Keep Me

He also seems to enjoy spending time with me outside of the bedroom. True to his promise, Julian has begun training me, teaching me how to fight and use different weapons. After the initial rocky start, he turned out to be an excellent instructor—knowledgeable, patient, and surprisingly dedicated. We train together nearly every day, and I’ve already learned more in these couple of weeks than in the prior three months in my self-defense courses. Of course, it would be a misnomer to call what he teaches me self-defense; Julian’s lessons have more in common with some kind of assassin bootcamp.

“You aim to kill every time,” he instructs during one afternoon session where he makes me throw knives at a small target on the wall. “You don’t have the size or the strength, so for you, it’s all about speed, reflexes, and ruthlessness. You need to catch your opponents off-guard and eliminate them before they realize how skilled you are. Every strike has to be deadly; every move has to count.”

“What if I don’t want to kill them?” I ask, looking up at him. “What if I just want to wound them, so I can run away?”

“A wounded man can still hurt you. It doesn’t take much strength to squeeze a trigger or stab you with a knife. Unless you have a good reason for wanting your enemy alive, you aim to kill, Nora. Do you understand me?”

I nod and throw a small, sharp knife at the wall. It thuds dully against the target, then falls down, having barely scratched the wood. Not my best attempt, but better than my prior five.

I don’t know if I can do what Julian says, but I do know that I never want to feel defenseless again. If it means learning the skills of an assassin, I’m happy to do it. It doesn’t mean I will ever use them, but just knowing that I can protect myself makes me feel stronger and more confident, helping me cope with the residual nightmares from my time with the terrorists.

To my relief, those have gotten better as well. It’s like my subconscious knows that Julian is here—that I’m safe with him. Of course, it also helps that when I do wake up screaming, he’s there to hold me and chase the nightmare away.

The first time it happens is the third night after my arrival at the estate. I dream of Beth’s death again, of the ocean of blood that I’m drowning in, but this time, strong arms catch me, save me from the vicious rip current. This time, when I open my eyes, I’m not alone in the darkness. Julian has turned on the bedside lamp and is shaking me awake, a concerned expression on his beautiful face.

“I’m here now,” he soothes, pulling me into his lap when I can’t stop trembling, tears of remembered horror running down my face. “All is well, I promise . . .” He strokes my hair until my sobbing breaths begin to even out, and then he asks softly, “What’s the matter, baby? Did you have a bad dream? You were screaming my name . . .”

I nod, clinging to him with all my strength. I can feel the warmth of his skin, hear the steady beating of his heart, and the nightmare slowly begins to recede, my mind coming back to the present. “It was Beth,” I whisper when I can speak without my voice breaking. “He was torturing her . . . killing her.”

Julian’s arms tighten around me. He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel his rage, his burning fury. Beth had been more than a housekeeper to him, though the precise nature of their relationship had always been something of a mystery to me.

Desperate to distract myself from the bloody images still filling my mind, I decide to satisfy the curiosity that had gnawed at me all through my time on the island. “How did you and Beth meet?” I ask, pulling back to look at Julian’s face. “How did she come to be on the island with me?”

He looks at me, his eyes dark with memories. Before, whenever I would ask these types of questions, he would brush me off or change the topic, but things are different between us now. Julian seems more willing to talk to me, to let me more fully into his life.

“I was in Tijuana seven years ago for a meeting with one of the cartels,” he begins speaking after a moment. “After my business was concluded, I went looking for entertainment in Zona Norte, the red-light district of the city. I was passing by one of the alleys when I saw it . . . a screaming, crying woman huddled over a small figure on the ground.”

“Beth,” I whisper, remembering what she told me about her daughter.

“Yes, Beth,” he confirms. “It wasn’t any of my business, but I’d had a couple of drinks and I was curious. So I came closer . . . and that’s when I saw that the small figure on the ground was a child. A beautiful baby girl with red curly hair, a tiny replica of the woman crying over her.” A savage, furious glint enters his eyes. “The child was lying in a pool of blood, with a gunshot wound in her small chest. She had apparently been killed to punish her mother, who didn’t want to let her pimp offer the child to some clients with more unique tastes.”

Nausea, sharp and strong, rises in my throat. Despite everything I’ve been through, it still horrifies me to know that there are such monsters out there. Monsters far worse than the man I’ve fallen in love with.

No wonder Beth saw the world in shades of black; her life had been overtaken by darkness.

“When I heard the full story, I took Beth and her daughter with me,” Julian continues in a low, hard voice. “It still wasn’t any of my business, but I couldn’t let this type of thing slide—at least not after seeing that child’s body. We buried the daughter in a cemetery just outside Tijuana. Then I took a couple of my men, and Beth and I came back to look for the pimp.” A small, vicious smile appears on his lips as he says softly, “Beth killed him personally. Him and his two thugs—the ones who helped murder her daughter.”