Payton (Dreamcatchers Romantic Suspense Series Book 3) Page 7

  After rejecting half his closet, Cole settled on a plain black button-down. It wasn’t a business shirt, more of a smart casual getup. It was nice, but not too dressy, so it wouldn’t give off the wrong impression.

  This isn’t a date.

  But he wanted it to be.

  She’d phoned earlier and suggested they meet at Vito’s. They were the kind of place you got a quick meal with friends. It had the feel of a family-owned restaurant, not a chef-run extravaganza complete with a wine cellar and expensive cuisine. It was casual, just like it was between them.

  The entire way there, his palms were drenched with sweat, and his eyes kept darting up to his rearview mirror. Would she be able to tell if he couldn’t focus? It didn’t help his confidence that his pants were uncomfortably tight at the thought of her smile and the way her body curved.

  When Cole walked in, Payton was already seated. She waved him over to the booth and he slid in across from her, trying not to move too awkwardly. His body brushed the length of hers and he dropped his eyes away. Payton turned quickly to look at her menu when he didn’t talk. Fuck, he was screwing up already.

  “Have you ever been here before?” Payton broke the silence.

  “Yeah. Is this your first time?” He set his menu down, cutting the space between them.

  “I, uh, I just moved here a month ago.”

  “Really?” Now things made more sense. Her attitude and determination. It was a fresh beginning for her. “Is that why you’re trying out new things?”

  She froze and wrapped her arms against her chest. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re doing amazing in class, Payton. Aaron and the guys give you shit sometimes, I know, but it’s rare to see somebody progressing quite like you.”

  Her cheeks went red and she eased back a bit in her seat. “I just have to do it.”

  “Why? That’s what perplexes me.”

  “That’s why I moved here. I had to get away.” She shrank back and hunched her shoulders as she let her gaze fall downward like something was weighing her down.

  Cole’s mind drifted to the first time he saw her. She’d had that same posture. There was no mistaking it. What burden was she carrying? He hadn’t cared too much for anyone else’s problems since the previous year. He hadn’t been able to. But with Payton, he wanted to know so he could help her. No one else had even come close to breaking through the fog as she had, and so damn quickly, too. It made his head spin if he stopped to think about it, and so Cole shoved the thought to the back of his mind. He’d worry about his reaction to her later.

  The waitress chose that moment to approach their table, and Payton held her hands out in front of her, clasped on the table. She was uncomfortable talking about whatever it was; that much was clear.

  “Hello. How are you? My name is Lindsay and I’ll be your server tonight.” Her wide-eyed excitement seemed out of place. “Can I get you guys anything to drink?”

  Cole looked over at Payton, who was still staring down at the table, caught in her thoughts. “You wanna split a bottle of wine?” he asked softly.

  “Sure,” she snapped out of wherever her head had been and looked up at the waitress, picking the first house wine on the list.

  “Great. I’ll be right back to take your order.”

  Payton was glaring at the table like she was trying to move it with her mind. Her face formed into a scowl before relaxing and then frowning again. What was going on in her head?

  “I was kidnapped,” she blurted out.

  He was lying on the ground, screaming at the top of his lungs, begging for them to stop, but they wouldn’t.

  “I don’t remember much.” Her voiced jolted Cole back to the present. He looked across the table at Payton, but she was somewhere else. “I was a waitress at this shit diner in Chicago, working for nothing, and I’d just gotten off work when this thing, this man, slammed me to the ground.

  “He had this face, something I’d never seen before, all hard angles but almost forgettable, unremarkable. He was completely bald. I was so fuzzy, maybe I was drugged. I don’t remember much.”

  He jerked out of the scene playing out in his head. “What the hell?” His voice came out as a low growl and he cursed himself.

  Way to frighten her even more, Idiot.

  “It’s strange, Cole. I don’t understand, and what I do know is pretty vague. I woke up with this woman standing over me speaking nonsense.”

  “Oh?”

  He was there again, in the darkness. They were standing over him, laughing when they did it. He was tied down—helpless.

  “Yeah. The bald man, he was talking to that woman.” Her face twisted up and she closed her eyes. “At least, I think it was her. They were both blonde women.” Payton shook her head back and forth. “No, it was her. There was a different man with her when they woke me up, and he called her Kelia.” She leaned forward and whispered, “The bitch was psychotic.” Payton’s lip curled up in disgust. “She was saying all these weird things, begging me to go with her. She even said she had visions of me.”

  “Jesus. You don’t believe her, do you?”

  Payton hesitated. “No.”

  “Those kinds of things, they stick with you.” Cole’s voice was low and dark, but he couldn’t bring himself to lighten the mood.

  “I know.” Their eyes met and that time he didn’t look away, not for an eternity. He took her hand and let her know, as best as he could, that he understood.

  “From the moment you walked into the gym, I saw it. Your shoulders were hunched, your eyes kept darting around. I knew you saw something and”—his voice cracked—“we both know that look. We know what it’s like to carry that around.” He leaned forward and brushed away tears that were streaming down her face. “You can’t do that alone. You have to share it with somebody.”

  “What happened?” Payton whispered, squeezing his hand.

  “Cartels. I was working with the Mexican Federales, hunting down some central Mexican meth distributors.” He shook his head. “Most people don’t know evil—not like I do. These guys, they literally worship death. They get down on their hands and knees to pray to Santa Muerte—Holy Death. They take sadistic pleasure in watching people scream. In those gangs, their sense of self worth is defined by their ability to kill, to incite fear.”

  “My God.” Her eyes widened.

  “Fucking street pusher—looked like a Goddamn skeleton with pockmarks all over his body from picking at his skin, and he was covered in tattoos. He used so much that he didn’t know which way was up or down, so we knew he’d talk so long as we gave him a few nudges, you know?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “He led us just north of the border to a concrete shack. It was just me and my partner. We couldn’t afford to take anyone else and spook him. He was supposed to be an easy mark. When we ran in, they were ready. Someone downed me with a taser, and beat us silly. My whole body. . . .

  “It was like falling into lava.” His breath was running away with itself, and those pale, emaciated faces—they’d never leave. They were always there in the back of his mind, coming out to play in his dreams every night. “They bagged my head, tied me up, and dragged me into this basement, and they left me there for a month with tiny scraps of food. We had to drink from a puddle of water they threw on the ground. I can still see it, Payton. Every day, three times a day, they’d come down and burn me with cigarettes, and then when I wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t give them what they wanted…then came the mock suffocations, the electrocutions—they’d just watch me scream.” His voice broke and—damn it!—tears were welling up.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “They loved it. That shit does something to your mind.” He pointed at his head. “Those men aren’t human. The drugs warp their minds. They don’t even look human. It drives them so insane that they pick at their bodies, all over, for hours on end. Their skin in covered in scars.”

  Payton grasped his hand, wiping away a fallen tear. �
�How’d you get out?”

  “Fucker got picked up and sang to the feds. The men holding us had turned on him when he stole drugs from them and he wanted protection, I suppose. They’d moved us that night once they’d beaten us unconscious, smuggled us across the border somehow. The feds couldn’t find us and the cops back at my own station had pretty much given up on us, thought we were dead.” He stopped talking when the waitress approached warily. She put their drinks on the table and walked off without saying a word. Cole didn’t blame her. He downed the a full glass in one swig to take the edge off. “You know what the worst part was?”

  Payton shook her head and took a slow sip of her drink, her eyes never leaving his.

  “The force didn’t give a flying fuck. I won’t ever go back. They just checked to see if I was fit for duty, and when I was diagnosed PTSD, they put me on indefinite leave.”

  Payton was quiet for a long time before she spoke again. “Those men, they sound so terrible. Like they couldn’t have a soul. As a cop, you must’ve seen death before.” Cole jerked back at the question. What was she getting at? “Is there something there, you think? Something inside of us, that makes us who we are?”

  He paused. Was there? For some people, maybe. No, there definitely was. He’d watched his partner’s slowly leach out before his eyes.

  “I think so, and I know that’s strange, but when you see it happen, you know that person isn’t in their body anymore. The second they’re gone, it’s a shell, empty.”

  “Does it hurt to see?”

  “You get used to seeing the body. Death . . . you don’t get used to seeing that.” He looked up at her. “Why are you asking?”

  “It’s something that I’ve always wondered about.” She was lying, but why? She was clearly gauging his reaction and she probably knew he couldn’t hide it. Talking about all of it fucking hurt, but at the same time, he felt a little relieved. He was getting it all out for practically the first time. He’d told some people bits and pieces, but never all of it. It felt right with her, even though he had no idea why.

  “It’s not pretty.”

  The restaurant was gone, and he was lying on the bloodstained floor, tortured by the screams of his partner. His incessant shouts were the worst part, because of what Cole knew was happening. He was begging for it to end it while he bled out.

  Her voice broke through his mind again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No.” Cole shook his head. “See, it doesn’t help to ignore it. I’m going to relive it no matter what. The only thing you can do is let it out, so you don’t feel it in here as much.” He touched a finger to his chest. “The pent-up emotion is what hurts you. Trust me, I know.”

  “Well, thank you for sharing it with me.”

  “Tell me something. Why are you so intrigued with death? Souls?”

  She stayed quiet again for awhile before speaking. “It’s intriguing. I’ve never seen it before. Everyone wonders about it.”

  Cole shrugged. Perhaps whatever had happened to her had left her pondering some bigger questions. He couldn’t blame anyone for wondering about mortality after experiencing what she had.

  “It helps to talk to someone who’s had a similar experience,” he said. Her eyes were bright again, but the sadness was still there. “Thank you for telling me what happened to you.”

  “And you, too. You sound like you remember most of what happened to you.” Payton responded.

  “I probably wouldn’t be sitting here with you if I didn’t. How do you do it? If I didn’t know what happened to those responsible. . . .”

  She gave him a look of understanding. She was leaning forward, almost close enough that he could reach out and touch her, wrap his arm around her. He hadn’t expected talking about what had happened could bring him anything except pain. It hadn’t before. He wondered, But now? Although both their spirits were low, that moment he’d shared with Payton was the closest he’d felt to another person since it happened.

  Synchronicity wasn’t a part of Cole’s belief system and neither was a relationship, before that night. He had lain on that blood-soaked floor listening to the desperate pleas of his only companion begging for his life to end while he bled out, and Cole had thought that he’d never want anything ever again.

  Now though, his life had changed in a moment again. He didn’t know whether to be happy or scared out of his mind.

  10

  Payton sat in silence at the table. Since she’d blurted out her secret and Cole and dropped a bombshell of his own, words had been few between them. It didn’t make things awkward, though; in fact, just the opposite. She’d shuffled forward on the booth’s bench seat at some point, she didn’t know when, and leaned so close to him their hands were almost touching. Being so close to someone else should have scared her, but all Payton felt was calm, safe. She’d had no idea just how it would feel to tell someone else the whole story. Fuck that, to tell someone the whole story and for them to believe her. She hadn’t thought that would ever happen.

  Cole reached over and poured them both another glass of wine, then picked up her hand and enveloped it in his gentle grip. The warmth she’d felt earlier spilled over, radiating between their joined hands. The room was just a little fuzzy around the edges from the wine and Payton could feel herself relax—let go—for the first time since she’d left Chicago.

  “I haven’t done anything like this in a long time.” She looked up at Cole, tucking her hair behind her ear so that their eyes met head on. His eyes looked different, too, almost as if there was light reflecting out from inside him.

  “I haven’t, either. It’s been more than a year since we were taken, and this is the first time I’ve been out with someone since.”

  And he’d chosen that first time to be with her? “Wow.”

  “Does it get easier?” Payton blurted out. “I mean, when did you first start to feel better?”

  “That’s the thing with PTSD. Keeping everything locked up inside just makes it worse. I wasn’t going to get any better until I learned to accept what happened and deal with it. I wasn’t coping at all at first. Couldn’t get out of bed, barely left the house, so the force set me up with a psychologist. I was convinced that nothing would work. Unless they’d been there with me, there was no way they’d be able to understand the fucked-up mess that was going on inside my head. I thought there was no way that some college grad in a pristine office who’d never seen a single day of action could possibly help.”

  “But he did?”

  “Here’s the thing. It didn’t matter who it was in the end. What mattered is that I made a connection, I talked to someone. What mattered was that I reached out.”

  “So the shrink helped?”

  Cole let out a short bark of laughter. “No. I mean, he’s good to talk to now, has some ideas and contacts that are helping. But the first person I made a connection to after it all went down was Aaron. He found me in the gym one night, completely broken. I was lifting, had been for half the day and should have stopped hours before. My arms were shaking and my legs were barely holding me up. But I couldn’t stop. Because if I did. . . .”

  “If you did, then you’d see them again.”

  “Exactly. Aaron . . . he . . . well, he forced the weights out of my hands and then sat with me for the rest of the night until I opened my mouth. Then he sat with me for several hours more and just listened. By the time the sun came up, it felt like my entire world had changed. The darkness inside me was still there—it’s still there today—but for the first time in months, I also saw the dawn.”

  “You let someone in.” Her voice was quiet, and Cole reached over, taking the hand she’d been holding and enveloping it in both of his, holding it tightly.

  “Yes. And that’s what you need to do. You have to let it out, Payton. You keep it all up in there.” He brushed his hand over the side of her head, gently combing his fingers through her hair. “You keep it all inside and it’ll kill you.”

 
“I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone,” she whispered. “I mean, I thought it would be too dangerous. It is too dangerous.”

  “But it’s over. Now you just have to learn to live with it.” Cole sounded so certain. He had no idea.

  “No, it’s not. I can still feel it, feel them, every day. I keep thinking they’re just gonna just show up at any time. I even think I see them sometimes.” The giant bald man was everywhere, and flashes of blonde hair still had her twisting around to look at the person’s face every time.

  “That’s a symptom of what you’re going through. I had it. I still have it, and it keeps me up at night. Every night in my dreams those tweakers are running at me, standing over me, laughing. . . .”

  He didn’t get it. These weren’t just flashbacks; she was sure of that much. Payton shuffled in her seat and looked down at her hands, holding in a sigh. She didn’t want to be angry with him. It wasn’t Cole’s fault that he didn’t understand. After all, she’d thought Keila was a complete nutjob for even mentioning that she had visions. Now there she was, reaching into someone else’s mind. Visions were everywhere in pop culture; you could even call up a psychic hotline on regular old TV. Erasing someone’s thoughts? That was far more fucked up, and yet there she was.

  “Yeah, I don’t get that as much. They’re not flashbacks.”

  “You know, I can forget where I am. I’ll be sitting in the gym one minute and the next, I’m lying on the ground begging for my life.” Cole looked at her and his eyes were glazed with moisture. God, the sight nearly broke her heart. He was so damn strong, built like a god and so stoic, and yet there he was, trusting her enough to let her see the vulnerable side that he’d hidden from everyone else.

  “I lost everything.” Cole wiped a hand over the back of his face, trying to hide the evidence, but he didn’t need to. Not from her. The man was a beautiful mess of a puzzle who was becoming even more gorgeous once the pieces were put back together.