“Smack Kade in the fucking face day?” I cringed, painfully stepping into my oversized sweatpants and slowly sliding them over my wounds. TBI. I hated those initials. Because of David, the filthy piece of monkey scum, I had a TBI. A traumatic brain injury. Not a severe one, thank God, but still…I just wanted to get back to being me again. And I was going to, I so was. Then I was going to piss on his grave.
“Oh, you’re bloody brilliant, love. No that only happens on Sundays. Today is Tuesday, which means it’s COUNSELING day.” He then stuck his freaking tongue out at me.
Shit on me. Going to therapy with Kade was not fun. The first week, I was able to speak well enough to talk through the incident. Kade went with me for support, and when he listened to everything David did, he almost lost it. Then it promptly became Kade’s therapy session, where it ended with him hurling a lamp across the room, screaming he should have shot him in the dick first, then the head. Security escorted him out of the building, and he wasn’t allowed back inside until the next day after he signed a code of hospital conduct affidavit. It was the first day he was away from me since I came to the hospital, and I know he spent the night with his doctor, talking through his rage. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me he offered them money to help him dig up David’s grave and mount his head on his office wall. Nope, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all, and I wouldn’t have minded either.
That Tuesday, as always, he helped me walk the hospital corridors to make our way to therapy. Our first visit was always to Deputy George Tatum’s room, where he was recuperating nicely from his gunshot wound to the stomach. Right below the bottom of his bulletproof vest. “Hey, look at this beautiful little lady, looking good, champ, looking good,” he laughed from his bed. His wife Margie, jumped up from her bedside vigil and gently hugged me.
“How are you feeling today, hun?” she whispered.
“Everyday a little better,” I smiled. Then I gave my attention to George, “How about you, George, when you busting out of this joint, huh?”
“They say probably tomorrow, and I can’t wait, because the food here sucks.”
After a few more pleasantries, Kade and I made our way slowly around the hospital to the dreaded therapy room. I gingerly sat down, careful not to lean too heavily on my right thigh. My puncture wound was still swollen and painful, but I knew it would heal.
“So how are we feeling today, Samantha?” Doctor Ross asked as she handed me a bottle of water.
“I miss being myself. Doing things for myself. I hate having to depend on people. I hate the pain.” I looked over to Kade, who was sitting across from me, watching me. “I feel guilty as hell that Kade is here all the time and not working and I know what he did to David is weighing…”
“Don’t.” Kade’s eyebrows pulled together in one of his menacing scowls. “That sentence is going to end real ugly if you continue with those thoughts, so just bloody stop. You, Sam. You saved me from drowning in my own misery…now it’s my turn. And nothing I did to David is weighing on any bloody part of my body.”
“How are we going to get through this, Kade? You are going to crush yourself with what you did, you will regret...”
“No, I will never regret protecting you. I will never regret taking the life of someone who didn’t deserve to live. I won’t. I’m not Thomas. I’m not a psychopath or a sociopath, I don’t take pleasure out of physically hurting people like your sadist of a husband did, and I’m not a unloving greedy fuck like your father. But I will stand proud and say that I stopped evil. I put a bullet into a man who killed a woman, shot a cop, and tortured the woman I love more than my own life. So no, I will never regret what I did. Now piss off about me and start talking about what YOU went through. Instead of healing every-bloody-body else, heal Sam!”
Kade was right. And I never talked so much about myself in my life. All the while with Kade’s hand in mine, always touching me, watching me, as if he feared he would lose me if he turned the other way.
After three months in trauma rehabilitation, complete daily physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and a hefty hand basket full of other therapies, Kade took me home.
“Up to the attic first, love.”
“Why? I want to jump in bed with you,” I laughed.
He stood in the doorway with a sheen of pure lust in his eyes, and then promptly shook it out. “Up to the attic, now.”
“Fine,” I huffed and walked up the stairs, which made me have to sit at the top and take a breath. “Sheesh, almost dying, really kills you.”
Wrapping his arms around my body, he lifted me up and walked with me the rest of the way into the attic. My eyes widened when I saw the entire room rearranged into an exact replica of the physical therapy gym in the hospital. That wasn’t the only thing he did for me either. No, Kade fucking Grayson took weekly trips to a farm for fresh organic foods, and he cooked them for me. Do you understand the depth of this? Kade Grayson, King of the burnt-microwave-dinner-I’ll-just-have-a-bag-of-pretzels instead. I watched him Google recipes, healthy ones, and coffee, my God, he bought me a brand new Keurig with a closet JUST FOR COFFEE. So many flavors.
Kade made what happened to me easier to deal with. He made learning to walk correctly again easier, learning to speak right again easier, but none of it was easy. Not at all. What David did was sick and twisted, and made me feel weak and small, but Kade made me realize, little by little, I was never weak, and I was never small. The monster was weak and small, not the survivor. Kade, the one they used to call the devil, showed me that it’s okay to be scared as long as you’re brave. To be strong when all you feel is weak, and to believe that I can survive and live after being touched by violence.
Six months after my abduction and torture, my father stood in front of the media, lawyers, and the federal court sentence for sentencing. The night of his arrest, he had been indicted and held without bail, and he pled guilty on all charges. It gave me a small amount of pleasure to know he admitted to everything, clearing my name and spending the rest of his pathetic life behind bars. Within the last eight years of him as head neurosurgeon, and then president of one of the prestigious New York City Hospitals, my father, Dr. Michael Matthews, along side his business partner, Dr. David Stanton, spread their venom into the white walls of the foundation, wiping out everyone in their path of destruction. A total of twenty-seven other doctors, pharmacists, lab technicians, and other medical workers were also arrested for knowledge, and helping with their fraudulent criminal actions.
It began as it always did, with big hospitals and greedy little doctors. My father and David billed Medicare for services NOT rendered, and began distributing controlled substances outside the course of routine medical practice, and for no legitimate purposes, except to make extra money. In the first year alone, they billed Medicare for approximately $567,000 in claims, yet this monetary value was not high enough for them, they wanted more. So they created their own Pharmaceutical Company, SamMatt, with me as the President. I guess that was easy for them, since I was gone to another world overseas, and my father really believed my achievements to be so little and insignificant that I would not return without the cover of a body bag.
The first action SamMatt did was misbrand painkillers and promote the drug to treat acute pain at dosages the FDA had previously found to be dangerously high. When they got away with that, they began using fillers and gave free units of the new drug to encourage doctors to buy their products. They inflated the prices from government programs and submitted false price reports. The criminal actions from my father and David went on and on, identity theft, pharmaceutical fraud, CME fraud, and off-label marketing, and so, so much more. The biggest one to me was helping to premeditate my murder, and the forced drug overdose of my brother. They charged my father with knowledge of everything that David Stanton did, because it was true. He knew of it all, and was fucking okay with every last detail. He was charged with criminally negligent homicide, which just means that he didn??
?t intend any deaths to happen. They were just a consequence of all the other offenses. A means to an end. That’s what my brother, Dr. Michael Matthews, Jr.’s, murder was; just a means to an end. It sickened me.
My father pleaded guilty to everything. I attended his sentencing. I went as a witness and stared that motherfucker in the face as Kade growled next to me. George stood on the other side of me, his arms clamped around my body, holding back Kade.
I was allowed to speak at the sentencing. I specifically asked to, because hell, I wasn’t going to let him go without a word from me, the last words from me that he’d ever hear. My father, in his nifty orange jumper, sat stoic, staring forward. His eyes never diverted. His head never moved. He just sat still and motionless, as if he were a statue that nothing, and no one, could break.
Until me.
The judge called me up. Kade escorted me toward the front, but we did not move towards the podium. Oh, hell no. Kade and I walked right in front of my father’s face, three feet in front of him, and made him look at me.
I had a speech eloquently written out folded deep in my pocket, but I left it there, not needing it any longer. Kade’s fingers wrapped around mine, anger and rage simmering just under his skin, but he kept it in check, held it in. “You’ll look right at her until she’s done with you,” Kade hissed. Even though it was said threateningly and menacingly, nobody moved to stop him from speaking. In fact, the bailiff just chuckled.
“I had wanted to ask to you why. I wanted to scream, shout, cry, and ask how you could do what you did, but I’m not going to do any of these things. Not ever. What I am going to do is forget you,” I stated. My father’s eyes filled with tears. They dripped down his pale face like rain. His tears gave me strength.
“There will not be a day I will live from now until my end, which a thought of you will be allowed to enter my mind. But every day, I will think of my brother, who was a great man, who touched people’s lives with his strength and his courage, with his love for medicine, his knowledge and talents. He saved lives. He was and will always be my hero.”
His tears fell faster. His breathing became harder, but I didn’t care.
“But I will not think of you. I will not think about the pathetic man who allowed someone to torture me, use me, and abuse for his own monetary gain. Where’s that money now? Gone. Just. Like. You. You’re a coward and a thief. A weak poor excuse for a man. And I survived. I survived you, and I survived David. I thought I would hate you and want to claw your eyes out, but I don’t, because you don’t affect me at all. You’re nothing. And you know what?” I took a deep breath and smiled up at Kade. “I’m done with you. Let’s go, Kade. I feel like having a slice of pizza.”
Dr. Michael Matthew’s chin trembled. His eyes poured out tears that I wondered if they left his body just to escape his horrid pathetic soul. “I’m so sorry. Please find it your heart one day to…”
“STOP!” I yelled. Kade’s grip on me tightened, and I squeezed his fingers back a strong reply of my own strength. “That’s just a pathetic confrontational plea designed to draw an emotional response from me, and Mr. Matthews, you don’t deserve anything I have to offer you anymore. Enjoy prison.” Rub that in like a lotion, bitch. Let it penetrate the skin, sink in real deep, you can’t hurt me again. Ever.
The courtroom erupted in applause and cheers, Jen’s voice over all of the others. Yet, as I walked away, I heard my Kade rumble deep and low, “Watch your arse in prison, old man. I have friends in low places, and karma? Karma can bloody bite you right in that arse, literally.”
Kade and I exited that courtroom with an army of people behind me, and my heart thundering like a battlefield. Running down the stone stairs, Jen stood on the lowest step and held her arms out wide as Dylan danced around her. “I say we ce-le-freaking-brate. Let’s go dance on David’s grave,” she pointed her finger at me and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t say I’m being horrible, because I’ve heard you say you’ve wanted to do it for months.” Yes, that was my best friend, always and forever my comic relief.
Kade’s hand slid up my back to the nape of my neck and all I wanted was to go home. Just go home and spend the rest of my life with that man. My eyes traveled up to his, clear gray skies, only the small whisper of a storm within, and I sighed, “Take me home, Kade.”
Without a sound, he walked me to the truck, lips in my hair, hands digging into the flesh of my neck. He helped me climb in and skimmed his hands over my back, my ass, and my thighs. It made me shiver. He always makes me shiver.
Kade walked around the truck, eyes locked on mine as he passed in front of the dirty windshield. Kade was still mysterious, dark, and intense. And mine, he was all mine. He climbed inside the truck in silence, pulled the keys from his pocket, the muscles of his hands and his jaw tense, rigid, and so damn strong.
Heavy silence hung in the icy air between us, the mist of our breaths, mingling and spreading. We drive without heat, since we have enough inside us to keep us warm. We drive without music, because each other’s breath was all the music we needed. We were all we ever needed.
Foot heavy on the pedal, green blur of wintery trees pass the sides of my vision, but I see nothing, nothing but Kade.
Then we’re home. Time is tangible. I can feel it still around us, letting us live in the moment, and hell, and we both deserved it.
Without a word, he exits the car and quickly moves around his truck, warm hand against the small of my back, just where my coat meets my waist. His fingers touch skin, and they’re like fire. Singeing and scarring, his touch burns into my flesh, rewriting, rewiring, reviving, and relentlessly, redefining everything I ever knew that was violent, savage, and vicious. Turning all my bruises to blushes, and all my scars to strength.
Epilogue
February – Two years later.
I scanned the crowded room and sighed happily as I eyed my husband sitting next to me in his tuxedo. Kade and I sat in Los Angeles’s Dolby Theatre, surrounded by the most profound and talented artists in Hollywood. Kade’s book about my abduction and torture, Savage Heart, was turned into a movie for which he wrote the screenplay. It was the hardest thing he’d ever written, his labor of love, but we did it together, side-by-side, with our therapist on call. There were days that it felt like we were tearing each other’s hearts out, a pure and primal pain. Sometimes, we fought frantically, blamed each other, cried, and vomited out everything dark and evil. Other times, our sadness took control and left us empty and full of despair. Yet, we wrote, together. We healed together. We were intense, raw and passionate, twisted, dark and forever.
To no one’s surprise, but Kade’s, his screenplay was nominated for The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the awards ceremony. He clutched the armrests, still uncomfortable in a big crowd, but we were there together, facing everyone, and that was all that mattered.
“I wonder if we could find any empty closets in this place. I bet I could make you stop choking the seats if I could get you alone for a few minutes,” I whispered, seductively into his ear.
His stormy eyes locked on mine and his hands let go of the chair and reached for mine. Interlocking our fingers together, he softly caressed the dark tattoo I had gotten encircled around my left ring finger. My tattooed wedding band that was the identical twin to his. We forwent the flimsy, easily discarded golden ones once we were married. What we had was intense and permanent, painful and beautiful all at once.
Will we ever fully heal from what we both endured in our pasts? Who is to say? Living one day at a time and doing the best you can is all that you could ever be in control of. Kade still has nightmares sometimes, as do I. Some featuring Thomas, others with David, and I’m still the calm in his storm, and he’s turned out to be mine.
As they called his name for his award, he smiled. Muscles tight, jaw flexing, his strength and courage showing through as he faced a fear and ignored its taunt. I knew he would win. After all, the movie was brilliant, the writing perfect. There was never a doub
t in my mind. Kade Grayson was not a man ever to be doubted. Yet, I was surprised when he walked up to the stage, long sexy masculine strides, accepted the award, then the microphone, and began to speak.
Kade speaking in front of an audience, and not thrusting his middle finger at the crowd of people cheering him on? Un-freaking-believable. And boy, did they cheer him on; they stood up and cheered him on, all of them. All the big names in Hollywood stood up for him and applauded, every single one of them. In my heart, I knew it wasn’t just because he wrote that screenplay. God no, it was because of what he’d been through, what I’d been through, and how we saved each other. They were applauding our courage, our strength, our fuck you to the haters, and our love.
As the crowd slowly quieted down and the hush of heart pounding, nerve-wracking anticipation filled the large room, the dark brooding expression he always wore on his face transformed into a smile. He stood at the podium for a moment and took it all in, and then he glanced over the crowd quickly and found my eyes, and I watched him let out a breath of relief. He astonished me. It was breathtaking to see how this man had grown, how the both of us had.
Then his deep voice filled the speakers, echoing across the great sea of people, and grabbed hold of my heart. As always, he grabbed hold of my heart.
“Thank you. Thank you all so bloody much. However, there’s truly only one person who deserves my utmost respect and gratitude. My beautiful wife, Samantha.” His eyes were on mine. Sparkling. Shining. Heating. Coiling.
“People think that compared to men, women are the more vulnerable of the sexes. I think that’s a huge bloody fallacy. When men become damaged, they usually stay broken and beaten, and they wait for someone else to put them back together. Women are the ones that pick up all the pieces, set them all up and seal up the holes. They heal. And, my God, did she build me up whole again. I would not be up here today, if it wasn’t for her, I don’t even think I’d be breathing today, if it wasn’t for her. So, thank you, Sam, for loving me, staying here and bloody fighting for me, and believing that I could be more. Thank you for showing me what courage and strength look like, and what compassion and love feel like.” He held up the award and nodded to the crowd, but I knew I was still the only face he saw. “And, thank you Academy for this award. It’s a pittance though, compared to who I have waking up next to me every morning. She’s all the reward I’d ever need in this life.”