Hold Me by W. Winters
Zander
Scrolling through the photos on Ella’s various social media accounts leaves a longing to know who this beautiful woman used to be. She hasn’t posted regularly in nearly two years now but I scroll past flirtatious grins and obvious laughter, past a woman celebrating life and exuding strength with a no-fucks-given attitude. There are pictures of him as well. Her sneaking up on him and laying with him on sunny tropical beaches. Pictures of him kissing her and where she’s kissing him. There’s an obvious point where her public persona was tamed. Just prior to their wedding photos, she appears wild and free. And then it changes, to bright smiles and “love and light” captions.
There are wholesome posts about her charity work, but it doesn’t take much to be certain that prior to marrying James, Ella was known for her partying.
The fireplace in Ella’s sitting room is off, adding to the quiet. The blue of the paint is suffused with gray light from the early morning. She’s still sleeping upstairs, leaving me alone in the chill of this room.
I came here out of habit. I didn’t know what to do with myself when I woke up in her bed. I found a spare toothbrush in the bathroom, still wrapped in plastic among other travel-sized toiletries. She was sleeping so deeply when I finally let go of her that I couldn’t bear to wake her. I tugged her blanket up to her shoulders and quietly slipped out to the room that’s most familiar to me. We’ve spent the most time here, in the blue sitting room. And in its silence, I’ve let my mind wander, I’ve let the questions repeat themself over and over. Am I doing the right thing? Is this really what’s best for her?
I’m only her Dom, so there’s no reason for me to be here. Not technically. It’s storming outside and I watch the raindrops fall against the window. When the wind blows, it’s vicious, battering the small droplets against the panes. Unless we’re going to have a true 24/7 relationship, then I can’t be here all the time.
Even if a part of me wanted to be here, simply because she’s most comfortable here, a much larger part of me doesn’t want to develop this relationship anywhere other than my own home.
We’re going to have to talk about it, and soon. This is a crucial boundary between the two of us. When I’ll come over, and how long I’ll stay. I need to make clear to her that she was only agreeing to the relationship we had before, nothing else. I’ll help her as her Dom. Although I would never make this arrangement with anyone else who couldn’t leave the confines of their home. With the only other 24/7 power exchange relationship I’ve had, the only true D/s relationship, she lived with me. Quincy.
Quincy, who has been the subject of at least one phone call this morning. A phone call I let go to voicemail. The hearing’s coming up, and I don’t want to talk about it.
A larger sheet of rain sweeps across the yard and taps more forcefully against the windowpane. I’ve never lived in a place like this, with all this space.
All this wealth.
Across the house, the front door opens. I hear it click shut quietly. It’s far too early for Silas to switch off with Damon. The footsteps and the jingle of keys is telling. I stay where I am, my jaw clenching slightly. He can come to me.
Kamden appears in the sitting room doorway with my temper barely contained, the anger still palpable. The air between us seems thick. Weighted. He narrows his eyes and watches me from the opening, then straightens up and strides in, taking the seat across from me. He’s exaggerated about it. Casual. But it’s not casual, and we both know it. From the tight set of his jaw I think he might like to hit me. The very idea begs my lips to pull up into a smirk, but I keep my expression neutral.
It seems we feel the same about one another.
He lets the silence stretch out, and so do I. I’ve thought about what I’d say to him, but every conversation is different as I play it out. More importantly, I need to be careful. He’s Ella’s conservator. There is far too much at risk for her to allow my ego to take center stage.
Everything outside of the two of us, is a risk. She isn’t in charge of her own decisions. I don’t have authority in that aspect of her life either. Pissing off the wrong person could end in me not having access to her at all. Had I not been able to convince Cade and Kamden, things could be very different right now. The Firm, Kamden, even her closest friends. One wrong step and we could be buried in problems I don’t know how to get out of.
Wind rushes outside the window now. The rain lets up a little, then comes back down hard. It’s one of those fall storms that steals the warmth from the air and makes it feel frigid afterward, even if snow is weeks from falling. The heat kicks on in Ella’s house, with the faintest of clicks. Other than the leather groaning beneath Kamden as he readjusts to lean forward, his elbows on his knees, it’s the only sound in the room. But not for long.
“If you hurt her, I will destroy you,” Kamden says beneath his breath.
I stare at him across the space between us. “That a threat, Kam?” A heat travels up my spine and across my shoulders. Instinctively, my fingers curl slightly, ready to ball into fists.
“It’s a promise.” His voice is clear, raised so there’s no doubt I can hear. “You wouldn’t be the first man who thought he could use her.”
A crease forms between my brows as my eyes narrow at him. That’s fucking rich, coming from the man who installed cameras in her home to spy on her. Fucking rich. Every ounce of anger calls at the back of my throat. Keeping a stone-cold expression I’m careful with my response, knowing full well the power he has over her. I’ve never hated a soul more than him.
“I’m not using Ella.”
“Of course you are.” His statement comes with a sadness he fails to contain. If I’m not mistaken, a fear as well. He stares into the empty fireplace, refusing to look back at me. “Even if you don’t want to admit it. You’re using her.”
“You’d know that from experience, right?”
“Fuck you,” Kamden spits, his eyes coming back to mine. I’ve pissed him off enough with that one remark to make color come to his cheeks. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. She’s like my little sister.”
I want to call him out on the cameras. Even if Ella were Kamden’s little sister, he sure as hell shouldn’t have been putting up cameras without asking her. But a guy like Kamden will have come up with a justification for himself. One that I won’t be able to change, or counter.
Besides. There are other things I know about Kamden.
“She’s like your little sister, but you didn’t go to visit her.” My tone is deathly low, and wrought with emotion I didn’t realize I had for that small fact. I don’t bother to hide it, the obvious pain he caused her. “She was alone, locked away, and you didn’t visit her once.”
All that color runs out of his cheeks, leaving him strangely pale in the gray light coming through the window. Ella told me he never went to visit her while she was at the Rockford Center, and that is definitely the kind of thing an older brother type would do. It’s most certainly the kind of thing Kamden should have done.
Kamden opens his mouth. “I—” A subtle shake of his head stops him from continuing. He was going to tell me one thing, and then he changed his mind. His thumbnail finding his bottom teeth as he leans back, once again he focuses on the empty fire. Another few long seconds go by. The rain makes it easier to sit through this conversation. It gives me something to listen to other than the beat of my heart and all my own thoughts. His expression gives me something new to think about; it reads nothing but regret. The longer I sit, the more questions build in my mind.
“I had a relapse,” he admits in a whisper and then clears his throat, meeting my eyes. “I didn’t go to see her, because I couldn’t. I know one of your dirty secrets. Now you know one of mine.”
“A relapse?” The leather armrest tightens under my grasp. Kamden stands up and shrugs off his jacket. He’s wearing a heather gray shirt underneath with his jeans. He’d look comfortable here if he weren’t trying to suppress so much emotion. He tosses the jacket onto one of the other chairs and sits down again.
“I overdosed.” Kamden’s mouth curves down, his cheeks reddening again, and I’d know that expression anywhere. I’ve seen it on my own face in the mirror enough times. He settles back into the chair and he’s joined by guilt.
Guilt. Real, pained guilt.
That heat I felt before dims instead as I watch him, finding no trace of deception.
Kamden clears his throat. “Fuck you for judging me.” His eyes are hard on mine now. He looks like this hurts to say even more than admitting the relapse. “I found her. I’m the one who found her. She’d jumped out of a window. Not this place. I can’t go back to her southern home. I thought she was dead. Lying there like a corpse, there was so much blood by her head. I thought she was dead.”
The image slams into me like a long-haul truck. Ella, lying lifeless and still on the ground outside some featureless window. The horrified feeling of coming upon her that way. The slow realization. Kamden wouldn’t have wanted to believe it was true. Reality would have forced its way in anyway. She had lived. Obviously she had lived. But there would have been a moment when his heart was in his throat, when his mind was screaming for her not to have done what she did. My own heart pounds to imagine it. I have to keep my face neutral with every bit of restraint I have.
It’s far more serious than I thought with Ella. I thought she had a moment of weakness once. Only once. “She tried to kill herself more than once?”
“Twice now,” Kamden answers and swallows hard. “She was admitted after she jumped out the window. The only thing that saved her that time was the railing. Her ankle caught it on the way down and prevented her from landing on concrete stairs.” He readjusts again in his seat, this time opting to sit back, his gaze focusing on the blanket. Like all he wants to do is hide beneath it. As if it could all be written off as a bad dream. “I couldn’t do anything about it. The police came. I was in shock. She’d jumped. It was obvious. I wasn’t there when they spoke to her when she woke up, they wouldn’t let me. They admitted her before I could do a damn thing to help her.”
A chill settles between us, dragging the tension down to the ground until it’s subdued entirely. All I can wonder is if Damon knows. My mind drifts to the file. Kamden’s quiet for another long stretch until he tells me, “And then, at the center, she drank drain cleaner. I’ve been—” He stops, putting a fist to his mouth, and takes a deep breath. Putting his hands in his lap before he continues. “I’ve been clean for a decade, but I couldn’t stop blaming myself.”
“For what? What did you do?”
“I’m the one who left her alone in the first place.” His eyes find mine. “She was losing it. Crying, which I expected. But she was angry and hysterical.”
This wouldn’t have been in the file. Even if I’d read it, this statement from Kamden wouldn’t have been in there. He wouldn’t be telling me now if he assumed I already knew about it. It comes back to me then—Ella telling me that everything in the file was carefully curated. I thought she meant she did it all by herself, but Kamden must have had a hand too. He must have kept out certain details.
“You left her alone because she was upset?” I shake my head, my own guilt rising again. I did the same thing. I let Quincy walk through the city by herself. I want to convince Kamden it wasn’t his fault as much as I want to convince myself, but lies don’t help a damn soul.
“No. I left her alone, and I took her phone. So she had no one. I took her phone,” he repeats as if the phone is what did her in. “She couldn’t call anyone … but she couldn’t have it. It was driving her mad.”
None of this makes any sense. “Why the hell would you take her phone?”
He’s looking into the fireplace again, and I almost wish I’d turned the damn thing on so he wouldn’t look so desolate while he stares into nothing. Kamden takes a trip back into his memories and resurfaces with a shake of his head. “They kept posting it. The video. It was all over her social. They kept tagging her, over and over again. Every time she saw one pop up, she lost it.”
“Posting the video?”
“Ella kept watching it over and over. Someone would tag her and the whole cycle would start again. She couldn’t stop herself. She’d play the video and cry. Gut-wrenching sobs. All day. After a few hours she’d manage to collect herself, but it would only be for a few minutes. An hour at most. And then she went back to the video. Back and back and back. When it was at its worst she would beg people to stop posting, but they wouldn’t. Asking them to take it down only made more people share the link. It was vicious. She had nowhere to go. Maybe you don’t get it, but sharing everything with them … she couldn’t back away and they wouldn’t let her.”
I’m missing a crucial piece of information, and for the first time I feel a real, genuine regret that I haven’t read her file. I haven’t done everything in my power to learn about Ella. I’m against it in general because I think people need the chance to tell their own stories, but this is a part of it that she’s yet to confide in me.
I didn’t know about the suicide attempt at her old place. I didn’t know she jumped out of a fucking window. And Kamden thinks she did that because of some people posting about her. No—posting a video. I’ve seen some videos, but—
“What were they posting?”
Kamden meets my eyes with deep disappointment. Somehow, the tables have turned since he walked into this room. “You want to make me the villain in all this because you’re pissed off at me, but I’m not the villain. You might be, though.”
“What got to her—” I stop and take a deep breath. I won’t let my anger get the best of me. I won’t even talk myself up into thinking I haven’t made any mistakes. “What did they post that made her that upset?” It has to do with James. It’s the only thing I can imagine. The realization is suffocating.
Kamden looks down at his hands in his lap, then back up to me. “You should ask her.” He shakes his head then adds, “No. You should already know.”
