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“What the fuck?” The voice penetrated my tomb of silence.
A hand took hold of my arm, and on instinct, I swung at him, lashing out at the demons who continued to haunt me. My fist collided with a solid part of his body, and I swung again. This time, there was no connection. He wrenched my arm back, and I tried to scramble away, but I couldn’t. He was so fucking heavy. So much stronger than I was.
“Birdie, open your eyes.”
“No!” I screamed. “Get off me!”
“Birdie.” His fingers grazed over my face. My stomach churned, and I tried to kick him, but my legs had turned to jelly.
“Please.” I shook my head. “Don’t do this.”
“Goddammit.” The voice was full of agony. Helpless. And it didn’t fit the voices from my nightmares. It was the reality check I needed to snap me out of it.
“It’s me,” he said. “Ace. Remember?”
Ace. My mind painted details of his features long before I opened my eyes. The behemoth of a man with the beard and tattoos. The one that should probably terrify me. But instead, my heart started to slow, and I found myself drawing in a steady breath, followed by another. He wasn’t Ricky or any of the others, and I wasn’t in that house.
“I’m in Las Vegas.” The voice that slipped from my lips sounded distant and childlike.
“You’re just outside of it.” Ace used his thumb to wipe away my tears in a way that seemed awkward for him. “But you’re safe here, Birdie. I need you to understand that.”
My eyes clashed with the whiskey gold in his. They were transcendent, unrivaled by any other color I’d ever seen in this world, and right then, I could have stared into them for eternity. Outwardly, he was jagged and guarded, but his eyes were the passage to a fragile soul. A secret kingdom hidden away in his mind and heart.
“Come here.” He tugged me up into a sitting position and then propped me beside him against the wall. It took me a second to realize what he’d pulled from his pocket. I wanted to ask him about it, but verbalizing the question required too much energy. The crash was real, and I doubted I’d even be able to move from the floor.
Ace held his lighter to the rolled paper, and I watched in fascination as he took a couple of tokes and blew the smoke from his lips in a long sigh. When he held it to my lips, I didn’t fight him.
“This will help you,” he murmured. “Just take a little puff into your mouth.”
While he instructed me, his fingers settled at the base of my neck, rubbing away the tension that had gathered there. “Now take a deep breath. Good girl. Let it go.”
My head lolled against his sturdy shoulder as wisps of smoke slipped from my lips in intoxicating patterns. I had never smoked before. Never even considered it. But as the minutes passed with the reverberation of his voice guiding me, a divine quietude bled into my bones. I’d never felt so relaxed. My mind had never felt such peace. Everything was slower, sharper, intensified. The waning joint passed from his lips to mine, an intimacy that lit a fire in my imagination. A lucid dream in which his calloused fingers twisted in my hair while I drank the smoke from his lips and tasted the fire in his lungs.
Warmth expanded from my belly down into the space between my thighs. A paradise created for pleasure—a pleasure I’d never given freely—yet at that moment, I wanted to give it to him. But my bones were heavy, and exhaustion seeped into every cell. Logic felt distant, but I could still hear the whispers of truth. He wasn’t mine. He would never be mine.
Eventually, the joint vanished, and only silence remained. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to. My body slumped against Ace, absorbing his warmth and the drumbeat of his heart.
“This will help you sleep.”
They were the last words I heard him rumble.
When I opened my eyes, the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling greeted me. Somehow, I’d been relocated to the bed Ace had prepared for me, my body cloaked in a tangled mess of covers. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. My memory was fuzzy, and I didn’t like that feeling. I usually crashed hard after a panic attack, but this was something else. The weed I smoked had lulled me into a sleep unlike any other I’d ever experienced. It was a difficult concept to grasp when insomnia had always been my constant companion.
I sat up and scrubbed the sleep from my eyes. Today was Friday. The second day of my imprisonment. The second of an unknown number. Ace hadn’t mentioned how long he intended to keep me here. There was no set time I was dictated to serve, and I think that scared me the most. But beneath the fear, the current circumstances also had another surprising effect. For months, I’d been juggling one mess after another. Every day was the same. Wake up, panic, stress, con, repeat. It was a vicious ride I couldn’t get off. But today, there would be no cons. There would be no dealings with Joe. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, it felt like I could actually breathe again.
