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Angelica’s voice filled his mind as she clung to him. She’s going to die soon.
Yes.
And there’s nothing we can do.
Not a damn thing.
When he arrived back in his sitting room he sat down in his chair, pulling Angelica into his arms. She’d started to weep, and he didn’t try to stop her. His own eyes filled with tears as well.
Suddenly he was overcome. Tears tracked his cheeks for the young Russian woman, for all the slaves, for his father, who’d given his life trying to protest the growing industry, for himself and the century he’d spent locked up, used, and tortured, and finally for Angelica, that her innocence continued to take such a horrendous battering.
After a time, she grew quiet and the tears on his cheeks dried. He ordered a meal, and though she’d lost her appetite, he made her eat what she could. He encouraged her to drink some water, then forced a few bites down his own throat.
Sharing the blood-chains with Angelica had forced him to look at the horror of the situation with fresh eyes.
After the meal he took her into the bathroom and ran her a bath, adding the bubbles she’d enjoyed once before. Maybe she could take some comfort in it now.
He had his housekeeper bring Angelica a glass of red wine. Once she was settled in the bath she took the wine and began to sip. He could feel her starting to let go.
With his laptop close at hand, he checked his e-mails. He wasn’t surprised to find that Scorpion wanted the private performance the next night, at midnight, at Engles’s home, the same place the after-auction party had been held.
Reyes had intended to respond right away. Instead, his mind got caught in the earlier loop of remembering the destruction of his family and the terror of living with a sadist like Sweet Dove and of the impending death of the Russian slave.
He needed to let all this go, but the muscles of his arms and back kept seizing. Maybe firing up his five showerheads would help. Because the tub was close enough to allow for their constant proximity issue, he headed into the walk-in enclosure.
The chain at his neck had grown very quiet, another indication that Angelica was doing better.
As he let the hot water beat down on his neck what ended up bothering him the most was that he’d been aching to make love to Angelica for months now, but it looked like the first time would have to be in front of an audience.
Chapter Four
Angelica was grateful for the wine, the food, the warm bath, and even the separation as Reyes took his shower. All of it had soothed and eased her.
But she was pretty sure that seeing the Russian in a completely emaciated, battered state would live with her the rest of her life.
Now that Angelica had some distance from the entire earlier experience, her resolve returned more firmly than ever.
The revisiting vision had explained why Reyes had a sense he’d been to Engles’s home before and had also drawn a tighter line between Sweet Dove and Engles. The two had been connected for a long time, and as Engles’s protégé Sweet Dove had learned her craft by enslaving and torturing Reyes.
Hatred lived in Angelica’s heart now, aimed at both Engles and Sweet Dove for what they’d done to the man who had saved her from Engles’s brutality by buying her at auction.
She needed to tell Reyes what she’d seen in this latest vision, but she wasn’t certain how. For the past several minutes the chain at her neck had been vibrating heavily and she could feel that Reyes was locked in a level of rage and despair that he couldn’t release. The last thing she wanted to do was tell him that Engles had been present at Reyes’s initiation into the world of sex slavery.
Having finished her glass of wine, she rose from the tub, crossed to the shower, and moved inside.
Reyes faced away from her, his hands planted on the far carved-stone wall, the water steaming hot and pummeling his shoulders across the tattoo of the hawk. The chain at her neck still spoke of Reyes’s anguish.
She went to him, grateful all over again for the worthy man he’d become despite the horror of his captivity. He was attempting the impossible and had been doing it alone for decades, to destroy something that had brought him a century of pain and that murdered humans every day. Her people.
Tears burned her eyes as she moved in behind him and slid her arms around his chest. He tensed up, because she’d startled him, but then he relaxed and she felt his chest rise and fall in what felt like a terrible tremor.
She hugged him hard. She felt his body shake as he let loose. He shouted, then pounded the stone wall with his fist. He wept like one whose heart had been torn from his chest.
Angelica never let go of him; she just held him, stroked his arms, his back. She said nothing. What good were words at a time like this?
But her presence might help, a physical representation that she stood with him in this moment and that he wasn’t alone anymore.
At last, he stopped shouting and when the water grew cold he shut it off.
Slowly, he turned to face her, his cheeks drawn, his eyes haunted. “Are you ready to go back to Newport Beach, because I can’t take you one more step down this road. I’m done. It was one thing when it was just me, but I can’t do what’s being asked.”
“What’s changed?”
He thumbed her cheek. “What Scorpion requires of us tomorrow night Sweet Dove used to demand on a regular basis. She loved to watch me tie down one of her female slaves and work her over, bring her to orgasm, repeatedly, the more times the better. She often instructed me how to get the job done, or how she wanted it done.”
“Did you hurt them, the women I mean?”
He didn’t say anything; he just held her gaze. “There, you see what I am? I’ve bruised women just to stay alive. Still want to be with me, Angelica? Still think I’m worth anything?”
He moved past her, grabbed a towel, and started drying off. She followed him as much by the necessity of being chain-bound to him as by the need to resolve their current situation.
“Will you be expected to hurt me during the show?”
“No. Engles would have been more explicit. Besides, I’m pretty sure by now he knows I would have refused.”
“But I’ll be tied down.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’re not doing this.”
As he wiped down his legs, taking the towel slowly to his feet, she felt his refusal like a brick wall between them. But she wondered if he understood her own current resolve.
He lifted up, wrapping the towel around his waist.
She had things she needed to say. “I didn’t know a woman could look like that, her eyes so dead.”
