In Death 03 - Immortal in Death

guess we do a lot of juggling for the controls, end up heading in the same direction anyway. He loves me."
    "You sound surprised."
    "Nobody ever did. Not like this. It's easy to say, for some people. The words. But it's not just words with Roarke. He sees inside me, and it doesn't matter."
    "Should it?"
    "I don't know. I don't always like what I see there, but he does. Or at least he understands it." And now Eve understood that this was what she'd needed to talk through. Those black, ragged edges inside her. "Maybe it's because we both had lousy beginnings. We knew, when we should have been too young to know, how cruel people can be. How power doesn't just corrupt in the wrong hands, it mutilates. He -- I never made love before him. I had sex, but I never felt anything but basic release. But I could never be... intimate," she decided. "Is that the word?"
    "Yes, I think that's exactly the word. Why do you think you achieved intimacy with him?"
    "He wouldn't have it any other way. Because he..." She felt her eyes begin to tear and blinked them dry. "Because he opened something inside me I'd closed off. No, that had been scarred shut. Somehow, he took control of that part of me, or I let him have control of that part of me that died. That was killed when I was a child when..."
    "You'll feel better if you say it, Eve."
    "When my father raped me." She let out a shuddering breath and the tears didn't matter any longer. "He raped me, and he violated me, and he hurt me. He used me like a whore when I was too small and too weak to stop him. He would hold me down, or tie me up. He would hit me until I could hardly see, or he would hold his hand over my mouth so that I couldn't scream. And he would push himself into me, and ram himself into me until the pain was almost as obscene as the act. And there was no one to help me, and nothing to do but wait for the next time."
    "Do you understand that you weren't to blame?" Mira asked gently. When an abscess was finally lanced, she thought, one had to carefully, thoroughly, slowly, squeeze out all the poison. "Not then, not now, not ever?"
    Eve used the back of her hand to wipe her cheeks dry. "I wanted to be a cop. Because cops have control. They stop the bad guys. It seemed simple. After I was a cop for a while, I began to see that there are some who always prey on the weak and the innocent." Her breath steadied. "No, it wasn't my fault. It was his, and the fault of the people who pretended not to see or to hear. But I still have to live with it, and it was easier to live with it when I didn't remember."
    "But you've been remembering for a long time, haven't you?"
    "Bits and pieces. Everything before I was found in the alley when I was eight was just bits and pieces."
    "And now?"
    "More pieces, too many pieces. And it's clearer, closer." She rubbed a hand over her mouth, deliberately lowered it to her lap again. "I can see his face. I didn't used to be able to see his face. During the DeBlass case last winter -- I guess there were enough similarities there to click. Then there was Roarke, and it all started to come back clearer and faster. I can't stop it."
    "Is that what you want?"
    "I'd wipe those eight years out of my mind if I could." She said it viciously, felt it viciously. "They have nothing to do with now. I don't want them to have anything to do with now."
    "Eve, as horrible as those eight years were, and as obscene, they formed you. They helped build your strength, your compassion for the innocent, your complexity, your resilience. Remembering, and dealing with those memories, won't change what you are. I've often recommended you agree to autohypnosis. I no longer do. I believe your subconscious is letting these memories surface at its own pace."
    If that were so, Eve wanted the pace to slow, to let her breathe. "Maybe there are some things I'm not ready to remember. Still, it doesn't stop. There's a dream that keeps coming back. Just lately and constantly. There's a room, a filthy room with this dull red light blinking in the window. Off and on. There's a bed. It's empty, but it's stained. I know it's blood. A lot of blood. I see myself curled in the corner on the floor. There's more blood. I'm covered with it. I can't see my face, it's toward the wall. I can't see clearly at all, but it has to be me."
    "Are you alone?"
    "I think so. I can't tell. I only see the bed, the corner, and that light blinking off and on. There's a knife on the floor beside me."
    "There weren't