“I’ll stay with her,” Avery says, though I can hear the uncertainty in her voice.
“Absolutely not,” Gabriel says. “My house is the safest place for you, especially when both Damon and I aren’t there. The security team is already installed there.”
“Then she can come with me.” Avery kicks me softly under the table. She wants me to say that I agree with her, but I don’t really. I like Avery, but she’s probably safer without me. “If it’s safer there, then she’ll be safer, too.”
The force of Damon’s discontent takes the air from the room. In the tense silence I imagine a million things he could say. I’ll take care of you, Penny. The fantasy gets stronger.
“Take her,” he says, his voice cold as he stands and tosses down his napkin.
Then he leaves the room, as if he decided on his dinner order instead of my fate.
Avery struggles to meet my eyes, but I can’t deal with that. Can’t deal with the empathy I would find. Can’t deal with the questions she would ask.
“What happened to her?” she asks Gabriel instead, a sweet relief. Someone else to answer her questions. Someone else to field the useless empathy.
“You don’t want to know,” he says, his voice hard.
“I should know if I’m going to help her.”
“I’m not sure there’s any help for someone who’s been through that.”
That almost makes me laugh. Maybe if the ice were a little thinner, I would have. But every second that Damon is away from me, the ice hardens. Every time he pushes me away it gets thicker.
It should be a relief that he doesn’t seem to be claiming the debt. That he’s giving me time to heal. But he’s the only person who really understands what I’ve been through. Because he went through his own hell, with the very same devil.
“Are you speaking from experience?” Avery says, her innocence heartbreaking.
“I saw a lot of fucked-up shit at the whorehouse growing up. Women raped, hurt. Beaten until they weren’t recognizable. And still I never saw anything like this.”
She makes a sound of sympathy. For me. For him. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, little virgin. I could have freed you. Never forget that. I could have paid a million dollars and then walked away, never fucking that pretty little cunt.” A pause, as if to let the words set in. “He fucked her. And then he drowned her.”
A sharp breath. “How did she—”
“Survive? She left a trail of breadcrumbs for him to find. He didn’t know if he’d make it in time. He had no idea if he’d find a dead body at the bottom of the pool.”
Didn’t he? Like that day on the river I don’t quite remember being pulled from the pool. I don’t remember much of last night except the hard currents, the sharp rocks. The metallic taste of blood in the water. That must have been horrible for Damon, but it’s hard to feel sympathy.
Hard to feel anything at all.
“Thank God he didn’t.” Avery sounds painfully earnest.
“What Jonathan Scott did to her… Most people would rather have died.”
I know I should feel something about that. Shame, probably.
But all I keep thinking is, what if I did die last night? What if the only parts of me worth saving sank to the bottom of that cold pool? I can be dressed up and fed like a doll, but I’m not a person. I can walk around, my body controlled by the people around me.
What makes me human? What makes me want to be human?
It seems like a horrible thing to be, so weak and unwilling.
Chapter Fifteen
Avery tucks me in at night, murmuring things about Gabriel’s huge house.
“It’s very comfortable,” she assures me. “And very safe.”
That last part seems to be the sticking point. Not only because of the threat of Jonathan Scott looming over us all. There must be something less than shiny, something not quite gilded in her past. Because she keeps glancing at the walls, as if something terrifying might jump out of the plaster.
She leaves the bathroom light on for me, the door cracked open an inch.
Then she closes the door, probably going to sleep with Gabriel. She doesn’t say, but I saw the way he looked at her. The way she looked at him. The lion to the gazelle. Only this gazelle wants to be eaten.
I hear the footsteps first. My heart is a muscle overworked in the last twenty-four hours, already sore and weak from beating so fast. Now it strains against my ribs, making weak protest.
The doorknob turns, a polished silver handle reflecting the light.
Most likely it’s Avery checking on me.
Possibly it’s someone out of my nightmares.
Damon Scott slips into the room, as casual as if he were visiting for tea. He’s still wearing his shirt and vest. Only his shoes are missing, the sole nod to being in his own home. I suppose that counts for casual with him, those black socks on the plush carpet.
He enters the way I imagine he’d visit a lover. A woman in lace lingerie should be waiting for him, not a broken girl in an oversize T-shirt.
He sits on the edge of the bed, his expression unreadable. “Hello, Penny.”
Such a mundane greeting.
I want to do something drastic in response. To scream or tear out my hair. Something to show the utter chaos inside me. He must see it. He must feel it, having that monster for a father.
Screaming would require feeling something. I would rather not feel, so I say nothing.
That earns me a small smile. “You’ve been holding up well.”
An iceberg holds up well, floating like a massive rock. Congratulations, I tell myself with bitter appreciation. I’m a natural phenomenon. And where I’m made from ice, he’s a flame.
Even from two feet away I can feel him burn.
“Would you like to stay at Gabriel’s house?”
As if it’s a vacation, meant to be enjoyed.
As if I have a choice.
“Why?” I whisper. Why are you here?
He raises one eyebrow, pretending not to understand. “Avery’s a nice girl.”
My very own mermaid with glitter fins and blue-green yarn hair. A consolation prize. I’m not good enough for someone to actually love me, to care about me. That couldn’t be more clear.
I speak louder. “Why?”
He doesn’t pretend this time. “Do you want me to leave?”
That’s not an answer. My lips press together. Already I’m annoyed that he made me talk. Where Avery could stroke my hair like I was a pet, something about Damon’s blunt taunting requires a response.
His laugh has everything he used to be—defiant and hungry. It has everything he is now, dark and unrepentant. The wild boy may have been alluring in his subtle strength, but the man has a thousand moving pieces. A puzzle I could never hope to solve.
“You’ll be safe at Gabriel’s house,” he says, his tone final.
He stands, about to leave the room.
There was no reason for him to confirm with me personally. It had already been decided at breakfast. And yet here he is, as beautiful and masculine as I can even imagine, taking my breath away. For what?
And then I know the right question to ask. Not, why are you here?
“Why do you care?” I whisper.
He pauses without turning. “Do you know why my father chose you?”
Jonathan Scott had said I was a peach. Ripe. Juicy. I can still hear the smooth slide of his voice. I can still feel the sharp bite of his teeth in my flesh. Every part of me tenses, every muscle in my body taut. It was the right question if he wanted a reaction from me—something desperate or even violent. Something dramatic. I press my nails into my palm, forcing down the bile in my throat.
Then Damon looks back at me, his dark eyes knowing. “Because he knew you meant something to me.”
A man who owns half the city. Wealthy. Powerful.
The sound that bursts from me should be a laugh. Instead it sounds like something cracking. “I tho
ught he would be smarter than that. I don’t mean anything to you except ten thousand dollars.”
Damon gives me a small smile, a little wry. “Smart people don’t always have perspective.”
Is that why Damon came to visit me? Because he feels like he owes me something? He doesn’t owe me anything. It wasn’t him who hurt me. He already sacrificed himself for me once.
I always dreamed of being a mermaid. How they could swim around, without a care for what happened above water. In their own little world. Only now do I understand how constraining it would be, how suffocating it can feel even when you can breathe. Whether the water is dark or light, tinged with blood or sparkling blue, you’re trapped inside.
“I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure what I’m sorry for.
His grief, even though he doesn’t look sorrowful.
He looks hard and glinting, like a diamond. That’s the way he stares at me, looking almost angry at my words. “I swear to God, Penny. What I would do to you. If only—”
My breath catches. “If only what?”
“If only you weren’t so fucking terrified.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Terror has sunk so deep in my bones it felt like survival. I wasn’t sure what would be left if you tried to strip the fear away. Would there be anything to hold me up? “He said he was leaving my virginity,” I say, the memory sore and raw. Festering. “He took me from… From the back. But he said he would leave me innocent for you.”
Damon doesn’t have any of the surprise that Avery did. None of the pity.
And then he takes a step toward me.
Another one, as if pulled by the invisible string of my pain.
He doesn’t stop at the edge of the bed. It’s his bed, after all. Not my personal island. Not a fortress. He puts one knee on the bed. That’s the only warning I get before his body covers mine. Caging me. Before he holds me down with the very heat of his presence.
I put my hands up before I realize what that means—it means I’m touching him. My palms against his broad chest, my hands feeling warm skin and hard muscle. I yank my hands back as if they’re scalded.
“You’re too young,” he murmurs.
There’s this heat coming off him, like he’s a fire and I’m thawing out. I know it’s not safe, being this close. He could burn me. But there’s also a small part of me that feels alive, only when he’s here. Only when he’s on top of me, his warm breath on my forehead.
“I thought the cops couldn’t protect me.”
“They can’t. But I can.”
For half a second—sweet relief. I want his protection, even if it means my ruin.
Except that isn’t what he’s offering. Isn’t what he’s demanding.
Realization crashes down on me. He’s going to send me far away, into the arctic where my ice can set in. I should be grateful for that, but I can’t. The whole world will see me as broken, after what happened to me. God, even I agree. He’s the only person in the world who could have seen me as whole.
“Because I’m tainted now,” I say, my voice wavery.
“Because you’re mine. I told you it would happen. This changed the timetable. Changed the methods. But it could not change that one fact.”
It’s impossible to argue with that when he’s braced above me, when the musk and man scent of him surrounds me, when the same sheets that rubbed over his naked body now embrace me.
“There are marks,” I say.
On my body. My soul. He gouged me deep enough that I haven’t stopped reeling for hours, for days. I will still feel him in years, if I live that long. On my deathbed there will be Jonathan Scott’s teeth marks aching on my skin. With my final breath I’ll remember how it felt to drown.
Damon nods, his expression grave. “Let me see.”
They’re in the secret places in my body, the ones I’m too young to show him.
He doesn’t wait for me to obey. Instead he grasps the hem of the extra-large T-shirt, yanking it up until cool air flashes over my stomach. The back of his hand touches my pale skin—an accidental touch, fleeting. I suck in a breath, whether from humiliation or something else I don’t know. I’m wearing the panties Avery gave me, white with little pink flowers on them.
The edge of the panties is scalloped, little ruffles over my skin.
And underneath, mottled brown and dark red marks that spread over my ribs.
A hiss of something like pain escapes Damon. He stares with a kind of reluctant fascination, unable to look away from the contrast of white fabric on dark bruises.
“You fought him,” Damon says, his eyes meeting mine.
There isn’t a question in his voice.
Don’t fight them. It only makes it worse. I understand now why Jessica told me that. It makes everything harder. Sharper. Darker. I never wanted to fight, the same way I never wanted to drown. It happened, my body reacting to its environment, animal instinct beating out reason.
The question flickers at the edges of my mind. “Maybe that’s when I lost myself. When I really broke. When I lost the numbers in my head.”
For the first time since he came into the room he looks surprised. “You didn’t lose the numbers, Penny. No one can take them away from you.”
Then maybe I gave them up voluntarily. Maybe that’s the price I had to pay to survive.
My mind has been blessedly quiet ever since I woke in Damon’s arms. It’s kept me safe from feeling the horror, the pain, but it’s also blocked out the numbers.
Damon reaches to his back pocket. I tense, sure that he’s going to pull out something terrible. A knife, like he had as the wild boy. A rope. I don’t know where my mind conjures all of these ideas, except that my thoughts all follow a train of violence. He’s never hurt me, but he seems too enamored of the bruises to really trust.
In his hand is only a pen, something smooth and cylindrical, no doubt expensive.
He pulls the cap off with his straight white teeth, revealing the shining silver point beneath.
With only a veiled glance at me, he lowers his hand to a bare patch of skin on my left side. There’s no bruise here. It somehow escaped the struggle. The pen has been against his body, kept in his pocket, but it still feels cool when it touches my skin.
I try to make out what he could be writing based on feel, but there’s a dull throb of pain all over and a numbness from the medication. Noise that drowns out the feeling of his fountain pen.
He pulls down the T-shirt before I can see what he’s written. Then he straightens, his knee still pressed between mine, only eight hundred thread count sheets and fine wool slacks between us.
“Go with Avery. Be a good girl for her. She’ll take care of you.”
The word until pulses in the air, asking and asking until I can finally voice the question. “Until when?”
“Until I kill my father, of course.”
He’s all the way to the door before I ask the question that’s been haunting me since I swirled underneath that pool, since I saw exactly what his father had done to make him able to hold his breath so long. “Why haven’t you already?”
He stands in front of the dark walnut door, facing away from me. His body locked into position like a statue. His voice almost separate from him, an unknown force in the room.
“That’s what he wants. To turn me into a killer. To make me like him.”
Finally I understand that though he’s been abused and harmed and corrupted in infinite ways, there was one piece of him left untouched. One part of the wild boy that remained. And he was going to burn that part with iron, to brand it until only blackness remained, because of what happened to me.
My breath is trapped, held captive by the grief I feel for that small part.
I worried he didn’t exist anymore, but he did. He’s standing five feet away from me.
“Wait,” I tell him. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to—”
“I do,” he says softly, not turning to me again. That part is over.
Then he walks out the door, leaving me staring at the place where he stood.
The room is bathed in shadows, more dark than light. I step out of bed to the soft carpet, feeling it thick beneath my toes. I cross to the bathroom, blinking at the over-bright light. I face the wide mirror and lift my T-shirt by its hem.
I read what he’s written backwards. A proof.
A simple proof, from the trigonometry book. I shouldn’t even remember it. He definitely shouldn’t. Unless he looked up the book later. Unless he read it again and again. But why would he do that?
The answer filters into my mind like sunlight through dust motes, caught and held before shining again. Of course the numbers haven’t left me. There they are, as clear to me as the sun.
Damon must not have doubted that.
As I stare at the scrawled ink on my skin, my doubt fades away. It’s replaced by the confidence that let me challenge Damon Scott to a poker game. The confidence that’s let me survive the west side all these years.
And now Damon has gone to kill his own father. To become the monster he’s fought his whole life. Will he ever stop saving me? If he becomes a murderer, he might. If he kills Jonathan Scott, he’ll lose his last shred of humanity. I have to protect him the way he protected me.
Chapter Sixteen
Somehow I went for years without seeing Damon Scott.
He hovered low in my mind, the same quiet and insistent worry that I have knowing children in the city are hungry, knowing animals are in pain. He wasn’t my waking thought, my nighttime prayer. He didn’t take up every moment.
The next five days may as well be eternity. I stay locked up with Avery in Gabriel’s home, which may as well be a castle for how heavily guarded it is. It’s hard for me to eat, to sleep, because I know that Damon Scott is on the verge of something horrible.
Avery takes very good care of me, like he thought she would. She doesn’t question my worry or my lack of appetite, thinking I’m still recovering from the trauma.
My body heals more every day.
There’s something I want more than my strength, than my pale skin in its former smoothness. Only the guilty can understand this. I want redemption. There’s an emotional debt more pressing than money.
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