Page 134 of Depraved

“Know what?”

“That Granite and I used to fuck.”

This time I dropped the apple, staggered and speechless.

“Um”—I picked up my apple and straightened—“thanks for telling me, I guess.” If uncomfortable moments were able to cause physical pain, I’d be hunched up and begging for death right about now.

She fiddled with one of her gold-hoop earrings. “I’m sorry. I only told you because if I were you, I would have liked to know.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Thanks for telling me.” I wanted to take a bite from the apple when I remembered it was on the ground a few seconds earlier, so I nervously moved it from one hand to the other. “So, I, uh…guess I’ll see you around, then?”

“Yeah. I guess you will.” Her cherry red lips pulled up in a smirk. “Good talk.” She turned on her heel and walked off. I, on the other hand, stood there, shocked and dumbfounded, unable to move because my mind was trying to wrap around what the hell she just said. She blurted out those words like it was a normal conversation fit for the breakfast table.

“Odd,” I mumbled to myself before walking into Neon’s room. The conversation I had with Tanit clearly had my mind so frazzled that I completely forgot to knock.

I stepped inside the room just as the doctor removed a bandage from Neon’s back, placing it in a bowl with other bloody and oozy mesh. Ink looked up at me, and he had to have seen the horrified expression on my face.

“Don’t worry. Doc gave her something to sleep through it. She’s not feeling anything right now.”

I closed the door and hesitated. “How bad are the burns?”

The doctor grabbed some new bandages from the tray next to him. “She’s healing pretty quickly. I would have preferred to do some skin grafting, but with our limited resources, treating the burns is the best I can do. Luckily, Ink managed to get his hands on some advanced bandages that won’t require daily changing. So, hopefully, this will be the last time we need to change it, at least for a while.”

Ink stared down at Neon, watching the doctor work on her, and I could practically feel his heartbeat from across the room. Right now, he wasn’t a hardened criminal, but a man hurting for his woman—even if she wasn’t his woman…yet.

For a while, I stayed, watching the doctor work. At first, my stomach dropped when I saw the burnt flesh on her back displaying a grotesque S. The thought of the pain she had to have endured while they did that to her was enough to make me sick. But the doctor was gentle, and Ink stood there with his hand on her shoulder the entire time. He never took his eyes off her back, like he was trying to engrave the image into his mind, to make sure he never forgot how grotesque her injuries were. Every second that passed, his face hardened more and more until his irises were a slate gray of hate. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out what was going on inside his head. He was killing Pythons one by one, watching them bleed through his mind’s eye.

“Uh…” I rubbed my palms together, “Ink, is there a kitchen somewhere down here?”

He stirred and looked up like I had somehow pulled him from another dimension. “Yeah. In the main house.”’

“Oh.” I chewed my lip. “Guess I can’t go up there to cook something.”

“You want to cook?”

“Yeah. Why? Does that seem strange?”

For the first time, he lifted his hand off Neon’s shoulder, crossing his arms. “You just don’t…look like the kind of woman who cooks.”

I puckered a brow. “Because of my weight?”

“Well…yeah.”

I pursed my lips then snorted while placing a palm on my forehead. “Yeah, you’re right. I can’t cook. But I do know how to make pancakes.”

Ink snickered. “Even if I could allow you upstairs, I can guarantee you won’t find shit to make those pancakes with. It’s a house full of dirty bikers. All we have is beer and leftover pizza.”

Sucking my bottom lip into my mouth, I searched around the room, finding a piece of paper crinkled up and tossed in a bin in the corner.

“Doctor, you have a pen?”

He reached into his shirt pocket and held one out to me.

“Thanks.”

Grabbing the piece of paper from the bin, I flattened it against my chest to straighten it out a bit.

“What are you doing?” Ink asked.