“Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened.” The lie crushes in like a jagged stone. “It was nothing to complain about.”
His hand stills, and then he slips it beneath my arm and runs his palm over my waist. “I know Rick saw you.”
The convulsion that moves through me is so strong it makes my stomach clench. There’s no hiding it from Leo. He sits up in the bed, his body away from the pillows, and pulls me up with him. Curls me into his lap, into his arms. Like he knows I don’t want to look at him while I say this. “It was Caroline. At first, it was Caroline. She kept touching me. I—” An embarrassed cry works its way out of me. “Leo, I can’t. This is nothing—”
“If you say it’s nothing compared to what happened to me, I swear to Christ, darling, I’ll punish that idea out of you.” His tone is matter-of-fact but there’s an undercurrent of blistering rage.
I believe him. I believe he’ll do it. So I steady myself to keep going.
“She kept touching me. And she kept saying things that sounded true. Things that were—that were close to the truth.”
“Like what?” He’s rubbing slow circles on my back like he can stop my heart and lungs from freaking out, even if he can’t stop the tremble in my voice. It’s working.
“She said I was afraid of you. That I was so afraid of you.”
“You were afraid of me. You were right to be.”
Hot tears leak out from under my lashes. “I like to be afraid of you.”
“I know. Your body tells me so.” He leans down and kisses the tears away. Leo’s whole body is alive with fury. I can feel it running under his skin like electricity. The sex didn’t make it go away. “Where did she touch you?”
“My hair.” Leo brushes it away from my face, deliberate. Forceful. Not like Caroline did. In the way that only Leo would.
“Where else?”
“My face.”
He takes my face in a tight grip and brings it to his. Delivers a hard kiss. Harder. To the point of pain. To the point I gasp.
It erases Caroline’s fingerprints.
“Where else?”
“She held my hand.”
He threads his fingers through mine and lifts them to his lips. Then Leo presses his teeth into every one of my knuckles.
“Where else?”
“Nowhere else.”
“Where did Rick touch you?”
“He kissed me,” I admit, and it feels urgent now, it feels awful. It feels like a confession. My voice breaks. Crumbles. “I hated it. He made me sit on the couch with him. He leaned over me—”
Leo tenses, his arms pulling me in closer. Locking me in. I’m safe here. “Did he—” He’s not the kind of man who hesitates, but he does it now. The heartbeat of silence is an open wound, papered over with pain and violence. “Did he rape you?”
“He tried. And the worst part—the worst part was how gentle they were. I know it doesn’t make any sense. It shouldn’t have been so bad, since they didn’t actually hurt me. They were soft about it.” My stomach recoils from the memory.
He feels my involuntary, disgusted shudder and crushes me to his chest, squeezing so hard I can’t breathe. And I don’t want to. Because on the next inhale—
All the horror and fear of that moment comes back in a series of choking sobs that threaten to drown me. Leo turns me, arranges me, so that my head falls onto his shoulder, and my arms can go around his neck, and he can hold me there while I wring myself out. His hands splay out on my back, warm and solid. “I should have killed him when his neck was in my hands.”
I swallow my next sob so I can hear, so I can think. “What?”
“He’s a dead man.”
I bury my face in Leo’s neck. “Please, don’t. Don’t, Leo. Please. Just don’t go anywhere tonight.” I’m a mess. Falling apart.
Leo holds me tighter. To him, I’m not fragile, even now. He shushes me with his hand on the back of my neck, with his arms cradling me. “Not tonight,” he promises. “Not tonight.”
But there’s tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. How are we ever supposed to have peace?
Chapter Seven
Leo
Haley cries herself to sleep on my shoulder.
She tried to minimize what Caroline did to her, and it is a fool’s errand. Touch like that is a fucking violation, and Caroline did it on purpose. She gave Rick permission to do what he did. There’s no doubt in my mind. It was all planned by Caroline, all ordered by Caroline. The way her body shakes when she talks about it, even in the safety of my home, is a testament to how much she hated it. How much it repulsed her. How much shame it forced into her.
I know. I fucking know.
It takes her such a long time to relax that by the time her head is heavy, by the time she’s given up all her weight to me, I’m on fire again.
I brush her hair away from her face and murmur in her ear. She doesn’t stir. She stays asleep when I put her on the pillow and tug the covers over her. I’d planned to take her to the shower with me. It’ll have to wait until morning. Probably better. That way, she won’t see what a fucking wreck I am.
Getting out of bed means gritting my teeth to stop myself from making any noise. My back is a mess of pain. All my muscles react to it. The only time it felt better was when I was fucking her, and I want more. The urge prowls under my skin. If she could handle it, I would bend her over the bed. I would fuck her all night. I would fuck her until a solution presented itself. I would fuck her until the end of time.
Instead, I go into the shower and turn it to cold. It’s a pure chill, like a fucking mountain spring, and it makes my lungs contract to stand in it. This is something to try when the pain has gone so haywire, when it’s run so rampant, so out of control. I force myself through a full shower. Shampoo. Soap. And then I add several minutes of tolerating the freeze.
The pain lessens a little. It relocates itself in my back instead of all the way down my legs and over my head. The intensity remains the same.
I’m going to have to keep Haley with me. For her safety. For my sanity. I need a fucking break. A fucking minute.
The slicing sting relents a bit more when I get into bed with her and pull her warmth against me. She breathes faster at my touch but doesn’t wake up. I drift next to her the rest of the night. No dreams come. Her skin under my hand is the only dream, and it batters my heart. Makes it ache. “I thought I’d lost you,” I whisper to her at some point before dawn.
“I’m here,” she says, her voice sleepy and warm, and after that I really do sleep.
Eva is waiting in the dining room in the morning. She’s showered and changed and looks far less panicked than she did yesterday, though she scrutinizes us both shamelessly as we sit down at the table. I have Haley’s hand in a tight grip. She didn’t say she needed this from me, but she’s coming down from the terror of being taken. She hesitated at the door to my bedroom before we came down. Swallowed hard. Put her hand in mine.
“How are you?” Eva asks Haley, who puts on a smile.
“I’m good,” she says. “I’m good now.”