way he looked at me. Pity? Guilt? Repulsion?
He normally pulled away from my touch, but not this time.
The fog from the drugs still held me tight. I wanted to climb out of my prison. The prison of my body and mind. They made the room I was held in seem gentle and safe. My real enemy now lived under my skin. Boiling and festering, melting my will and consciousness.
“Keep me?” I whispered.
His forehead wrinkled.
It was pathetic that my self-worth was based on whether or not a violent, sadistic, car thief intended to keep me around. Whether or not he wanted me around.
If he didn’t want me, what was I?
If I wasn’t good enough for him…
My head spun, the room tilting and swaying around me until the nausea built again. I clutched my arms around myself, even though the skin on my right arm burned on contact. It’d feel worse when the hot water hit it.
Colt switched on the shower and let it run while he stripped out of the remainder of his clothes and helped me out of the jeans Tank had dressed me in. Then, Colt gently guided me into the warm stream of the shower. Rough hands moved over my tired skin—the softest touch I’d felt in days, but it still grated my nerves. His sinewy body supported me, while he started with my tangled hair, running the warm water and shampoo through it—but not beginning the daunting task of untangling it all. I wrestled with the possibility that it’d be much easier just to shave it all off, losing yet another piece of myself.
Brushing a fine lather over my skin, Colt worked his way down my body, pausing when he reached my core. I dropped my eyes, waiting, but he didn’t move. Was I that disgusting to him now?
“He didn’t….” I whispered. “They didn’t. Please.” I begged him to touch me. I needed him to do what he always did—to turn the pain and agony into something else. Into something that would purge me of everything.
He pressed my legs apart, lathered me, and then rinsed my skin with clinical efficiency. In seconds, I went from feeling pampered to feeling like an exposed lab rat. I pulled away, but Colt pressed his hand to the side of my neck and lifted my chin.
“What if they….” I had no words. No tears. “I don’t remember. They kept me high. So much is just black.”
He took my face between his hands, nearly touching his nose to mine. “They didn’t.”
“But….” The possibility was strangling. “How would you know?”
“They didn’t,” he repeated. “You’d be hurt, bruised.”
I was all those things and more. Every inch hurt and yet felt numb. I wanted Colt to drive it away. “Why don’t you want to touch me?”
“Devlin would have made sure you knew what he’d done.” He lowered his voice and his eyes. “He would have made sure I knew what he’d done.”
He didn’t answer my second question. “Why?” I whispered so quietly it probably wasn’t audible over the water.
Why didn’t Devlin do anything? Why was he such a bastard? Why did Colt act like I was disgusting? “Make me feel,” I pleaded before Colt could say anything else.
“I’m afraid you’ll feel plenty very soon.”
Afraid…. Colt afraid of anything. That thought was too much to take in. “I mean….”
“I know,” Colt whispered. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer. A hug that wasn’t truly a hug. A position of pity, but I appreciated it anyway. “You need to heal first. I could hurt you too badly.”
Was that a reason? Was he really concerned or was it an excuse? “I don’t care.”
I grabbed at him. Fisting his flaccid cock.
He wasn’t even attracted to me anymore.
He grunted and tried to pry my hand away, but I squeezed until he closed his eyes, and I could feel his blood pumping through his veins.
“Darlin’,” his eyes opened. “You need to heal. You’re dehydrated, malnourished, and Jace needs to look at your injuries.”
I probably wasn’t hurting him as bad as I thought I was.
His long hair hung in drenched strands around his face, framing his tired eyes. I remembered looking into those green eyes the first night I’d met him in the club. I’d been high then as well—albeit unknowingly.
“I already broke one promise,” he whispered. “I’m not making it worse.”
Worse was not being able to escape from my own head.
“How bad is it going to get?” I asked, slumping against his body and pressing my cheek against his chest.
“Very.”
The hot water wasn’t enough to wash everything away. Enough to make me clean again. Nothing would ever make me clean again. Even if they hadn’t raped me, they branded me. Marked my skin forever with beautiful designs that I detested.
I broke from his grasp and held up my arm. “Why?”
He pushed it back down and looked away. “I can’t.” His eyebrows seemed to quiver. “Not now.”
“What’s on my back?” I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know. But I had already asked.
He didn’t have to look. In fact, he closed his eyes like the images were already ingrained. “Another butterfly on your left shoulder blade—purple, pink. A black locket on the right with a small heart on either side.”
Butterflies… damn butterflies. I shook my head. Nothing made sense. “Your brother have a strange fascination with butterflies?”
“No.” Colt turned off the shower, pulled me out, and wrapped me in a towel. He was different.
That realization scared me as much as everything I’d been through. More. He was supposed to be my salvation. My exit. Now he seemed busted just when I needed him to be the forceful, domineering man who’d talked me into this damn arrangement practically at knifepoint.
“Later,” he whispered. “I can’t explain now.”
I leaned against him and felt his muscles stiffen. “Why do you hate it when I touch you?”
“I don’t.”
I tilted my head and peeked up to see his face. What was it then?
He groaned but didn’t distance himself from me. “You never stop asking questions, do you?”
I smirked. “I’m trying not to pass out while keeping my mind occupied. Unless you can provide a viable alternative, I’m going to keep asking questions.”
“Shouldn’t you be thinking about something happy, then? Unicorns. Teddy bears. Whatever?”
“You’re a better distraction.”
He squinted, easing me back into the chair while he dried himself off and pulled his boxers back on. Rippling muscles. Piercings. Tattoos. I drank in every inch. If he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I’d take what I could get.
Some part of me missed the sight. Or was I truly desperate for that distraction?
Fucked up. That’s the only explanation. Everything about me had been crushed to pieces and left to rot and fester within my own skin.
He hoisted me up and carried me to the bed where Jace waited.
I wasn’t ready for that. For Jace—a stranger.
A doctor. I reminded myself. He’d seen hundreds of bodies. Many worse than mine, I reasoned with myself.
I was in denial about how bad I really was.
Why couldn’t I disappear? Fade into the background. After laying me down, Colt pulled the towel, but I grabbed it with all the strength I had left.
It was too much. They were asking too much. I wanted my dark, quiet, room alone again.
“Let go, darlin’. We’re not going to hurt you.” He spoke softly, placing his hand over mine and drawing me into his sea-green eyes. We both knew he was lying. There was going to be pain involved. Deep, soul-shattering pain, even worse than what I’d already felt, but I closed my eyes and let go of the towel.
I felt him move away and could no longer hold down the panic. I grabbed for him as he laid a comforter over my legs.
“Calm down, Aubrey,” his voice was sharper this time—more like the Colt I knew. The Colt my body knew. Isabella hobbled up onto the bed and laid against my left leg. Jace grimaced but didn’t say a word as he pulled a pair of gloves from his bag and snapped them on.
Tattoo man.
Dead eyes.
The rush of adrenaline tightened around my chest, and a long cry erupted that my brain didn’t register as my own. Isabella wiggled closer. Colt held my arm.
Too much.
Reality slipped away.
Too much.
Every sensation. Every sound. Every touch. The light of the room. It gathered under my skin and grated at my nerves until I screamed again.
Jace’s voice cut through my panic. “I can sedate her.”
“No.” I took a breath and held it.
Every fiber teetered on the edge of insanity. “No.”
I couldn’t lose myself to the dark again. I didn’t want to be trapped with no way out. “No.”
“Okay,” Colt finally said. Or maybe he’d been saying it all along.
God, I’m fucking losing it. And every inch closer I got to the heroin wearing off, the more terrifying it was. What if I never came back? What if this damn prison was all I ever knew?
I breathed through another rush of adrenaline, but my chest throbbed. I buried my fingers in Isabella’s hair, even its soft texture prickled at my skin like sharp needles. She licked my arm, her tail thumping on the bed behind her.
“Fix me,” I whimpered, not looking away from Isabella. “Please, fix me. Get me out of here. Make it stop.”
Colt brushed his thumb over my cheeks under my eyes. “That’s what we’re working on.”
I tried to think of all the things Colt had mentioned. Unicorns. Damn, I couldn’t even remember. I just wanted him to fuck me out of my mind.
Jace began his work at my head, shining a blinding light into my eyes. Then, he checked my throat, neck, the bruises forming on my sides. I stared at the ceiling keeping my fingers buried in Isabella’s fur and blocking out all the other sounds and touches.
Mainly their quiet chatter. I’d lived it, I didn’t need to hear a play-by-play of all my injuries.
My vision blurred, sleep trying desperately to take me. That is, until Jace pulled out a needle.
I squirmed against Colt’s side.
“I’m going to start an IV,” Jace said in his overly calm doctor voice. I often wondered if they realized that tone only made them more unnerving. “It’s only saline. It’ll be the best way to rehydrate you.”
He took my left arm, breaking my contact with Isabella until she perked up and inched her way closer to my side. Jace poked and pinched, but I held my composure until I saw the elastic band. I squeezed my eyes closed, holding onto reality as the memories pulled me back. Licking at my skin like flames.
I balanced precariously on that edge. Between Devlin and Colt. Tank and Jace.
The harder my tired heart pounded, the more lightheaded I became, giving the memories an even tighter hold over me.
Jace slid in the needle with one quick movement, then pulled it out, leaving the small flexible line in my arm. Colt picked up the bag of clear liquid next to my thigh and connected the tubing while Jace pulled something else out of the bag.
What now?
Jace opened the small white tube and rubbed a clear ointment on the tattoo on my left arm, then the one on my foot before covering them both with a fresh gauze bandage.
I drifted out again, feeling their strong hands roll me to my side so Jace could continue his work and massage the cooling ointment onto my back.
Pain and pleasure. The symphony of my life.