Shocked and in pain, her lip bleeding, Charlotte had headed for the door. “I broke up with him then and there. Or I tried to.” It had taken all her courage; she’d kept waiting for him to haul her back, hit her again. Richard’s arrogance was what had allowed her to escape. “He refused to believe it. At first he laughed, said I’d come crawling back since he was the only one who’d have me.”
A growl rumbled out of Gabriel’s chest. “Tell me you reported the motherfucking piece of shit.”
Patting his chest in a soothing gesture, she snuggled even closer to the furnace of his body in an effort to get warm. “Yes, but it was my word against his.” And Richard was a master manipulator skilled at creating illusions that appeared real. “In the end, nothing came of it.”
Gabriel’s jaw was granite. “It didn’t end there, did it?”
She shook her head. “When he realized I was serious about breaking up, he began to bombard me with flowers and chocolates, was suddenly the charming boy who’d first made me believe he loved me.” Panic pulsed in her, causing her lungs to struggle, the air suddenly too thin. “But when I wouldn’t budge, he started to get mean.” Shallow breaths, her heart beating too fast. “He spread rumors about me on campus and through the online campus forums, but that didn’t matter so much to me.”
She’d never been a social butterfly, hadn’t cared about the opinions of the popular cliques. “Molly knew the truth, and that was all that mattered.” During their relationship, Richard had tried to manipulate her into dropping Molly as a friend, but that was the one thing on which Charlotte had never given an inch. “The fact that I was a nobody on campus actually helped me—no one cared enough to spread the rumors.”
“Breathe, Charlotte.”
“I can’t. I have to get this out.” Almost panting now, she slid her hand around to his back and fisted it in his shirt. “I thought that would be the end of it, but he started sitting in on my lectures, just smirking at me. And I could feel him following me around campus, but I could never catch him at it.”
Fear licked at her, a memory of how hunted she’d felt, never knowing when he might confront her, hurt her. “Then I started getting anonymous e-mails full of pictures of women being degraded. No messages, just the vilest pictures with my head Photoshopped on the women’s bodies. The phone calls started soon afterward, all from untraceable numbers.” Nausea had swamped her each time she heard the ringtone. “Over and over and over and over at night and during finals, until I had to change the home line and my cell.”
Gabriel’s voice was hard when he spoke. “He was stalking you.”
“Yes, but he was so good at covering his tracks that though the police were sympathetic, they couldn’t stop him. They did give him a warning though—it enraged him. He stewed and stewed on it, and he watched me.”
She shivered, continued to push the words out because she was afraid that if she paused, she’d never start again. “I didn’t know that then. The incidents stopped after the warning, and when they didn’t reoccur over the next two months, I felt safe again. Safe enough to insist Molly go out of town for a special seminar her lecturer had recommended. I told her I’d be fine.”
Dread swallowed her in a dark cloud. “It was what he’d been waiting for. He knew I’d be alone from Friday night to Sunday afternoon when she came back.” Seeing spots in front of her eyes, she tried to draw more air into her lungs, failed.
“Enough.” Gabriel gripped her chin, made her meet his gaze. “I can guess the rest.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Please, I have to finish.” He had to know exactly what he was fighting—because Charlotte didn’t want him to fail, wanted a life that had Gabriel in it. “Let me finish.”
Fury masked his features, but he nodded. “Go on.”
22
BAD THINGS HAPPEN… BUT THEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN
“HE GOT IN USING a key he’d duplicated while we’d been together.” Charlotte hadn’t had an alarm then, hadn’t even considered it, her neighborhood was so safe. “I never worried he might have a key because I’d never brought him to my place; we’d always gone to his.”
After that horrifying weekend, she’d excoriated herself for her mistake in not thinking to change the locks, until Molly had finally shaken her and said that she hadn’t either. Neither one of them had expected the depth and psychopathic patience of Richard’s rage, having had no experience with his kind of a twisted mind.