Robin Roberts - Everybodys got something

Table of Contents

Both personally and professionally, Alexa knows all too well the power of words. Two years after her boyfriend Christophe's vicious attack, she's still trying to see herself as more than simply 'his victim', still trying to figure out her own story.

After his trial, she moves from New York City to Toronto in an attempt to start over, but his words cling to her and even in a new country she can't see how to move into relationships with the new people in her life while hiding the secret of Christophe's worst offense.

She can't hide that secret from her coworker Jake, though, because the news buff has recognized her from the coverage of the assault and trial and knows every word she can't bring herself to say about her ordeal.

With Jake's help, can Alexa reclaim her story and her life?

"Everybody's Got a Story" features Jake, a character from "Blank Slate Kate", so if you haven't read that book yet you might want to as this one contains definite spoilers.

If you'd like to read all of the Toronto books in order, starting with my free novel "Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo", the "Also By Heather Wardell" link in the Table of Contents will give you the information you need.

Whether you've read all of my books or are just finding me now, thank you so much!

Heather

Chapter One

The prosecutor's closing argument was reaching its peak. "On that fateful Friday night over two years ago, he took advantage of her trust in him to get her into the apartment building where he felt sure nobody would interrupt them. Then he began to carry out his plan, the plan you've been shown was carefully thought out and pre-meditated. Christophe Durand deliberately drugged Alexa Ryder with a potent anesthetic he bought online as part of his planning, knocking her out so he could abuse and mutilate her at his leisure."

I pressed my thighs together beneath the long skirt I wore, hating that word. I wasn't mutilated.

Was I?

Knowing damn well that I was, that the man with whom I'd thought I'd spend my life had literally etched his control of me into my skin while I lay unconscious before him on the air mattress he'd had me bring to the under-construction apartment, I swallowed hard and stared straight ahead at the front wall of the courtroom and did my best not to listen as she described how he'd ensured I'd never forget him. I didn't need to listen. I knew far too well what he'd done.

"As if all that hadn't been bad enough," the prosecutor went on, "which of course it certainly was, after hours of it he let her return to consciousness."

My stomach twisted painfully, as it always did when I had to remember waking up, dizzy and confused, to excruciating pain in my thighs and Christophe's face looming over mine bearing an expression of cold hatred. I could still hear his voice, cool and almost calm, as he said those awful words. "You've been a bad girl, Alexa. You've cheated on me, been with another man. But you'll never be with a man again. I'll see to it."

I hadn't been a bad girl, and I hadn't cheated. But so far he'd been right on the third part.

As I swallowed hard to make sure I wouldn't humiliate myself even further by throwing up in the courtroom, the prosecutor said, "He woke her up so she would know and suffer as he violated her sexually in every way possible."

Just like every time anything sex-related was mentioned, I felt everyone in the courtroom struggling to keep from looking at me and imagining the details of what he'd done to me. I was the human equivalent of a massive car accident on the highway: you know you shouldn't stare, but somehow you're compelled.

As the prosecutor detailed how carefully Christophe had planned, how he'd even prepared a written list of what he wanted to do to me so he wouldn't forget anything, I realized that Christophe had turned in the prisoner's chair and was facing me.

My heart raced but I kept my eyes fixed on the courtroom wall. I couldn't let myself look at him. If I did I might stand up and beg him to tell me why he'd done it all.

We hadn't spoken for over two years. I couldn't remember the last thing he'd said to me, although no doubt it had been some sort of command. My last words to him, some variation of the 'please don't do it' I'd said over and over during the assault, had come just before the police had burst into the apartment.

Nothing that had been said in the two years since, in the media or in the courtroom, had explained his actions to me, and I longed to know how he'd been able to treat me like that.

The prosecutor hit a few of the highlights, or lowlights, of the sex acts Christophe had forced me into at the point of the gun I hadn't known he owned, making sure the jury remembered the worst things right before they went off to deliberate, and I could feel Christophe staring at me the whole time.

He'd stared at me the same way when I was on the witness stand, recounting those same acts as the prosecutor gently helped me through it. Christophe had known I thought bedroom stuff should be kept private, shared only between lovers, and though I hated it I'd realized on the stand that he was enjoying watching me squirm as the judge and jury and defense lawyer and my family and everyone else in the courtroom listened to the details.

I'd loved him.

I hadn't known him at all.

The prosecutor, mercifully, said, "But you've heard all of this before, and in far greater detail. You've heard expert witnesses tell you that Christophe Durand is a sociopath. He poses significant danger not only to Alexa, not only to any future girlfriends he might have, but to the world at large. Were it not for his one error, Durand would have completed his plan. He would have continued his assault on Alexa until the list he'd prepared was completed and then he would have killed himself in front of her to ensure she never forgot him, to condemn her to a life of guilt and pain."

My thighs itched from being squished together and I eased them apart a little. No worries on the 'forgetting him' score, although now instead of waking up from nightmares of a bullet piercing his skull I woke up from equally awful dreams in which he told me he'd kill himself when he finished with me and I begged him not to.

If only those were just dreams.

He had told me that and I had begged him. I'd begged him for a lot of things during those awful hours, but mostly, as he showed me the list and I saw both what he'd do next and the increasingly small number of things he'd do before the end, I'd begged him not to die, and I'd begged him to take his time torturing me so he wouldn't reach the end of the list. I'd loved him.

When the cops had shown up, there'd been three things left on the list before "Kill myself". Would he really have done it? Would he have shot himself and left me tied to the half-finished apartment's exposed wooden studs to stare at his corpse until someone found me?