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“Fucking bitch! The fucking bitch broke my fucking nose!” he yelled, as the blood started pouring.
He advanced on me quickly, but Daniel's hand at the back of his shirt pulled him backward. “Go deal with your face. I'll lock her down.”
He'll lock me down?
I was too stunned to swing out again, my arm falling down at my side.
Martin glared at me then stormed out, slamming the door so hard I was shocked it didn't splinter down the center.
“You gonna hit me too?” he asked, his head tilted, watching me.
“I haven't decided yet,” I answered honestly.
At that, he nodded. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
I should have said yes.
I should have taken the opportunity, one arm free, to get my gun and get done with the whole dying thing. But I couldn't bring myself to. Not yet. Not when things had changed so quickly. It shouldn't have mattered that V was my mother. She was nothing to me. But I found myself needing answers.
After I got those answers, I was going to follow through with my plan.
Which would, hopefully, be before Martin got his hands on me again.
I shook my head. “No.”
Again, I got a nod. “Are you going to fight me?” he asked, motioning toward the bed.
“Are you going to threaten to rape me?”
He flinched.
Flinched.
The seeming second in command to a skin trader, aka: someone who routinely sold women to be raped, flinched.
What the hell was his deal?
“No, I'm not,” he said, his words firm.
“Then I guess I don't have to break your nose too,” I said, sitting down on the bed, moving to press my back onto the headboard. I didn't want to be cuffed lying down. I had been cuffed lying down for months. I lifted my hands above my head.
Daniel came toward the bed, kneeling beside me. “No,” he said, pulling my arms down. “Put them behind your back instead. It'll hurt your shoulders like hell but it won't make your arms fall asleep.” Agreeing to his logic, though wholly uncomprehending why he was trying to offer me comfort, I put my arms behind my back. He reached around me, slipping the chain through a rail, then putting the bracelet on my other wrist and clicking it closed. Then, to my utter disbelief, he grabbed one of the pillows, turning it longways and slipping it behind me to cushion my back from the hard headboard.
“Who are you?” I found myself asking his profile.
His head snapped to me, his eyes flashing for a second before it was gone. “Someone who doesn't get off on pain,” he said simply, moving off the bed and toward the door.
He was half in the hallway when I found my voice again. “Is it a good or a bad thing now that she knows I know?” I asked, not sure why I was bothering.
But he turned back to me, hand on the doorknob. “Honestly?” he said, shrugging a shoulder. “There's no way to know that. V is unpredictable on good days. But I can guarantee that no one will be coming into your room at night anymore.”
Well.
That was something.
“Thank you,” I found myself saying.
His brows lowered, looking confused, before he shook his head at me like I had lost my mind. “Don't thank me, kid. There's no telling what I might have to do in the future. Don't be getting all your hopes up that I can protect you.”
And with that, he was gone.
Okay.
I needed to focus.
In the matter of three days, my entire life had been turned on its head. Everything I had accepted as facts were wrong. People I thought I knew were relative strangers. People I thought were strangers were somehow family.
It was a fucking lot to try to digest.
While cuffed to a damn bed.
But then again, being cuffed to a bed left me nothing to do but think about things.
Like... my mother.
My mother. Who I had always pictured off living on some white beach somewhere, her days spent drinking margaritas and getting fanned by cabana boys. Then spent her night praying on unsuspecting men like a parasite. Bitchy, childish, maybe. But that was how I saw her. Far away. Wholly unaware of me growing up, becoming my own person.
I didn't think I would have been able to handle knowing she lived within an hour of where I grew up. That would have hurt. More than the abandonment in the first place. More than knowing she loved herself more than she loved me. The fact that she could have made an effort to get to know me, if not as a child, then as an adult, and she tossed it away. Yeah, that burned.
Then there was, of course, the matter of her being a complete and utter monster. A psychopath. Or sociopath. Whatever the psychological term for her might be. She was inhumanely evil.
Never mind that she had me kidnapped, starved, and tortured. Let's forget that for a moment.
She was a woman.
She was a woman who was in the skin trade.
She had other women kidnapped and then she sold their bodies over and over again.
It was disgusting when men did it. Stupid, clueless, careless men.
It was downright evil when a woman did it. Women who knew the horror of rape. Women who, even if they hadn't experienced it, knew the ever-present fear of it. The reality of it possibly happening in their future.
For a woman to subject dozens or hundreds or lord-knew how many innocent women to that, daily, for however long they brought in money... that was so horrifying that I couldn't think of a word to describe it.
My mother bought and sold women into prostitution.
Jesus fucking Christ.
And my father... I didn't know what the hell was going on with my father. But something was up.
My life was crumbling underneath my feet.
I slammed my head back against the headboard to keep the tears from coming as my mind wandered back. To the compound. To the days that followed Reign bringing me there.**I was pressed up against Reign's side, his arm laying across my hip, my head on his chest. “Tell me about your past,” I said, my voice quiet, post-orgasm contented.
