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His declaration nearly makes my heart burst from how full it feels. After plummeting to the depths of hell sharing my emotional flashback, Gauge has lifted me right back up into the clouds.
“Gauge,” I sob, cupping his bearded cheek in my palm. “I love you, too.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE
GAUGE
There are no words to describe the hellfire burning deep inside of me. It’s not every day you learn the extent to which the woman you love was abused.
Groomed from a young age, forced to perform oral, restrained, sodomized… For two fucking hellish years of her young life.
I sit up in the bed, raking my hands through my hair, desperate to calm down. There’s so much anger coursing through my veins, I’m afraid to lie next to Opal in case she wakes. She doesn’t need to see me like this. The poor woman has endured enough this evening.
Luckily, Opal doesn’t wake. Her hair is fanned across her pillow, her mouth slightly open as she sleeps. She’s curled herself around my pillow, possibly thinking she’s still clinging to me. Perfect in every way imaginable.
After she poured out her soul, she crashed hard. I held her, telling her repeatedly that I loved her until she drifted off to sleep in my arms, safe and sound.
How could someone hurt her in the most brutal of ways?
She’s a fucking angel walking among us, and this bastard harmed her, stripping her of the peace he had no right to steal from her. A bastard who is my age…
When she let that tidbit of information slip, I nearly threw up. He was my age when he saw how pretty she was, was my age when he moved in on her, was my age when he forced himself on her.
Opal’s words from our first time together make a hell of a lot more since when I look back on it.
“I’ve never had vaginal intercourse.”
A normal response would have been, “I’ve never had sex.” Opal wasspecificwith what she had not done.
Disgusted, I shake my head. Why didn’t I question what she meant? Was I too caught up in the moment to think with my brain instead of the head between my legs?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
My head falls into my hands as I fight off my nausea. There are too many similarities coming to light between the pedophile and me. We’re the same age, look similar, found Opal sexually attractive as a young teen, both into bondage, and both able to track her down if she goes on the run.
The room spins, sickening me. I make a mad rush for the door, needing the fresh winter air to chase my dark thoughts away.
After several deep pulls of crisp air, I calm, but only slightly. No matter what I do, it doesn’t undo what Opal went through. Nothing can fix that, and I’m not sure what I can do to help her move forward from this trauma.
The only thing which became fucking crystal clear is why she held back from telling me what happened to her. My woman was so brave as she told me her story. If the shoes were reversed, I don’t think I’d have handled it as well as she had.
Though she dropped a truth bomb the size of an atomic blast, I’m furious that I still don’t have a name for the dickhead who did this to her. But knowing her story now, I understand her reluctance.
It’s safe to assume the creep has some past or current form of military or police investigative skills. There’s no way she’s leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow or else he’d have found her by now.
Opal may be green, but she’s not dumb—far from it. Keeping her mouth shut about his identity has kept her safe this far. Getting her to reveal his identity is looking more like a lost cause—she’s too scared and she has every reason to be.
If this guy is an officer of the law, it could be damn near impossible to bring him to justice. I hate to think it, but my contacts may be tied to him, or know of him. When he started abusing her, he was twenty-three—young for CIA, FBI, or even a detective in the police force, but not impossible. And now that he’s closer to my age at twenty-nine going on thirty, he could be higher on the food chain.
If the crew investigates further, using our informants in law enforcement will not be possible. We would go at this behind the scenes.
Fucking asshole used his position to keep Opal under his thumb for way too long. He abused his power, and he’s going to pay for it.
Opal didn’t deserve this. No one deserves this, but that it happened to my woman burns my gut. Opal is too good, too sweet… Way better than I deserve.
This fucknut might still control her fear, but that will end. Once I find him, he’ll be the one experiencing fear.
* * *
