, the men, the abuse, the violence … the shackles and being tied up. The child paedophile ring he passed me around, to be filmed, raped, photographed and used until I grew to look more like an adult and no longer fit the purpose. The years of being destroyed, humiliated, defiled. How I was broken to pieces over and over and had to keep gluing myself back together.

He has all of it.

The botched abortion that made me sterile, the years of picking myself up, slapping on makeup, even when my body was bruised and torn, and letting men have sex with me was so painful my legs would give out. He knows how I crawled out of a hospital bed after my insides were stitched back together to get back on the streets for fear of Rick’s wrath. For that was worse than internal bleeding and intense agony. Pushing away the pain and actively getting out there to enhance my ability to seduce men for my own ends. Learning to woo and use my wiles to create the woman who sits before him now. The sham, fake girl who masks a million sins.

A girl who spent years learning how to no longer care.

The beatings, the rapes, the torture. My mother’s overdose and how I stood and let her die, watching her with no remorse as she gasped her last breath. The endless days of wishing myself dead even though my own willpower wouldn’t let me execute it.

He’s right. He didn’t know a damn thing about me before and now he knows too much. Things I would never tell a living soul, even under threat of death. He knows everything that is worth knowing if you wanted to build a solid way of torturing someone to death. He could crush me so much more brutally than before.

I don’t know how to feel about this other than suffocate with anxiety. Tears blinding my eyes as I stare at that damn box and he just stands there too.

“How?” It’s all I can force out, unable to catch his eye and completely shamed to my core. I feel vulnerable and naked, and now everything between us these past few weeks suddenly makes sense.

The subtle changes in not only him but Mico too, and I don’t doubt Mico has an idea about what’s in these books. Alexi tells him everything, he is his closest friend.

Its unbearable weight crushing all that’s left of my self-respect.

They know my ugly truths. The worthless mess I really am. My poor beginning and trying to claw myself some sort of life.

It’s devastating.

“I had a PI dig backwards when I couldn’t find you. He tracked you down to Hackney after pinpointing English women and Texan men married with one registered daughter, born in the states. I pay him the big bucks because he is thorough. It took a while, and he found these in an abandoned apartment in a derelict building when he went out there to find out more about you. Or should I say about Lisa?”

And time seems to just stop.

My face freezing over with the realisation this goes beyond just reading about my past. His PI stood in that very place that I left to rot after I ran. No one else would have moved in after, the whole place was scheduled to be levelled, and they had been slowly evicting tenants over those years. I’m surprised it was still standing. I left such a long time ago.

He knows my name is not Camilla.

He knows I’m not who I pretend to be.

I have no words, no breath in my body. I just sit like a startled deer in the headlights. Unmoving, afraid to feel because there’s an entire world of tears and pain behind my dam, aching to be let loose. I blink at that infernal box and pick at my nails absentmindedly, turning it over and over in my head. He knows absolutely everything there is to know about the sad little girl who died the day I changed my name. It's excruciating, and I can’t bear to look at him anymore.