The slave.
The woman who deceived him.
I deserve to die.
The belief doesn’t lessen the amount of moisture burning my eyes, though. I thought we had a connection. A unique closeness that was tripled because of the dark.
I, for once, thought I was worthy.
Silly me. There’s no price tag associated with my name. No wealth. I’m nobody. And it’s proven without a doubt when the man who saved me from the darkness yanks back the trigger…
Gasping, I jackknife into a half-seated position as my hands shoot up to check my chest for a bullet wound. There won’t be one. There never is. My hazy head often confuses the emptiness in my chest as the gaping hole of an invisible bullet. Not even the real bullet that shredded through my shoulder only minutes later that morning hurt as much as the fake one that rocketed out of the man from the pantry’s gun.
As I struggle to regulate my breathing, I scan the room I’m waking up in. It’s starkly contradicting to any of the rooms I’ve awoken in previously. It is masculine but with a touch of the sophistication I admired anytime I was a chambermaid for a female member of the Novaks’ family.
The skyrocketing blood pressure I’m only just getting under control spikes again when my eyes land on the chest of the tattooed man sleeping across from me. It’s the same tattooed chest I was confronted by only hours ago, but now his identity is slowly being unveiled, I’m looking at it through an entirely new set of eyes.
Tattoos can conceal scars, but they can’t fully hide them, and Trey has more than his fair share.
When I scoot across the mattress, being extra cautious not to pull on the bandages plastered to my back, the sound of gunfire booms into my ears. The noises aren’t real, they’re from jaded memories. However, the smell most definitely is. It is the scent of death and desecration. A smell I’ve become well accustomed to the past six years.
Hopeful the drugs hazing his mind earlier are still in effect, I stop an inch away from Trey’s slumped frame before raising my hand to his chest. My breathing grows shallow when my fingertips trace a bullet wound hidden by the large fan of eagle feathers stretched across his chest. There’s another one just to the right of his ribs, two in his stomach, and one partially concealed by the waistband of his Calvin Klein boxer shorts.
The final piece of the puzzle slots into place when my finger outlines a circular scar high on Trey’s left shoulder. Six bullet wounds may seem like a lot, but when you learn how many shots were fired that morning, you realize it could have been so much worse.
Part of me wants to believe the man from the pantry lowered his gun to my stomach before taking his shot was because he was aware the likelihood of surviving a bullet wound to the stomach was far more probable than one to the head. He also pushed me out of the line of fireaftertaking his shot.
It all seems very heroic… until I recall the hell his gallantry put me through.
There have been many times I’ve wished to be dead since that day. Death was far kinder than anything I’ve faced after India told Achim what I had done. He said I was a whore, and as such, he would treat me like one.
That was the first time I was raped.
It continued a minimum of once a month for the next six years, growing more violent with each one. I’ve been abused both physically and mentally, defiled, and had my family name shamed all because, for the first time in my life, I acted on impulses instead of orders. And now, just as I’m on the cusp of being freed from the torment, the same man is about to steal it away from me again.
I can’t let that happen. I’m barely surviving as it is. The thread is extremely thin. If I don’t fight for my freedom now, I may never get the chance again. That’s how dire things are, and it’s the sole reason I slip Trey’s cell phone off the table next to him and punch in three words into a messenger box I never thought I’d use.
“I have Ana.”
Eleven
Trey
The guilt eating me alive gets a moment of reprieve when a faint tap hits the edge of my boot. Peering down, I spot an untouched orange teetering back and forth next to my covered foot. It’s from the bowl of fruit the women devoured within a second of it being placed in front of them earlier today. It’s untouched because the person lucky enough to scavenge it up doesn’t trust anyone.
How fucked is it that the only person K trusts is me? A drug-fucked idiot who got so possessive about a woman he hardly knows, he hurt her to prove a point. I’m not talking about the chlorine in the jacuzzi. I truly did forget about the welts on K’s back when I slid into the warm water with her in my arms. I’m talking about how I made out with whoresafterspotting K’s unexpected entrance into the main living area of Clarks.
Seeing Eight’s arm wrapped around her shoulders snapped something inside of me. It fucked with my head even worse than the drugs I took to try and pretend I hadn’t attempted to end K’s life as I wish someone had my miserable existence years ago.
I don’t recall much of the night Nikolai’s crew found me in a dungeon starving, naked, and shackled to a stonewall like winter wasn’t below freezing. However, I do remember pinning Nero to the wall of my holding cell with a shank I’d made in case anyone was game to walk in with my moldy, undercooked food once a week, instead of sliding it under the door as they had the previous three years. I wanted them to kill me, to free me from the torment I hadn’t built the courage to end myself. My father raised me with so much self-worth, no matter how many times I pierced the shank through my frail skin the prior twelve months, I couldn’t end my life as Cole had tried years earlier.
Nikolai saw straight through my ruse. He knew I was taking the coward’s way out, so instead of killing me as I was hoping, he walked out of my torture chamber, grunting that Nero would have been dead if I had truly planned to kill him.
I dug the tip of my shank in deeper, determined to prove Nikolai wrong.
All it did was display the courage I assumed I’d lost.
Upon seeing this, Nikolai gave me two choices. Kill Nero and remain captive in a compound now controlled by Russians, or put down my shank and join him in returning rightful order.
