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“I think you should do what feels right, little rabbit,” he told her slowly. “Tell everyone, tell Connie, tell no one. Whatever feels right to you. But you should know that they’ll understand. We all have secrets, we all know how it feels to become overwhelmed by them.”
She squirmed closer to the heat radiating through his clothes into her. “Will you do it?”
“If that’s what you need, Caera, I will.”
“Mmm-kay, thanks.”
*
There was literally no point in continuing the conversation, Saul thought as he strode along the path toward the flashlight heading their way. Caera’s responses were dwindling down to sleepy murmurs and mumbles he couldn’t understand, and the negligible weight of her body on his back was growing heavier with every step.
“Saul!” Jasper called out.
“Here!”
Fifty feet away, the flashlight stopped swinging and the beam held steady, pinpointing their location. Picking up his pace, it only took a few minutes to maneuver through the dark to reach Jasper and Connie, being careful where he set his feet on the path.
The beam hit him square in the face, then dropped.
“Is she okay?” Connie stepped forward to examine the woman clinging limply to him.
“Found her sitting on the bank of the pond, thinking.” Saul heard the bitterness of the word in his own voice and winced. He wasn’t breaking any confidences here, not when she’d given him permission to divulge them. “She’s convinced being alive is a curse on everyone around her.”
“Bullshit,” Jasper snapped. “The only ones cursed are Dominic and his whore wife.”
“Keep your voice down, Jasper,” Connie hissed, gently stroking Caera’s face. She glanced at Saul. “She’s zonked. Is she safe there if she has a nightmare?”
He tightened his hold on her thighs. “I’ve got her, don’t worry.”
“How close was she to doing something stupid?” Jasper’s face looked hard in the shadows, yet his voice didn’t match it. There was a wealth of compassion in him—Saul had come to learn that about his friend.
The sadist was an artist at hiding his emotions.
Taking things into his own hands, Saul started walking again, with Jasper falling into step beside him and Connie bringing up the rear—probably to catch Caera if she fell, not that he would ever let that happen. “Caera was going to drown herself at dawn. That’s close enough for me.”
Holding the flashlight steady on the path, Jasper grunted. “Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be the first of us to choose death. I think when you’ve had all your choices made for you, every decision taken out of your hands, there’s power in dying when and where you choose. She might not remember the shit they did to her, not completely, not yet, but…she knows. No matter how deep you bury it, it’s never deep e-fucking-nough.”
Saul’s imagination ran wild, picturing a skeletal hand poking out of a mossy grave, the headstone reading Caera’s Traumatic Shit. Forgotten, but not gone.
“I’ve got some free time tomorrow. Atticus being in D.C. has lightened the workload by a fraction, so I can shift some meetings around in the morning if you want me to talk to her about where she comes from. What we are.”
Well, it was an interesting proposition. Saul just didn’t know if learning about the horrors of where she was born, trained, and tortured like a lab rat would help her right now. Maybe it would fill in the huge void standing between Caera and her life, but it could also widen that chasm until she had nowhere to go but into it.
“What you went through…how bad was it?”
Jasper laughed harshly. “Some things I’ll take to the grave, Saul. Not even Anarchy knows the worst of it. We weren’t allowed to socialize as kids. We were kept separate, in our rooms or in the lab. Training was done by Dominic, the experiments by Rita. I don’t know how they treated the girls, whether they were manipulated as thoroughly as the boys. Caera’s time there and mine…”
Oh, fuck. Saul felt the air change, thickening with tension.
“This is probably none of my business, and feel free to tell me to shut my mouth if I step out of line.” Jasper ran his hand over his mouth, then looked over his shoulder. “Con, is she still sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Does she think she’s a virgin?”
Saul stopped dead in his tracks, glaring at his friend. “What the fuck?”
“Honest question, simple answer.”
