Chapter 9 #2
“I’m many things, asshole. Better at riding than most of my brothers, the best torturer this side of Birmingham, a Mario Kart prodigy—”
She snorted loudly. Rude.
“What I’m not is a mind reader.” I gave her a dry look. “What does this—” I flapped my hand like she did. “Mean?”
“Your deviant proclivities.”
“Where did you learn all these impressive words?” I asked, trying not to laugh. It was how I dealt with my demons; morbid, dark, twisted humour. That, and sex.
“School,” she answered flatly. “Is that why you need it rough? Because of what happened to you?”
“Mostly,” I agreed. “I started out pretty fucked up, but it got worse.” I shrugged. “I’m not talking about this with you.”
“Aw, but we’re friend-adjacent.”
The sarcasm on this woman. I exhaled hard through my nose, swallowing back words that originated in my dick instead of my brain.
“So how rough do you need it?” she asked, seeming to have recovered her bravery now she knew she was pissing me off.
“Very. I won that race, by the way,” I said, pointing my controller at the screen.
“Not bothered. How hard is very? What are we talking, specifically? Bondage? Choking? Spanking? I’ll be so disappointed if you tell me it’s just hair pulling.”
I clutched my shaved head. “Leave my hair out of this.”
Her flat expression called my bullshit, which was annoying since I was usually calling her on hers.
She leaned closer, her scent hitting my senses.
Brimstone, explosives, a little smoky, a lot dangerous.
No decay, no death anymore. It was a relief to smell the absence of it, to not connect her with Hanna and the empty, staring eyes I couldn’t look away from for hours, the silence that suffocated me, the strangling fear of knowing I would be next.
“Let’s make a deal,” Lynn suggested.
“Let’s not,” I snapped, harsher than I meant to. I dragged a hand over my head, dug my fingernails into the back of my skull. My demons were too fucking loud today, breathing down my neck.
“I’ll say that word, out loud, and you tell me your sex shit and how it helps.”
I gave her a wary glance. Was that all this was—trying to find ways to deal with her trauma?
Pure curiosity? And here my ego assumed she wanted to fuck me.
I shook my head at myself and said, “Fine. I need complete control, a position of true, absolute power. Sometimes I need a bark to force complete submission; there’s enough alpha in my immediate family that I can produce a weak one.
I refuse to be even a little bit submissive. Fuck that.”
Because she was quiet, watching me but listening, not antagonistic, I bit out, “I need to hurt, instead of being hurt.”
“Makes sense,” Lynn said quietly, a low murmur of velvet, barely there at all.
“It’s more than most people can handle. Too dark.”
She shrugged. “I get it. I thought—honestly, I thought it might work for me, too, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. That won’t help me.”
She sounded so disappointed, so miserable, that I asked, “What will help you?”
“Fuck knows,” she sighed, picking at the buttons of the controller. “But I’m sick of not being able to sleep. I need to take control of it. Beat the memories into submission. I’ve had enough.”
I knew that feeling. “Start by fulfilling your end of the deal. What happened in that barn?”
“What didn’t happen?” she muttered, scowling at her hands. “I was… out searching for a job when someone jumped me from behind and shoved a rag against my face,” she said with difficulty, like her own voice fought her, refusing to give sound to her thoughts, to that word.
I stayed quiet, letting her get it out, choking my demons until they passed out. The problem with that was more and more of them appeared as Lynn spoke. I wasn’t kidnapped off the street, but the parallels were there and I had to grit my teeth to sit through her story.
“When the drugs wore off, I was where you found me. In that barn.” Her upper lip curled, and she pulled her feet onto the chair, knees pressed to her chest.
“Careful,” I murmured.
The look she shot me was pure acid. “I know my limits.”
I held up my hands, backing off. Remained quiet.
She ground her jaw, muscles shifting in her cheek. “That’s enough surely. I’ve told you what happened.”
“I’m not the one who needs to hear it, Lynn,” I said in as gentle a voice as I could manage. Judging by her snarl, it was still combative. Truculent.
“What do you want to hear?” she demanded, her whole body coiling tight, a live wire one false step away from shocking me to death.
“Do you want to know about the endless fucking parade of men who paid to visit that horror show, who made the women trapped in there with me scream and beg and sob until they eventually broke and went silent? You saw how they restrained us. You saw. They kidnapped us, sold our bodies to sick, poisoned excuses for men, to the very worst of humanity, the twisted and cruel, the ones who laughed at pleas and came when we cried. You saw that place. Do you think we stood a single fucking chance of getting out of there when we were locked in stocks twenty-four-seven? Do you think we could consent to a single fucking second as they—they—”
Her hands curled into fists, shaking hard on her knees. The rage in her eyes had given way to horror, to nightmares, and my gut tightened. I knew how she was feeling, and not just because I’d stepped foot in that barn.
She shook violently, and my instincts that were shredded beyond repair tried to form a command, a compulsion. I knew I should touch her, offer some comfort, but the idea of skin against my skin made me want to throw up.
“How the fuck is this supposed to help?” she demanded, teeth bared, eyes on fire as she swung around to look at me.
“I can’t sleep, can’t breathe, can barely eat, and my whole life, waking and sleeping, is consumed by this.
How the hell do you think talking about every sick detail is going to fix the mess in my head?
” She drilled her finger into her skull and my hand twitched to wrap around her wrist, to pull her fingers away where they couldn’t do damage.
“It has power over you,” I said tentatively. “That’s why you can’t speak about it, why you can’t sleep without nightmares. Because you’re not the one with the power; your trauma is.”
“So how do I kill it? How do I take the power away from it?”
“You’re not gonna like the answer.”
Her eyes locked with mine, hard like I’d set a challenge. “Tell me.”
“This shit. Talking about it. Ripping it out of your head, one word at a time. Coping mechanisms help in the short term, but the only thing that’ll help you sleep long term is therapy.”
“No.”
A mirthless laugh left me. “Denying it doesn’t make it any less true.”
“Fuck that.”
I shrugged. “Then you’d better make peace with never sleeping properly again. Why don’t you talk to the others who came here from the farm?”
“I barely know them.” I looked at her from the corner of my eye, and she snapped her teeth at me. “I don’t trust you either, don’t get the wrong idea. But I don’t have to worry about snapping and killing someone who wouldn’t deserve it.”
“Because I would?” I guessed.
“Exactly.” She smiled for a second, before her scowl replaced it. “Start another game, nightmare.”
I eyed her for another moment, then did, not sure what to expect when she picked up the controller again.
Would she throw it at my head? Rip all the buttons off?
To my surprise, she did neither, just stared at the screen as her character shot ahead of mine, because of course it did.
I swore viciously and jammed buttons to catch up to her, not afraid to play dirty and earning myself a murderous glare; I felt it scald the side of my face.
“Did you talk about it?” she asked after a long pause.
“Eventually. I fought it, like you did. Nearly lost myself. My dad pulled me back from the edge, forced me to face it even if it made me want to rip the skin off my bones just to escape the feeling.”
I confessed more than I meant to, more than I wanted to. I focused on the race, my jaw clenched, the truth bitter in my mouth.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know the feeling.”
I threw a shell at her on screen just because I didn’t like that quiet, hollow voice.
I’d heard it too many times. Used it myself too many times, too.
It haunted me. I saw Hanna’s eyes, vibrant and full of life, then sharp with fear, then full of tears, then finally empty of life.
My first and only friend died in a cesspit and no one cared but me.
“The clients, customers, monsters, whatever you want to call them,” Lynn hissed, her voice pitched low, quiet. “They knew we weren’t there by choice. Knew we’d been kidnapped, trafficked, and we were—it was—”
Her rough breath was laced with fury, and I stayed exceptionally still on instinct, aware any sound would be like a red rag to a bull.
“Rape,” she whispered, so quietly I could have missed the word under the bright, optimistic music of the game.
It was a chilling contrast, the colour, happiness, and pomp of the race, with Lynn’s faint rasp of horror.
I let her win the game. Didn’t even try to beat her. Then I pulled open the bottom drawer of the cabinet to my right and took out a bottle of rum. I had no glasses here, didn’t usually bother with them.
“Do you drink?” I asked, my voice neutral.
Her laugh was abraded, low. “Yeah, I fucking drink. Give me that.”
She snatched it from my hand, her nails carving fucking trails on my hand.
“Ow,” I complained, holding up my hand.
“You’ll live,” she dismissed, taking a long swig.
“I need a tetanus shot,” I muttered, inspecting the scratches.
“Oh, get a personality transplant while you’re at the hospital. They might do a two-for-one.”
I gave her a flat, unimpressed look, but it was a relief to see her smirking.
“You’re full of so much shit,” she told me, passing over the rum when I motioned for it. “I said that fucking word, and I don’t feel any different.”
“Did you not hear me say the phrase long term?”
She was quiet for a beat, and then a deep, growling scream built in her throat. “So I raked myself over the hot coals of my own memories for nothing.”
“That’s descriptive. You should take up creative writing.”
Lynn bared her teeth, which might have threatened me if she had the sharp points of an omega.
“It takes time,” I sighed. “And constant work, day after day. It’s not one battle, Lynn, it’s an entire war. It’s a hell you have to force yourself through every fucking night, and then again when you get up in the morning.”
“So what’s the point?” she asked, a little empty.
Worry panged in my chest, and when I blinked I saw the empty, unmoving body of my only friend.
Lynn wasn’t the only one who’d been rented by the hour.
My pimp sent in a fucking client even while Hanna lay dead in the bed across from mine.
I stared into her blank eyes the whole time.
Looking at Lynn now was like looking into Hanna’s eyes.
I swallowed another gulp of rum, focused on the burn. I’d love to tell her it got better, easier, that life took on bright, new meaning. All I had was: “Some days are easier to get through.”
Her laugh was caustic, brittle.
“Yeah,” I agreed, like she’d spoken words.
“So what’s the point? In all this.” She flicked angry hands at the room, the compound, the world.
“It’s better than being dead.” I handed her the bottle. “Want another race?”
She stared right through me, her eyes unfocused, and then she sighed, “Fine. It’s better than being dead.”