Knight In Black Leather by Gail Dayton (ebook reader ink .txt) 📕

your fault," she whispered. "It was theirs. All theirs. You're a good person, Stevie."

He jerked free, sounding an ugly laugh. "Yeah. Sure."

"Stevie--" She touched his arm and he pulled it away.

"I'm tired," he said. "I want to sleep."

"All right." Marilyn nodded, her heart aching. She wanted to hug him, but she knew he wouldn't accept it. "Sweet dreams."

She found Eli on the sofa in the living room, flipping channels, and dropped down beside him with a sigh.

"I'm worried about Stevie." She wanted to lean her head on Eli's shoulder, draw some comfort from him, but he'd been just as distant as Stevie lately. It hurt more though. A lot more.

"He'll be okay." Eli put the remote through its paces, scarcely glancing at her.

All of her worry, all the sense of loss and despair Marilyn had been feeling spilled into unexpected anger, and came boiling up from inside.

"How do you know?" she demanded, struggling to keep her voice quiet, knowing the boy was still awake. "How can you be so sure? Because you're okay? Then, why in hell haven't you done squat to make Stevie understand he's not a bad person? That what happened to him wasn't his fault?"

Eli sat motionless on the couch, jaw clenched tight the way he did when fighting anger. "What if it was?"

Twenty-Four

***

 "Was...?" Marilyn frowned trying to follow Eli's thought process through her outrage. "Was his fault? You think it was Stevie's fault that--?"

He threw the remote across the room as he sprang to his feet to loom over her. "Not Stevie's fault. Mine. What happened to you, what happened to Pete was my fault. None of it, from Teresa's death to your hell would have happened if not for me."

"Bullshit." She shoved him back as she stood, coming nose to nose with him. "Dwayne Gardner did that. It's his fault. Nobody else's. You had nothing to do with it."

"He came after you to get to me. How can you say I had nothing to do with it?"

"Did you make him do any of that? Did you call him up and tell him 'Hey, come kidnap my kid?' Hell, no. Dwayne Gardner is responsible for what he did. Nobody else. Not you. Not society. Not even the devil. The devil can't make a person do anything. Lay it out there in front of you and tempt you, sure, but the doing is all yours. And you didn't do anything but try to protect us and rescue me from Flash. He's the one who did the bad stuff. Not you." She fought her voice back down to quiet.

"God." Eli spun away from her, making fists and holding them tight, facing her again several feet away. "You don't know, Marilyn. You don't know anything."

"What don't I know?" She closed the gap between them.

"What I've done. You don't know--there's stuff inside me I can't even think about. Bad stuff. Black like tar and it sticks to everything I touch. I try to keep it from spreading but--"

Oh dear God in heaven, was that what he thought? "No, Eli." She caught his face between her hands, forced him to look at her. "No. You are a good person. Loyal and honorable and caring all the way through to the bone. Down to your heart and soul."

He laughed, a bitter sound, breaking free of her touch. "You're delusional. You don't know what I've done."

"What is it I don't know? That you killed Fat Fred? Good. He deserved to die."

"I didn't kill him. I wanted to. I should have. Every day I didn't was another day he... You want to know how he died? I stood up to him. Told him to leave one of the kids alone. I don't remember his name. He was new, barely out of grade school. Scared sick. I said I'd take the job. But Fred wouldn't let me do it, not any more. I was too old. Almost seventeen."

He paused, his eyes shuttered, face expressionless. Marilyn wanted to hold him, but with him lost in the past, she didn't know if he would accept her touch.

"He lit into me," he said, "screaming he was going to kill me. I fought back--for all the good it did. Fat Fred was the size of a small mountain, even bigger than Flash. Everybody ran. Except--somebody came back.

"I don't know who. I was unconscious by then. I came to and he was dead, his skull bashed in, his face worse than Tee's. The two-by-four was on the ground next to him. Somebody had a hell of a lot of hate stored up for that bastard.

"That's when I got out. I ran before I could get blamed for something I didn't do but should have. Tee let me stay with her a couple days, then I hitchhiked. Got as far as Erie and fainted, practically on Fitz's doorstep. He took me in. Taught me all he knew."

"Thank God for Fitz," Marilyn whispered.

Eli's eyes shifted toward her, blinked, and seemed to register her image instead of some past horror.

Marilyn captured his hand and pressed it against her cheek. "Explain how that makes you a bad person."

He turned his hand over, cupped her cheek. The brief moment of yearning sadness in his expression before he pulled away made her want to cry. "It wasn't that, Marilyn. I was on the street four years. Four fucking years. I did things--you have no idea what I did--"

"You think I don't know? My God, Eli, how stupid--how naïve do you think I am? I was in that basement with Stevie for hours. I know Flash forced him to have sex with perverts who get their thrills from abusing children. Did you think I wouldn't realize he was just carrying on the family business?

"But I knew before that. I knew from the second you told me Flash wanted Pete. The look on your face told me exactly what he wanted him for and that you knew firsthand what kind of hell it was. I know, Eli. I