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I wonder what day it is today?
Her hands are warm as she spreads my legs before pushing inward. My knees acquiesce to her handling and soon I am spread open for her to see. I feel something cold at the entrance of my cunt before she slowly inserts two gloved fingers inside me. She doesn’t do much and soon enough my legs are lowered and I am covered with a luxurious grey blanket, hiding my nakedness from their watchful eyes.
I listen as she explains the trauma she can see to Dominic.
“She has a couple of bruises and cuts, and perhaps a cracked rib. And it will probably take a day to get her blood tests back but I can almost guarantee you she has at least one sexually transmitted disease. But it worries me that she is nonverbal, Dominic,” Dr White says.
“She spoke to me,” he replies. “She told me her name.”
“There’s a chance, then. But that’s not the biggest problem. She has been raped and sodomized. There is a lot of tearing inside her,” she says, sadness coating her words. “And Dom, somewhere along the line, this girl has given birth. I would guess in the last year.”
For the first time in forever I feel something. Excruciating pain. Turning on my side, I pull my knees against my chest as the first soul-rending sob rips free of me. Tears stream down my face, not because of what the doctor said, I already knew all that, but because of what I lost.
My heart.
My soul.
My daughter.
Hope.
Chapter Three
Take an Inch
Dom
She won’t speak. Nothing. Thalia remains silent, no matter what I say. It’s been three months and her soft nature—the way she defies me with the sweetest grace—is driving me nuts. How am I supposed to be supportive and help her heal if she won’t tell me what the fuck is going on inside her pretty head? And she is pretty. No doubt about that at all.
After months of coaxing Rafe to let me pamper her like a princess, Thalia glows from the outside in. Her skin is soft and radiant, her hair that I brush in equal silence with her nightly, shines to a high gloss. Her room is covered in a collection of orchids of all varieties, though she keeps the white ones closest to her bed.
It’s the darkness I sense inside her that eats at us both.
The other girls we rescued that night have been rehomed, except for one. She took her own life the night Tommy put her in that truck. The boys returned to find blood dripping from the door, her pale hand on the floor in the middle of a stain none of us can shake. She slit her wrists with a piece of wire torn from the inner workings under the steering wheel. Rafe burned the truck the next day, incinerating it with her remains.
Thalia crouched in the ashes while they were still hot, collecting handfuls she put in a small vase she stole from my room that was Mother’s. I didn’t say a word, taking her to the end of the Newport walk where she freed the unnamed girl into the arms of the wind, carried to her freedom by the roiling sea.
None of us know what happened to the girls, and none of them spoke about it. All we know is they endured unspeakable horrors at the hands of a monster, or maybe ten. I can’t even give her the body of the asshole who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
Not even our pet FBI agent has been able to trace him. Harvey Wellington failed us for the first time, and Rafe was none too pleased, cutting the man out of half our work to the point I suspected he would remove our ties altogether, but the man is too valuable in keeping us out of irons.
And so, I sit with Thalia perched on the queen bed I gave her, stroking the brush through her hair and removing all knots, one at a time. And because she is so beautiful, so serene but so strong, I keep brushing long after each tangle is resolved. She doesn’t argue with me, nor do either of us speak.
I tried, in those first weeks, talking to her in the hope of an answer. Not a single word passed her lips after the day she gave me her name, but I’ve earned her trust since. White was adamant she needed to speak but I saw her communicate in other ways. I’ve also learned not to push her. Patience is key between us for our tentative truce to remain.
When I’m finished brushing and have no more reason to remain with her for the evening, I set the brush gently in her hands and touch the inside of her wrist. My nightly silent plea is that she doesn’t take the same route as her friend. She said goodbye to her in her own way, across the ocean they traveled together.
A single tear drips onto my finger, trickling into the minute gap between us. I raise my head, startled, but keep my movements slow so as not to scare her. When I find her gaze in those liquid-brown eyes shot with shadows and torture, she gives me a single nod. And fuck me if she isn’t the only one welling up. My arms ache to wrap her up, draw her into my chest, and promise her everything she ever needs.
But what she desires is space, so despite the ties that constrict my heart in my chest, I nod back and rise slowly, letting my thighs take the strain and relish the small pain I sacrifice at her altar.
My fingers flick up without my permission, grazing her cheek in the briefest, featherlight touch. Her eyes widen, her lips part, but I back off before I can frighten her further, having indulged my own needs too much already.
The door closes behind me before I manage to suck in an impossible breath, my heart hammering in my chest.
“Still no words?” Luca, the house’s chef, stands beside me with a tray like a fucking ghostly apparition haunting the halls of Rafe’s Rhode Island home.
“None.” I straighten my jacket. “She’s communicating a little now in other ways. Watch for them.” I swallow back the emerald-eyed beast roaring in my chest as he nods and pushes her door open, singing softly.
