The mere mention of the accident had shaken her so much that she’d given them only the bare minimum of details. She hadn’t wanted to delve into the specifics of that night, and they probably didn’t learn anything more than what they’d already read in her file.
“After the fire, there was a month that I don’t think I slept more than a handful of hours total. I’d just buried my entire family…everyone that was ever important to me. It was a rough time. A really, really rough time.”
“I can only imagine,” Rowe said, putting his hand over her own where it was twisting the blankets in her lap.
Accepting the comfort he offered, she held out her other hand for Paine.
“The nightmares you have now are the same?” Paine asked, automatically linking his hand with hers.
“Not really,” she answered while trying to think of the best way to describe the craziness her brain was throwing at her daily. “At first, they were just about the kidnapping.”
Both men frowned and exchanged a look.
“What do you mean it was about the kidnapping?” Rowe asked.
“We believed that the brides were drugged prior to stasis and most of them had no memory of what happened before they woke on Djaromir,” Paine explained, his expression plainly showing his confusion.
Indigo was shaking her head before he was even done speaking. “Quite a few of us remember what happened. It may have taken a day or two, but I remembered everything. Well…everything up until I was injected with whatever they used to knock us out came back to me. Same goes for the others.”
“Can you tell us what you remember?”
“Sure.” She shrugged, inwardly wincing at going over it again out loud. “But I don’t think that’s gonna help matters much.”
“Why not?”
“Listen, guys. I’ve gone over everything that has happened a million times—both awake and in my sleep.” Indigo rubbed her face, ready for the inquisition to be over already, even if they hadn’t really started yet. “Rehashing won’t do me any good. Trust me.”
“Keeping everything to yourself isn’t helping either,” Paine argued, his expression grim. “Your color is awful, you’ve obviously gone past the point of exhaustion, and you’re going to let us help you, dammit!”
Indigo recoiled at Paine’s words. “Don’t tell me what to do!”
“We are your husbands, Indigo,” he shot back, his face angry for the first time that she could recall seeing.
Which did nothing to detract from his good looks, dammit.
“Stop fighting us,” Rowe said, chiming in from the other side of her.
“I’m not fighting you—err, at least I don’t mean to be fighting you.” Indigo’s forehead wrinkled as she tried to think of a way to explain what was going on inside her head without sounding like a crazy person. “Listen…I’ve handled this before and I can handle it again. I just need a little bit of time.”
“For what?” Paine stood up from the bed and paced anxiously. “How will time resolve this situation?”
“Ummm…” Indigo drawled, trying to think of an answer. “Well, they fizzled out before on their own, so I’m sure they’ll do it again. I just have to wait it out.”
“And you’ll what? Go crazy in the meantime?” Rowe barked sarcastically. “I’m sure I can speak for Paine when I say that we’re not waiting for that day to come.”
“I’m not going crazy,” she lied, crossing her fingers in her lap.
Paine, who was mid-pace, turned on his heel and pinned her with a stare.
“What?” she asked, fidgeting under his direct gaze.
“Start from the beginning,” he said softly, his tone quite a bit softer than the look he was holding her with. “Please, Indigo.”
“We want to help,” Rowe said softly. “Let us.”
“Fine,” she whispered, her stomach tightening at the thought of talking about her family and all the mental baggage that came with it. “The nightmares and sleeping issues are a little like the problems I had before…but different.”
“And they started after the kidnapping?” Paine asked, sitting down beside her.
Indigo nodded as she leaned into his body, absorbing the strength he offered without words.
“How are these different?”
“Well…” Indigo swallowed, her throat suddenly much drier than it was just moments before. “At first, they weren’t. They were all the same.”
“How?” they prodded simultaneously.
“They were all about the kidnapping,” she said softly. “They started with what I remember from my abduction—”
“How much do you remember?” Rowe interrupted, his voice more anxious than he appeared seated beside her with his elbows braced on his knees as if in deep thought.
“I remember my liaison, Eva, and how sketchy she was acting as I followed her through the building,” Indigo explained, letting the memories take her back to the time right before she was whisked away. “She’d been acting weird from the moment I’d checked in.”
“How so?”
“Little things were off,” Indigo said with a shrug. “That morning had been rough before I’d even arrived at the Intake Center. I’m honestly shocked I’d stayed long enough to get kidnapped in the first place. Looking back on it now, a million signs were telling me turn and run the other way, but I just wanted to get on with it and ignored them all.”
“What do you mean, signs?” Paine asked, confusion once again taking over his expression.
“Just little things that I should have seen warning me away from this mess, that’s all.”
“Like what?” he questioned. “Give me an example.”
“Well…” Indigo thought back to the beginning of the day of her abduction. “The first sign was probably my alarm not going off. Then, I guess another sign would have been both of my rides standing me up. And then, when I got to the Intake Center, they couldn’t find me in the system and almost turned me away.”
“Those are all signs?” he asked, his gaze doubtful as he looked to Rowe as if for confirmation.
“Well, yes,” Indigo stuttered as she thought over everything with a new eye. “If those weren’t signs telling me I was making a mistake, I don’t know what else they could have been.”
“Yet you ignored them?”
At Rowe’s words, Indigo’s head jerked in his direction, immediately on the defensive about her choices. Seeing his confusion, she realized he wasn’t judging; he was simply curious as to why she’d ignored the warnings.
“No. I brushed every single one of them off like an idiot,” she admitted sheepishly. “I don’t know if the money clouded my judgment, but I ignored every single one of them up until the very end.”
“When it was already too late,” Rowe tacked on perfectly, taking the words right out of her mouth.
“Yup,” she agreed, popping her lips together at the end. “Before I knew it, I had taken a needle to the arm and was lying on the ground trying to figure out what the hell had happened.”
“That had to be frightening,” Rowe said gently. “Do you remember being put into stasis?”
“Do you mean when they shoved me into that box and left me there for over a month?” she asked snappily. The word “stasis” seemed too gentle to describe the predicament she’d found herself in when she’d woken up. “No. Fortunately, I don’t remember actually going into the box. Dear Lord, I can’t even imagine the craziness my nightmares would have reached if I’d been awake when they put me in.” Unable to hold back a shiver, Indigo took a moment to pull herself together once it passed. “The last thing I remember was the few moments right after the injection while I tried to figure out what was happening. Everything was fuzzy and it sounded like I was in a tunnel, but I saw Eva and a large man standing over me. They were never clear, but I could hear them talking about me as if I wasn’t even there.”
“What did they say?” Paine asked, leaning forward.
“Just that I wasn’t the o
nly one. That there were more…” Indigo trailed off, her voice cracking with emotion. “Then I woke up on Djaromir, and that’s that.”
“Wait.” Rowe straightened, his brows drawn. “What do you mean, that’s that?”
“I mean, that’s all I remember. Most of the nightmares are scary versions of what could have happened, not what did happen.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rowe listened carefully as his bride spoke of her memories, but he knew there was more to her exhaustion.
“Give me an example of what happens in your dreams?”
“It depends. They’re never the same,” she said with a frown.
“How?” Rowe asked a follow-up to his original question, hoping she’d open up a bit more than she had been since she woke up.
Clearly, the nap had been much-needed, Rowe thought, noting the dark circles ringing her eyes. Much needed, yet still not enough.
“At first, they were only about the crate and being trapped. When I found out how long we’d been missing, it messed with my head. Add the fact that nobody even knew we were missing, and my imagination took off from there. That’s all it was in the beginning. Nothing from my past popped into those dreams early. Just me in a crate.”
“When did that change?” Paine picked up her hand where it clenched the covers at her waist.
Both men had previously noted how she’d work out nervous energy by fiddling with or twisting whatever textiles were closest, and now was no different. The T-shirt she was wearing showed signs of her working it with damp fingers, the fabric creased and dimpled from her sweating hands.
“I don’t know…maybe after a week or so,” she admitted. “One night they were only about being stuck in that damn box, and then it morphed. I was still trapped in the crate, but now I had to deal with fire too. Sometimes, the box was on fire. Other times…” She swallowed hard. “The worst nights are when I am on fire.”
“Did you talk to anyone about your nightmares?” Rowe asked, unable to believe she went through all of this alone. The sleep deprivation she’d suffered was serious, yet she’d managed to claw her way through somehow. “Your friends? The healers on Djaromir? Anybody?”
“Well—I didn’t—no,” she stuttered.
Rowe closed his eyes and took a calming breath.
“What?” Indigo asked anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ve been suffering for so long on your own, love,” he said, the burden of her situation sitting heavily on his chest. “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
“I’ve got this handled,” she argued, her mouth set in a mutinous line.
“No, you don’t, Indigo,” Paine said flatly. “You do not have this handled.”
Rowe held up his hand when it looked like Paine was going to continue arguing with her, something he could see was having the opposite effect than the one they wanted. Indigo was becoming even more defensive as they continued to probe. She was closing down instead of opening up, and that wouldn’t help any of them—including her.
“Let’s not argue this now,” Rowe interrupted before things could spiral. “You said the nightmares changed, right?”
“Yeah,” she answered softly, her voice much calmer than the confrontational tone she’d had earlier. She sniffed as if holding back tears—barely.
“Talk to us about them. Let them out and maybe it will help,” Rowe urged. He could see the emotional toll this had taken on her, her mood swinging from one extreme to another with just a few words in between the shifting tides.
“Right after the kidnapping, my nightmares had been more of a scary movie reel of what could have happened. I mean, anything literally could have happened to me…well, not just me but all of us. My brain spent a lot of time coming up with different scenarios of what could have been, and believe me, every situation I thought up was worse than the one before it.”
“And now?” Rowe questioned, hoping he’d be able to get a clear understanding of what exactly they were fighting.
“They’re basically the same, but there’s now always fire somehow mixed in. The first few times it happened, I woke up drenched in sweat. I could feel the heat around the crate. It felt so real. I was trapped—stuck in an oven—baking like one of my pies.” Closing her eyes, she tightened them until her face was pinched. “They only got worse…if you can imagine something being worse than feeling yourself burn alive. I hear their cries in my sleep, begging me to help them, but I can’t move. No matter how much I push, the box won’t open. I can feel my fingers and hands burning, but the box doesn’t give. It won’t let me out.” A hiccupped sob escaped from between her lips. “Sometimes, I can even hear my abuela’s voice warning me away. Pleading with me to be safe, to watch out for myself.”
Paine let out a loud whoosh of air when she’d finished.
“That sounds frightening,” Rowe rasped out, his mouth dry.
“Oh, it is,” she agreed with a sad smile. “They got so bad and were so vivid that, no matter how tired I was, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to. Fuck, I needed to. My body just wouldn’t do it. I’d lay there for hours thinking about it. Sometimes, I’d get lucky and fall asleep for an hour or so before I woke up screaming.” Indigo paused for a moment, her eyes focused on a spot on his shoulder.
Rowe was on the verge of waving a hand in front of her face to bring her back to the present when she let out a whimper.
“I can still see my clothes begin to burn. The moment they catch on fire and it spreads up my body until it’s everywhere.” Indigo wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her arms. “I mean, it was so real I could almost feel it. The heat burning my skin. The smell of it burning my nose and lungs. Have you ever smelled hair burning?”
“Umm, I don’t believe so,” Rowe answered, growing more and more worried at the blank look on her face.
“It’s…pungent. The kind of smell you don’t forget.” Indigo pushed her bangs back where they fluttered over her forehead in curls before drifting to the side of her cheekbone. “There are times when I’m wide awake that I think I smell it. I could swear on it. I’ve even tried to hunt it down a few times, sniffing around the room like some sort of hound dog, even though I know it’s all in my head. Maybe this has already driven me insane because that’s crazy, right?”
Rowe looked up when Paine cleared his throat, his eyes wet. Seeing his brother, obviously upset by what their bride had said, looking at him as if helpless made Rowe feel the same. These nightmares weren’t simply bad dreams that they would be able to vanquish easily. Instead, it looked as though her subconscious mind had begun playing with the past, twisting it just enough to insert itself into her dreams for her torment.
“How did you get past your nightmares before?” Paine asked, his voice gruff.
“Well…” Indigo furrowed her brow in thought. “After the fire, I stayed busy. There were lots of things that I had to take care of because there was nobody left to do it. The police reports and fire department investigation, the insurance, all of it had been so overwhelming that—I don’t know. One night they were there and the next they were gone.”
“They stopped on their own?” Rowe asked, unable to believe that she’d overcome such a traumatic time of her life without seeking the help of a professional healer.
“I guess, yeah.” She shrugged without much energy, her eyes welling with tears. “I went to work almost immediately after everything was taken care of. I had to. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and the accounts were wiped out from paying for the services. I had a couple hundred bucks that I was going to use to pay for an extended-stay motel, but that wasn’t going to last me forever. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what I needed to do to survive.”
“How did you manage?” Rowe questioned. “You were just a child.”
“I was only a few weeks from turning eighteen and there was nobody else,” Indigo said, shrugging even as tears sprinkled her cheeks. “Literally. There was nobody else. My dad’s family disowned him when he married my mom because
they’re a bunch of racist assholes, and my mom’s only family was my abuela. She was an only child, so I didn’t have any extended family waiting to step in and help out. I lost everyone in that fire.”
“I still don’t understand how you got through it all, Indigo.” Paine breathed out, pulling her into his arms for a hug. “You’re amazing.”
“She definitely is,” Rowe concurred, rubbing her back as she leaned into his brother. “But hearing that your nightmares simply went away does not help us much.”
“Maybe it is time you met Tamin and Rodin,” Paine added, his arms tightening around Indigo when she went to immediately pull back. “Just listen for a moment.”
“I just need a little bit of time. They’ll go away,” she argued, her nose pressed against the leather of Paine’s shirt.
Rowe snorted at her sad attempt to talk them out of what he knew was needed. “You don’t have time, love. Look at you.”
“It’s true.” Paine nodded, giving her a grim smile. “You have been short tempered, forgetful, and you look awful.”
“Geez!” Indigo snapped. “Don’t sugarcoat it or anything…and I know I look like shit. I don’t need you two pointing it out, all right?”
“We didn’t say you looked like shit,” Paine shot right back. “There is a huge difference between shit and awful,” he rasped, his voice worried. “You don’t look healthy, and the only color on your face are the rings around your eyes. Can’t you see that we’re worried here! We’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what we did wrong.”
During Paine’s speech, Indigo’s eyes had gotten steadily wider as his volume increased. Rowe could tell she was shocked that the normally cheery warrior was obviously angry. Rowe was worried he was going to need to step in between the two to calm them both down. He was just about to move when Indigo threw her arms around Paine, hugging him awkwardly.
Warriors of Phaeton: Paine and Rowe Page 18