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50
IRINA
Two more weeks passed.
Anyone who thought love healed all wounds had never experienced real pain. They’d never lived through the soul-shattering kind of torment that obliterated everything they thought they were before it.
I’d never been perfect. My life had been a constant whirlwind of emotions that I fought to control and questioned at every turn.
Am I overreacting had become my mantra. It circled in my head every time something made rage simmer in my veins or whenever I’d dropped into an extreme low that I just couldn’t force myself out of.
But in the nearly two months since being taken, my rage was absent. I got angry, but it drifted away before it could ever really take root inside me, in the same way it once had. Maybe that would be a good thing to some, but for people like me that anger was a respite from the pain, and from the numbness that often followed.
I glanced up at Scar where he sat at his desk on the other side of the room. He typed away on his keyboard, his fingers flying and his eyes focused on whatever he was working on. The two computer monitors seemed to scroll endlessly, shifting and changing faster than I could track.
I watched him for a moment, shifting to sit on my hands and resist the urge to pick at my nails. He was busy.
I couldn’t blame him. He still had a job and responsibilities, even if I hadn’t yet been brave enough to tell him I wanted to go back to work—I needed something to focus my energy on.
Without it, the need for release pulsed inside me, twisting and turning until it became something menacing and insidious. I’d tried to shove it down for days, resisting the urge to find a knife and sink the tip into the flesh at the top of my thigh.
I could picture the way the blood would well at the small incision, the way it would trickle over my flesh as the tension trapped within me escaped along with it.
Pain was an escape, and I needed one before I lost myself again. Because my anger was finally rising inside me, along with my need for vengeance that I couldn’t have yet. It was an entity all its own, something I could never hope to control.
The need for blood terrified me. The call for revenge was something I’d never known, manipulating everything I’d thought I knew about myself into something…twisted.
Scar’s metaphor of the phoenix—the woman who rose from the ashes in the wake of her trauma, burning her own life to become something more—seemed fitting. I couldn’t burn Fresh Start to the ground, but everything else I’d known was gone.
My apartment.
My friends outside the Bellandis.
Almost my life itself.
None of my old friends would understand the woman I’d become. None of them would understand that I’d been reborn from pain and necessity, crawling from the fires of my life, filled with the determination to eradicate those who’d wronged me.
“What’s wrong, Butterfly?” Scar asked, swiveling his chair to look at me. He raised a brow, his gaze knowing as it landed on my face. He always seemed to sense when I was hesitating to ask for something, anticipating my needs before I was even ready to communicate them.
I unfolded my legs from the sofa, walking toward him with relief that I could finally move freely. My leg still felt the phantom shadow of the brace every now and then, as if the memory of it being part of me would linger long after it was gone.
I stood in front of him, swallowing back my nerves as I caught one of his hands in mine. I shifted it forward, dragging it toward me until his palm touched my thigh. I waited for the moment when he would recoil, always expecting it to reappear now that I wasn’t so broken that I posed no threat to him. But he held my gaze, his brow hitching as his lips parted.
“Irina,” he murmured, a warning in that voice that I understood. He thought I meant to push things before I was ready, but I had something else in mind.
I’d just give myself a little shove to communicate what I needed, because sometimes words weren’t enough.
I raised his hand, gliding it up the skin of my thigh until his fingers brushed against the scars at the top. My breath hitched, the panic that infused me almost immediate when his thumb brushed against my underwear.
I closed my eyes, pushing down that terror long enough to shift his hand further toward my hip. “I need to hurt.”
Scar stared up at me when I opened them, his dark eyes glittering with need. I knew he would never act, but the expression still sent another volley of fear through me. “Good girl,” he murmured, digging his thumb into the scars beneath his hands.
A gasp escaped me when he wrapped his hand around my hips to my ass. The other followed soon after, tugging me forward until I stumbled onto his lap. Those firm hands positioned me how he wanted, straddling his waist in the office chair that barely seemed large enough to accommodate his broad frame. Somehow he made it work, staring up at me through the canopy of my hair around us.
“I don’t want—” I said, feeling the need to clarify as my underwear brushed against the fly of his slacks.
“I know exactly what you want, cuore mio, but pain can come physically, or it can come from facing your demons,” he said, reaching up to cup my cheek. He splayed the fingers of his other hand over my ass cheek, gripping it firmly and digging into the plump flesh harshly. He drew me down to him, my face hovering just above his as he tilted his mouth up until his lips brushed against mine briefly.
I sighed into the touch, feeling safe in the one thing that Darragh had never taken from me. Scar’s tongue traced the seam of my mouth, and I opened to allow him to slide inside with gentle strokes as he tilted my head exactly the way he wanted.
His usual frenzied energy was absent, his touch an exploration as he discovered every part of my mouth at a leisurely pace. My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, gripping it as I tried to push away the arousal that his touch elicited.
I hadn’t thought myself capable of it anymore, but my hips rolled over his length in response. I moaned, making Scar still beneath me. He drew back, studying my face for the reaction we both knew had to come.
“Do you want to come, Butterfly?” he asked, his eyes holding mine as I sank my teeth into my bottom lip. Something in the words was a challenge, a dare for me to take back my body and claim it as mine again.
But I didn’t think I could handle the thought of him inside me. The thought of him touching me.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said, shaking my head subtly.
“It’s your choice. This will always be your choice, Irina. I won’t be upset if you don’t want me to touch you. I won’t be angry or disappointed in you if you change your mind. But if you want me, I’m right here,” he said, his hand releasing my cheek and wrapping around to grab me by the other ass cheek. He used his grip to pull me down, rubbing me against him again as a groan rattled up his throat. “Use me.”
I stared down at him, not knowing the extent of the abuse he’d suffered, but I’d seen the marks. Seen the way he moved away from touch.
It didn’t take a genius to know that Scar had faced his own demons in life. Tears burned my eyes at the concession, the trust he placed in me to do something to him. To take from him. I understood that sacrifice now, and it broke something inside of me to know that he thought I was worthy of that.
“I’m yours, Butterfly,” he said, guiding my hips to roll over him again. A shock of pleasure swept over me, the power he gave me surging within me. It was heady, addictive, fueling the tentative threads of desire that pulled taut in my stomach.
“Oh God,” I moaned, feeling the edges of my nails scrape against his skin through his shirt. He continued to roll my hips on him, guiding me so that his cock bumped against my clit with every grind.
“Tell me what you need,” he said, watching me intently. Something in the depths of his gaze was hesitant, hinting at his uncertainty in what I would be able to tolerate from him. I couldn’t formulate enough thoughts to grasp what would be okay and what wouldn’t, leaning forward to touch my mouth to his.
The comforting taste of him drove me higher, a reminder that he wasn’t a man who would hurt me.
Consume me. Overwhelm me. Yes.
But never hurt.
He let me devour his mouth, tangling my tongue with his in firm sweeps that mimicked the motion of my hips. Even through the pressure of him against the most intimate part of me, the feeling of his hands gripping my ass and guiding my hips, he made it clear I was in control.
He never forced, only encouraged me to take what I needed from him. Filling me with the desire to take until there was nothing left for him to give.
The fabric between us was too much, the double barrier limiting the access I had to his body. I reached between us, running a hand over the hard length of him between my thighs. Groaning into my mouth, he shuddered when I grasped the button of his slacks to pull it free.
He pulled away when I slid the zipper down, reaching in to wrap my hand around him. His girth meant I couldn’t wrap my fingers around him while stroking my hand up the throbbing vein on the underside. Precum welled at the tip, wetting my thumb as I dragged it over the top.
His head dropped back on a ragged groan, his face twisting with pleasure when I lowered my body back down until his bare cock pressed against the thin layer of my underwear. “Irina,” he said, his voice concerned as my breathing quickened.
I shoved through the moment of fear, sliding myself over him in slow rolls that reminded me of the fabric between us. There was no doubt in my mind that sex was off the table, that it would take baby steps to get me to the point where I could accept a man inside of me again. But the feeling of him against me in this way, rubbing through me, and the pleasure on his face reminded me that I was more than the result of my trauma.
I was more than a survivor. I was a woman beneath it all; a woman with needs and desires that I wouldn’t let Darragh take from me.
My hands went for the buttons of Scar’s shirt, working them open quickly in my haste to touch the bare skin beneath. The power of knowing he’d let me touch him for the first time, the thrill of seeing him laid out beneath me and knowing he was mine to use, all drove me higher as my hips ground against him more quickly.
“Fuck, Butterfly,” he groaned, letting me touch my nails to his skin. I explored his scars and tattoos while I rode him, leaning forward to touch my lips to the space above his heart. He growled, making me fear for a moment that I’d taken it too far, but when his hands tightened on my ass and he urged me to press against him harder, the next noise came from my own throat.
The strangled moan was torn from the darkest parts of me, the pieces that were jagged and broken. The parts that felt more animal than human.
Suddenly overcome with the need to feel his skin against mine, I dropped tentative fingers to my dress. Lifting it up from the hem and tearing it over my head, I lowered my chest forward the moment I was nude except for my underwear.
It was the moment when I would have felt self-conscious with any other man, horrified to reveal the scars marring my skin, but Scar had seen them. He’d bandaged them and cared for them.
He’d seen all of me, and he still wanted me.
