CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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“BUT IF YOU RUN, Kas, you could bring help. I know you could.” Nyx coughed in the dark, her voice barely a whisper. “You’re fast. You could run and find someone before they—”

“Kill you?” I muttered, slinging my arm over my eyes. My bed creaked as I shook my head. “No chance. We tried it before, and it didn’t work.” I raised my head, peeking through the dark to Zanik, one bed over. He’d borne the brunt of our punishment that time. He’d been kept in a different room for a week, unconscious with a thousand stitches down his back, sewing his muscles back into place from where they’d flayed him alive.

Even now, his back spasmed with nerve damage, and the ugliest scars I’d ever seen zigzagged down his spine. He said it didn’t hurt these days, but I watched him. I watched all of them. And the way he moved when he thought he was alone said otherwise. He was hurt because of me. I’d gone because they’d assured me that they’d run with me.

That was before Nyx tripped, and Quell tried to carry her, and Wes decided to steal a gun from the guard’s room, only to wake them—letting them know in explicit detail that the Fable slaves were making a run for it.

We’d all made a pact that whoever got to the cave first would keep going, no matter what.

But that was before I heard Zanik screaming. Before I watched Storymaker hurling a whip as though he was some devil reincarnate, lashing everyone I loved until they were crisscrossed with blood.

I shuddered and pushed that day away. “We tried, and we failed. No way are we putting any of us at risk again.”

“But we have to do something,” Saraz whispered. “I don’t care if they hurt us. If one of us gets out, then at least—”

“I said no,” I hissed.

“Kas is right.” Quell turned onto her stomach, hugging her pillow. The dorm was stagnantly hot with no air but all of us had blankets covering our collection of scars and scabs. “Even if we took a vote and agreed on a person to run, the chances of them getting far isn’t high.”

“Even if they did get through the cave, it would be a week’s hike minimum,” Jareth piped up, his voice gravelly from sleep. “They’d catch us before we got near civilization.”

“How do you know it’s a week’s hike?” I asked, staying quiet and keeping my eyes trained on the door.

“I wasn’t drugged enough. I woke up. I don’t remember the route, but I do know it took a long time, even by car.”

Everyone gasped, digesting this information.

“And besides,” Jareth added. “Kas is right. Sure, one of us might get out, but then what? Who the fuck is gonna believe a kid that there’s a house of horrors hidden in some valley where men and women have a secret society?”

“Police?” Nyx squeaked. “The police would believe us.”

“The police are probably in on it.” Jareth sniffed, rolling over to face the wall, signaling his end to this conversation.

Quietness fell for a while, and the creak of bedsprings faded as we all stopped moving. I closed my eyes, waiting for sleep to whisk me away, but Zanik murmured, “I feel as if I earned the right to say this. After all, it was me who paid the price when we tried to run last time. And you know what I think?”

“What?”

“Tell us.”

“Go on.”

A babble of voices, all threading together.

“I think we fucked ourselves by getting close. I love you. I know you love me. And I would rather stay in hell with you than take a chance at freedom, knowing it will kill one of you in return.”

A grumble of arguments.

A thread of anarchy.

I had to squash that.

The only way we were getting out of this place is if we all turned on each other, or if we were smart and stuck it out.

Swallowing, I glanced at the door again, wishing I could see through the wood to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

“We need to kill Storymaker,” Maliki whisper-hissed. “Then we could all be free.”

I sat up in bed, staring at each of my family, imprinting their small, dark shapes into my heart. “Zan is right. We love each other. Therefore, we’re stuck with each other. But I promise you, I will get us free. I...I have a plan. I just need to wait for the right time.”

“What are you planning?” Wes asked.

I shook my head. “The less you know, the better. But Mal is right, too. Storymaker has to die.”

He had to die because if he didn’t, then we all would. And the thought of watching my family be butchered after being subjected to sexual fucking servitude was enough to make my hands ball and heart smoke with everlasting hate.

I would never leave them.

I would die doing whatever I could to protect them.

I would do that because I loved them.

And love was the cruelest prison of all.

I gasped, sucking in air as my mind returned to the library, and my body jerked in the wingback. I flopped over my legs, inhaling hard as the room spun with books and pages, all blurring together in mockery.

Books that I’d read, cover to cover, countless times over. Stories of bravery, fantasies of dragons and shapeshifters, romances where the hero always saved the girl.

I bared my teeth and growled at them all. Useless tales. Utter bullshit. The real stories of love and sacrifice were far less pretty and very rarely tied up with a happily fucking ever after.

Gemma.

Flinching, I groaned and shook my head. I didn’t want to think about her either. About the way her eyes glowed with pain. The way her voice caught with misery.

She’d argued with me, she’d pushed me, and she’d almost made me snap. But then she’d given in. She’d shrugged as if she was as lost as I was.

And then, she left me.

My breath hitched, replaying the way she’d shrugged before heading out the door. My heart had folded in on itself, burning to ash.

It still hurt—throbbing as if she’d ripped it free from my chest.

Who’d have guessed I’d be defeated by a simple, sad little shrug?

A shrug that said I’d hurt her more this morning by not even touching her than I had in any other interaction.

Christ, I didn’t even understand what she was shrugging about!

And why did something so innocuous as that punch me right in the heart and leave me empty and bereft and so many other complicated things?

That shrug had felt monumental. Familiar. It felt like a weapon that’d already successfully annihilated me before.

Yet...I can’t remember if that’s true.

I collapsed deeper into Storymaker’s wingback, wedging my elbows onto my knees and cradling my pounding head in my hands. My broken arm throbbed and the cuts on my hands that I couldn’t recall earning stung as I dug fingernails into my scalp.

Every part of me hurt.

I’d woken this morning, shivering my ass off in damp clothes with stairs cutting into my body, and for a flicker of a moment, I pictured a bath. A star-studded sky. A kiss...

But then, it’d vanished.

Just a dream.

Nothing important.

Until I’d found her in the library, and she told me otherwise.

She’d looked different.

There’d been a light in her eyes. A welcome. A warmth. When I’d first stepped into the room, she’d blushed and given me a smile that summoned me to her. The overwhelming sensation of affection tugged me forward, promising comfort after the disastrous sleep I’d had on the stairs.

I’d wanted her.

Her smile said she could soothe my aches, stitch my wounds, and grant me peace that I couldn’t seem to find anywhere else but with her. She looked as if she was excited to see me. As if she wanted to hug me, kiss me, touch all my scars and share pleasure with someone who’d trapped her.

How was that even possible?

The last interaction we’d had was...

It was...

Wait, it must’ve been...

No, it was when...

Ah, hell.

I groaned under my breath, tugging at my hair, raging at my crippling headache.

Why can’t I remember?

This wasn’t like before.

This wasn’t like all my other memories, skulking and slithering behind armored doors, just waiting for sleep or distraction to punish me.

This was...blank.

A blank emptiness that spread like cancer, chewing up pieces of my day, my night, and everything in-between.

Think!

I grunted as my head throbbed harder, and my balance believed I lived on the bow of a ship and not in an ivy-smothered mansion.

I’d been cruel to her, I knew that. I’d been nasty, purely because having her say things like “making love” and “friendship” had fucking terrified me. I’d spewed all that shit about my past. I’d given her pieces of me that no one should ever know.

Why?

What had driven me to confess things I’d so firmly locked away? Things I’d trained myself to forget?

It’d been her. Her softness. Her empathy even while I denied her.

The way she spoke of pleasure and togetherness—she made it seem as if we’d changed our path last night and had committed to one another.

Committed what exactly?

Had she said she wanted me?

Had she said she loved me?

Because she’d looked at me as if she did love me...and that can’t possibly be true.

I choked, stumbling upright and swaying on the spot. Loving another person would destroy me. I wasn’t prepared to let someone have that much power over me again.

Never again.

I’d learned that lesson, and I can’t fucking do it again!

But you feel something.

“Fuck!” Breathing hard, I collapsed back into the chair.

Despite not remembering last night, I knew I was lying to myself. What I felt for Gemma had transcended just the need for a sexual release a while ago. I knew that. That conclusion was written in black and white. But the difference was, those memories were real. They hadn’t been planted there by her words. Those memories came with feelings and knowledge, not blank and empty.

She’d fought to convince me pretty hard that what she said truly happened last night.

But what if something completely different had occurred?

What if I’d caught her running and fucked her on all fours in the forest as punishment? What if she’d tried to kill me with the dinner she’d made, and I’d smelled the poison, only to smash the food all over the carpet? What if she’d begged me to let her go, and I’d said yes? Wouldn’t that make her look at me as if she cared? Only to hate me when I woke and reneged on such a promise?

So many scenarios.

So many stories, just like all the paper ones glowering at me from their bookshelves.

I trembled as I closed my eyes, commanding my thoughts to stop playing hide and seek. Instantly, walls soared into place, chains clunked tight, and rusty padlocks loomed in my mind’s eye.

No.

I didn’t want to wade through the shit shackled behind those doors, I just wanted to know what the hell happened last night for Gemma Ashford to look at me as if I was good.

As if I’d shown pieces of myself that made her fall.

“I’m not yours forever, Kas. I’ll never be.”

Her voice came and went.

A phrase that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember when.

I scrubbed my face with my hands, itching at the hair on my cheeks.

A whiff of papaya crawled up my nose—

Bubbles.

Bath.

Breasts.

I gasped, rocking backward, inhaling my fingers, doing my best to trigger whatever recollection just came and went.

Oh, God, what if she was telling the truth?

What if I had given her a bath last night?

What if we slept together?

What if I’d actually earned her heart?

Me!

The kid who was worthless. The boy who was abused. The man who was forgotten.

Me!

Ah fuck, why can’t I remember?

Panic coated my palms with sweat as I rifled through my thoughts.

The valley.

The seasons changing.

The river glowing blue.

I could remember all of that with perfect clarity.

Gemma nursing me.

Gemma cursing me.

Gemma promising to teach me the pain of heartbreak.

I dug deeper.

I kept digging.

Nothing.

I can’t remember what happened next.

There were...pieces.

Flickers of arguments. Feelings of desire, frustration, and fear. All interspersed with missing blankness. My mind had become a book with torn out pages, erased paragraphs, scribbled sentences. Vital information hadn’t just been stolen; it’d been deleted as if it never existed.

Wh-what’s happening to me?

I bent over and rocked, groaning with nausea, with pain, with rapidly building fear that I was getting worse.

Schizophrenic!

The word blasted through my skull with familiarity, just like her shrug.

But why?

Was I schizophrenic?

Was having Swiss cheese for a brain a symptom of such a thing?

Wrenching my head up, I glared at the bookcases and the many tomes, novels, and texts I’d devoured over the years.

See...I remembered that.

I remembered my solitude and loneliness. I remembered my Fable family. I remembered dark and disgusting things. And I also remembered those memories were locked up tight for a reason. So why couldn’t I remember something nice for once?

“Goddammit!” Swooping upright, I stumbled to the side with vertigo and tripped to the bookcases.

I had to know.

I couldn’t live like this.

I couldn’t take her looking at me as if we’d shared so much, only for her to tell me things that couldn’t possibly be true.

If we actually slept together last night?

If something impossible because possible, then I’m more fucked than I thought.

I was lost because if I could forget something like that. If I could sleep with the girl I wanted more than anything and not have a shred of remembrance of how she felt, how she moved, how she tasted then...

I might as well drown myself in the river.

I might as well end this goddamn struggle because what sort of cruel, sadistic joke was life playing on me when I finally had someone to call my own and I couldn’t fucking remember her!

You can’t afford to call her your own, remember?

Oh, God.

I didn’t know who I was anymore.

I had no strength or desire to love.

Yet I wanted to love more than anything.

My hands reached for the medical texts, my fingers running down spines, my eyes squinting past haze, struggling to read. My broken arm throbbed from whatever I’d done to it last night. The fresh cuts on my knuckles oozed, and the scent of papaya kept teasing my memories.

The smell hissed as if it was stark evidence, collaborating Gemma’s claim that we’d lain beneath the stars together.

I froze, doing my best to imagine it. Two of us in the bath. My hands on her body. My cock pulsing inside her.

I hardened.

I choked.

Come on.

There had to be something in this godforsaken place that could help me.

Ripping out a medical journal, I carried the heavy book back to the chair and collapsed.

Sinking into the leather, I skimmed the contents until I stopped on concussion.

Holding my breath, I flipped to the right chapter and shook my head, trying to be free of the rocks and fog that’d never left me alone since falling off that awful cliff.

Given the absence of a diagnostic test or biomarker for concussion, the current concussion diagnosis is confirming the presence of symptoms after an individual has experienced a hit to the head or body.

I skimmed the jargon, racing to find what I needed.

Basic concussion:

Can cause irritability, tiredness, forgetfulness. The individual might suffer from—

I skipped to the next part.

I wouldn’t lie to myself and think I had a mild concussion. I wasn’t an idiot. Mild didn’t equal being so fucking tired I could barely stay awake for a few hours at a time. Mild didn’t explain while Gemma said I woke up as different versions of myself—

Wait, you remember that.

You remember...

I groaned, forcing my messed-up brain to dig deep, to shovel hard, to uncover things I didn’t want it to erase.

A rabbit!

I choked as images of sunshine and a juicy rabbit flashed through my head.

Cooked meat.

The scent of skin charring and the stomach-churning fragrance of my own flesh being burned by Lev—

Nope.

The shutters came down. The memory flickered out.

And I was left panting, holding the book as my gaze fell on something that explained my current circumstances and left me doomed all over again.

Severe concussion:

Can last for days, weeks or even longer. Common symptoms after a concussive traumatic brain injury are headache, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, and loss of memory (amnesia). The amnesia usually involves forgetting the event that caused the concussion, sequences following after it, and sporadic deletion of day to day life.

I stopped breathing, snapping the page over, searching for a cure or at the very least a time frame on how long I’d have to deal with this shit.

But nothing.

Just a stupid footnote that the patient should see a qualified practitioner and be prepared for up to a few years of rehab.

Years?

Years!?

I threw the book at the fucking wall and howled.