AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I fade in and out of consciousness. The next time I open my eyes, her face bandanna is back on, obscuring her features, and she’s rolling a condom down my painfully erect penis. I black out again, and the final time I come to, it’s to her lowering herself down onto my dick. The double-edged sword of Viagra is that it’s great for guys who need a little help in the boner department - but for me, at my age and level of fitness, it hurts. I can’t come, which seems to be her endgame. She bounces in my lap for what seems like hours, and when I finally reach climax, it doesn’t feel satisfying. It feels numb. The drugs pull me under again, and this time, I don’t wake up for what feels like a long time.
It’s completely dark outside when the guy kicks me awake. I’m not restrained to the bed frame anymore; my wrists are cuffed in front of me, now, and somebody has gone to the trouble of dressing me, pants and all.
So that happened, I think to myself, knowing how much worse Avery had it. The guy pulls me back downstairs, unlocking the heavy door, shoving me back into the basement. I land face-first on the mattress, the clicking of the heavy locks back into place the last thing I hear before it goes dark again.
CHAPTER FIVE
AVERY
Rome is back with me. And he’s hurting, I can tell. But when I ask him what happened while he was gone, he tells me nothing. Perhaps he thinks that if he sacrifices himself, if he bears the pain, that I will be spared.
Rome Montague might know about how the world works, but he doesn't understand how the mind of a killer works. I mean, neither do I, not really. But I do know that this depraved man calling the shots behind the one-way glass divider thinks in a far more cunning way than either Rome or I could ever begin to fathom.
Rome’s body is a testament to pain. His tattoos span the length of his body. There’s barely a spot that isn’t engraved with some kind of ink. He chose to sit for countless hours while somebody carved a needle through his flesh until blood and ink settled into the spaces left raw. Hepaidfor that pain. He wears it like armor.
So, to a man who chose pain so many times, giving himself up to protect another might not seem like such a stretch. Even if that person he’s protecting is me, the girl who betrayed him. The girl who sent him to prison.
The girl who ruined his life.
The thing about pain, though, is that it has so many different degrees. The pain you choose to ink over your skin is a pain you control. A pain you ask for. The pain that Rome wants to take on my behalf in this hellhole is not a pain that anybody would ever ask for. It is savage and vicious and violent.
And I don’t deserve his protection after the things I’ve put him through.
All of these thoughts turn in my head as I watch Rome affix a butterfly clip to the clean bandage he’s just wound around my arm, from wrist to elbow. He smells like antiseptic and earth, like fresh-cut grass and rain. And he’s still weak. The bullet might have been surgically removed from his shoulder, but the wound is still deep and raw and terrifying. It’s bleeding again, which means he’s injured it somehow. It hasn’t bled for days. It makes me wonder if somebody reopened his wound on purpose.
The fact that the wound is from a bullet he took for me makes it even worse. I’m guilt-ridden on top of everything else. I want to know where he went when I was alone down here. But I can see that whatever happened, it was bad. Bad enough that his bullet wound is bleeding again.
I think they hurt him terribly.
But I’m too much of a coward to ask for specifics.
“What?” Rome asks, readjusting the butterfly clip against my wrist. He feels my stare, even when he’s 100% focused on bandaging me up.
“Nothing,” I whisper. Rome stops what he’s doing to raise his eyes to mine.Damn.Even in this dark room, they’re the coldest blue I’ve ever seen. Something about the hardness behind them makes me flinch. Rome must see the pain in my eyes, because his hard stare turns to concern. In this moment, it’s as if the way he treated me just hours ago was a dream. The way he calmed me when I was having a panic attack, the familiar distractions he employed to settle me down. It was like looking through a window to the boy I used to love, and now that window has been slammed shut.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks quietly, carefully moving the butterfly clip higher along the bandage. “No,” I say quickly. “It’s fine. Thank you.”
Truthfully, the cut on my arm was the least painful of all the injuries I’ve sustained since being down here. There are many things that hurt a great deal more. A sharp blade across my wrist, inflicted by the man I used to love, pales in comparison to anything else our captor has done to me.
It hurts most for Rome, though, because he was the one who helped the blade along. I know this, even without discussing it with him. Maiming me hurts him more than any bullet, deeper than any electrical current, harder than any blow.
It’s awkward, now. Without thinking, I reach for the edge of the square bandage affixed to the bullet wound on Rome’s chest. It’s so close to his heart, I was convinced he was going to die on the floor in front of me when it first happened. Rome pulls away before my fingers can make contact.
I search his eyes again and find nothing but hard walls.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I wasn’t going to touch the spot where blood still seeps through his dressing. I was just going to offer to redress his wound the way he’s dressed mine.
“It’s okay,” he says, backing away from me. He crouches down in front of the first aid kit we’ve been gifted, amongst our dungeon of horrors, ducking his head so I won’t see how much it hurts him to move. I chew on the inside of my cheek as Rome struggles to change the dressing covering his bullet wound.
“You should let me help you,” I say, trying not to let the irritation moving along my skin enter my voice. He doesn’t deserve my frustration, my impatience. He took a bullet for me. He almostdiedfor me.
“I don’t need your help, brat,” he snaps, sitting on the side of the mattress that fills most of this small, windowless room we’re locked in together. I suck in a breath upon hearing the name he bestowed upon me in high school.Brat.I haven’t heard that nickname in a decade.
I watch him as he carefully takes a breath, struggling to fill his lungs properly, a brief wince of pain as his chest expands with air.
Getting shot will do that.
I use his temporary distraction to snatch the clean gauze from his hand. “You don’twantmy help,” I correct him, as I kneel in front of him. “But yeah. You doneedit.”
