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He knew what she suffered, for he’d been living in the in-between for the last nine years as well, just the same as her. He recognized well the numbness she spoke of—the hole that sat in his chest, gaping, sucking away everything he’d always thought life would be for him.
Torrie sat there, small in the size of his bed with only her chemise on and a shield of detachment protecting her from the world. Her hair was still weaved into a heavy dark braid that fell over her shoulder, though many thick strands had worked their way free during the night, sending dark wisps to frame her face. The locks set off the peculiar creaminess of her skin. Perfectly unmarred—as though the skin on her face had to make up for the twisted wreck of the scars on her legs.
Before carrying her onto the ship, he’d never been this close in proximity to her. And the beauty of her stretched his groin in unholy ways he wasn’t keen on having to subdue. That she’d stripped off the layers of her clothes down to her chemise last night—a necessity for the heat that had overtaken his cabin—hadn’t helped matters in the slightest.
When he’d come into the cabin the night before, she was on her side, sleeping with her wrapped bare arm atop the sheet and the swell of her breasts a shadow in the moonlight filtering in the window. He’d suffered a test he hadn’t been prepared to endure, attempting to ignore her bare skin the whole night.
Damn her for following him to the docks. For putting him in this position.
Stay far away.
For everything that he’d done since leaving Newgate—for how he’d manipulated circumstances in her life—that had been his one rule in regards to Torrie.Stay far away.
And this was too damn close. Whatever odd compulsion she’d had that had set her on that path of following him on the docks, it didn’t touch the obsession he’d had with this woman.
She’d been his sole purpose since he’d walked out of Newgate.
Her cousins, Sloane, a duchess, and Lachlan, an earl and heir to the Vinehill estate, had both recovered from the fire long before he was released from prison.
But Torrie—she was not fine. He’d seen that in her right away. Even married to a viscount. Even living a high life in London.
She was not fine.
But he’d never imagined it was as bad as this. That she had shattered so fully from those moments in time when the flames had overtaken her.
The nail of his thumb flicked repeatedly across the pad of his middle finger and his gaze lifted to her as he steadied his breath. “I know what it’s like—the in-between.”
Her green eyes pinned him, narrowing in spite. “How could you possibly know what it’s like?”
He paused for a moment, his voice dropping. “In prison I wanted to die.”
She blinked hard, the wrinkles around her eyes easing. “You did?”
“Every day. Every beating. Every time I retched up a piece of rancid rat fat because of the pain.” His hands clasped together in front of him, his look shifting to the floor, to the tips of her brown boots peeking out from under the bed. “I would take beatings—so severe I couldn’t see out of either eye. Blood and pus crusting my lashes together.”
She flinched, a tremor running through her whole body noticeable enough for him to lift his gaze to her.
“And I would lie there in the filth. Willing it to happen. Willing death to take me.” He paused, his head shaking slowly. “But it never did. I couldn’t understand why. I would lie there. Breath after breath would come. Breath after breath after breath. And I couldn’t will the air in my lungs to cease.”
Shifting the sheet up across her chest to add another layer in front of her breasts, she leaned forward, her voice breathless. “So what did you do?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just kept breathing. Breathing. And I survived—survived when there was no will to do so.”
She nodded, her fingers at her chest curling into the sheet, her voice tiny. “I asked my cousin, Sloane, to kill me. It was in my room at Vinehill and months after the fire. My body was healing—barely—but the pain was constant, unbearable.” Her words turned wooden as her gaze lifted to the ceiling of the cabin. “It was in the middle of the night, in the darkness, and Sloane was sitting next to my bed, keeping vigil as she did after her own wounds had mostly healed. Raining. And I thought that was the time. The dark, the rain—as far opposite from the fire and light as possible. She’s as a sister to me, and of all people, I wanted her to do it. To smother me. To help me go quietly into the night. I had no right to ask it of her, but I did.”
He had to force air into his lungs. “She didn’t try to do it?”
Her look dropped to him. “No, she didn’t. She didn’t even pretend to consider it, though she almost killed me for asking. And then she left Vinehill. She couldn’t watch the pain I was in anymore. What I had become. ”
“What had you become?”
A half smile, twisted from horrific memories, lifted the right side of her face. “A monster. A bloody monster to everyone around me. To anyone that tried to help me. I lashed out with words, with anything I could throw. I was nothing but a monster.”
“That is why you left Vinehill?”
“I was still closer to death than to living when I left. But I knew I couldn’t continue as I was. It began to hurt too much to see how I terrorized the people around me. The people that loved me.”
“Where did you go?”
