Page 56 of The Shadow Sanctum

Sawyer sighs. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean what I said.”

One side of my lips rises into a bitter half smile. “Are you suggesting I don’t have daddy issues?”

He doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he looks off, hands rubbing his jeans like he’s hoping they’ll catch fire. After what I’ve put him through, he should be used to the cold.

“It’s not uncommon, you know,” he finally says.

“Right.” I swat a stray hair that’s caught in my eyelash. A breeze volleys it back—even Mother Earth is angry with me.

“You’re processing trauma, Luna. You don’t get to tell your brain how to handle it… There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“I don’t need you to lie to me.”

I tense at the hand that grasps just above my knee—gloveless and cold, with scabs clinging to cracked flesh. All the wind has spared is the webbed scar tissue that’s turned an angry red. If I held it, he wouldn’t fight. Not right now.

“Luna,” he whispers with a voice that makes a speech out of one word. Incredibly how he does that.

“Nearly every woman I have been with in my adult life has experienced trauma in some form. I’ve seen it play out dozens of times… You know this is true.”

I burst with a humorless laugh that carries in the window. I’m lucky the people have never heard my laugh, else they’d recogonize it. “I suppose the human trafficker would be the expert on sexual trauma.”

He tenses beside me, his knee retreating from my own.

There.

Now we’re even.

I peek at him from the corner of my eye and expect anger. I don’t really I’m hoping for it until my face falls at the serious look in his moon-glazed eyes. He doesn’t look at me, but instead at the night sky while his legs hang rigidly fifty feet from the ground.

“I guess so,” he says with a voice I don’t even recognize.

No follow up. A second stretches into three until even in the cold, my hands grow clammy. “You claim my… response, is not uncommon. I can’t imagine it’s the default.”

“There is no default.” Spoken so much quicker than I expect. “Some trauma survivors are hypersexual, some are hypo, some fall in between. Some get flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, obsessions. And some…” He pauses, never more careful with his words. “Some have kinks. I’ve done the daddy kink a hundred times. It’s not weird to me. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

I snort. It’s harder than I expect to curl my lip.

He finally faces me, the warm glow of the moon catching the blue of his irises. For a moment, they sparkle. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Nothing.

Nothing wrong with me.

He looks me square in the eyes as he says it, his face soft, his expression one of compassion. I know not to believe him…

But he is such a good liar.

If I let myself be led by this look alone, I would think I was the center of his universe. He’d never lie to me. Never hurt me. Never betray me.

What a joke.

And yet…

“You’ve done it before?” I ask, my voice weak. Scared.

His eyebrows arch. “Daddy kink?”

I nod, two small dips of my nose.