Beautiful Rose (Elixir Billionaires #1)

15. Zander

15

ZANDER

“Please take a look,” she whispers.

I’m beyond confused and having a hard time understanding how we got here. When she said she wanted to tell me something, I didn’t know what to expect.

But right now, I’m shit scared to look at her or whatever she is trying to show me. Her trembling, cold body, and her vacant stare reminds me of myself in those nightmare-laden nights. She is physically here, but her mind is lost in a world of horrors.

“Marr, put on your clothes.” I grab a blanket from the bed and am about to put it on her shoulders when I see them.

“Fuck.”

Her entire back is marred with scars. Not small crisscrosses but long, deep marks, making her skin uneven. There’s barely any of her light skin visible as the dark recesses cover her back. They appear to be stretched with time. Unconsciously, my index finger traces one of her scars just below the shoulder blade, and she squeals at my touch.

“Shit. Shit, Marr.”

She picks the blanket I just dropped on the floor and covers herself before turning toward me.

My eyes glimpse her black bra, and I pull on the two corners of the blanket, covering her front. When I squeeze her in a hug, she flinches at the sudden contact, and her entire body tenses. But I don’t let go. My mind is running a race. My thoughts are incoherent. I’m not sure what to think. I hold her tight, hoping her touch will give me some answers.

Time passes, and her body slowly relaxes in my grip as I lead her to the couch. She hasn’t spoken a word, and now I’m dreading if she thinks she has already shared enough.

I turn to her, giving her the space she needs, and whisper in a hushed voice, “Help me understand, Marr. For the past half hour, my mind has been racing, and now I’m scared of my own thoughts. I can no longer sit in this mental train dreading what happened to you. Please stop this frenzy for me.”

“What are your worst thoughts?” Her eyes shine with tears, but her voice is steady.

Her tears are not of sorrow, but it’s the pain of opening herself, being vulnerable in front of me. She doesn’t know how much I respect her in this fucking moment.

“No, we are not playing the guessing game. You’re going to tell me everything that you planned to when you asked me to talk in private. You’ll tell me every-fucking-thing you planned to tell me.”

She swallows, glancing nervously up at me, indecision clear in her shiny blue eyes.

“Oscar told me you underwent treatment for social anxiety disorder,” I say. She blinks rapidly, her eyes large and lost. “I twisted his arm. I wanted to know more, anything, about you.”

“I grew up in Kindred Hearts Orphanage. Nobody knows about my parents,” she says and again goes quiet, maybe giving me a chance to absorb her words. But her words make no fucking sense .

“I know it’s hard, but you’ll have to give me more than that, baby,” I whisper softly. I’m still as a stone, my head buried between my hands with elbows resting on my thighs. I don’t want to cause any disturbance, and break her trance.

“A lady who worked at Kindred Hearts found me in a dilapidated house…in a gruesome state. My back had wounds”—her hands reach behind her back over the blanket—“filled with blood and pus. I was…barely breathing. Doctors said I might have been in that state for several days as my wounds were severely infected.” The couch moves as she shivers, reciting the horrid events.

While she catches her breath, my breathing has stopped.

“I stayed in the hospital for several months. Forensics roughly estimated the scars to be three or four years old. My age was also an approximate guess. So, who—” Her words come out raspy, like her throat is having difficulty forming sentences. “Whoever had me, had me for a few years. That means I couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old before I...I was…in the possession of—”

“W-who took you?” My hands grip the corner of the couch as my brain tries to comprehend her words, my body taut with fear, anger, and frustration.

She shakes her head, her eyes not meeting mine. “Don’t know. After the crime was reported by Kindred Hearts staff, police searched the area, but they couldn’t find anyone. Most likely someone dumped me there.”

“Your parents?”

She shakes her head again. “I had only three memories when they brought me to the hospital. Pain, immense pain, seeping through my bones. Sleep—I was always sleeping. Doctors believed I was mostly sedated.”

“What’s the third thing?”

“Roses.” For the first time, there’s a faint lightness in her voice. “I only remembered the smell of roses. Wherever I was, there were roses. ”

Can this be any more fucked up?

I clear my throat, my heart running a mile a minute. “H-how do you know that?”

“I was in the hospital, and one day, a nurse brought red roses for me. Before that day, I had never spoken a word or reacted to anything. But I pointed to the bouquet and smiled. She asked me if I liked roses and that was my first word: rose . So, they started calling me Rose, and I got the name.”

“No one came to find you?” My throat struggles to form sentences, but I also need to know her story.

She shakes her head in denial once more. “No. There was no report of a missing child. My case stayed open for a long time.” Her hands twist around the edges of the blanket. “When I moved to Cherrywood, I requested they close it.”

I gaze ahead and run both my hands through my hair. “You don’t want to meet your parents?”

“I don’t have parents, Zander. The people who brought me into this world forgot about me long ago. I don’t want to be a burden on anyone. I don’t want to be… unwanted, again.” There’s not even a pinch of hatred in her voice. She says it as a matter of fact. How can she not hate those who should have protected her but failed horribly? But before I ask her that, I need to know more.

“What happened to you all those years?”

She takes a deep breath, as if praying to some heavenly force for courage. “Not sure. I have burn marks of something sharp. My skin was torn and loose. The charity trust of the hospital donated for some grafting surgeries. Doctors believe someone kept me on a bed of hot metal or something.”

“Fucking hell!” My razor thin control snaps as I burn with rage.

I rise to my feet and start pacing back and forth. How can someone do this to a child? My own demons crawl from the dark. I grab a decorative blue stone kept on the dresser and throw it hard to the wall. The full-length mirror shatters with a loud noise, and there are shards of glass everywhere. But it does nothing to lessen the rage burning inside me. I feel like there’s a shortage of air in the room and I’m suffocating.

So many questions—how, why, who—run through my mind. But I ask something else. “Were you...were you violated?” I stammer.

She looks at me in understanding. Her tear-stained face and hollow eyes will haunt me forever. Holding my gaze, she replies, “No. This was a surprise to everyone. There were no signs of rape.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

My brain fills with varied sentences, starting from I’m sorry , but the words don’t seem like enough. I look at her. Still draped in the blanket, she looks so small and tiny.

My precious, brave girl.

“Marr, I...”

“It’s all right.” An angelic smile pulls on her lips for my benefit.

“Nothing you told me is all right. It’s all fucked up.” I breathe heavily through my nose and try to calm the raging storm inside me.

Moments later, I ease back on the couch beside her and pull her to me, still covered in the blanket. I want to hold her, take her pain away. But I don’t think I’m strong enough for both of us.

My phone vibrates in my jacket. Marr shifts away from me, pulling on the blanket and covering herself as her gaze fixes on the coffee table. I’m reminded for a second of our first meeting in the conference room—that day, I chalked her off as someone too nervous, too timid. But right now, I’m awestruck by her grit.

How did she reach from that hell to here?

My phone vibrates again with Kristy’s name flashing on the screen.

“Zander, is Rose still with you?” Kristy’s panic-laden voice greets me.

“Yes. We are in my suite upstairs.”

“Okay.” She hesitates before asking, “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah.”

I end the call and turn to Marr. “That was Kristy.”

She nods in response.

“Marr.” I press on her hands, which are holding the soft plush blanket. “I-I don’t know what else to say, but it means a lot that you shared your past with me.”I know these words aren’t enough, but I’m struggling with my own feelings.“Kristy is waiting for you.” I tug a soft curl behind her ear, and my eyes register the pearl earring. “Feel free to use the bathroom. I’ll be right outside. Take your time.” I squeeze her hands once again, and before standing, I place a kiss on her forehead.

My heart constricts at the sight of a tear that rolls down her cheek when my lips touch her warm forehead.

Ten minutes later, she reappears out of my suite. Her dress and hair are as perfect as before, but her blue eyes are no longer sparkling. She looks exhausted, and I don’t blame her.

Like before, I clasp her hand in mine, and her wide eyes meet mine in surprise. But I don’t let go. She stares at our conjoined hands as the descending elevator takes us to the ground floor and we find Kristy and Oscar in the foyer.

“Shall I take you both home?” I ask Kristy for the second time this evening, my hand still grasping Marr’s cold fingers.

“I will drop Rose and Kristy off. We drove together.” Oscar looks between Marr and me before tilting his head toward the parking area.

I hesitantly look at Marr. Her gaze is fixed on the floor, and her shoulders droop low. I don’t want to leave her, but I also need time to process all that she told me.

“I can text you later,” Oscar adds when he notices the indecision on my face. For a second, I wonder how much he knows about Marr’s past. He wasn’t too pleased with me getting closer to her in the beginning. I’m still staring at him, lost in my thoughts, when Marr gently squeezes my hand.

“Oscar can drop us.”

I glance hesitantly at all three of them before giving Oscar a gentle nod. I press on Marr’s hand firmly before letting go.

She clumps toward the parking lot, and my heart squeezes with the feeling that I’m letting go of something precious.