Chapter 13 #2
“Get off me!” She growled, but his hold only tightened.
A draft teased between her legs, reminding her she had nothing on under her sweater dress.
“Let me make this perfectly clear, so there is no misunderstanding in the future. You are nothing. Everything you touch, eat, and breathe belongs to us. We own you. Disrespect me again, and I’ll throw you out in the snow and let you freeze to death.”
She stilled, because he was that terrifying. She believed him. She believed he’d let her die in the cold and forbid his brothers from saving her.
“Please…” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” Fear choked her as she understood how helpless she was against him. He could do anything to her, and she was powerless to stop him. “Please don’t…” The air chilled around them. “…don’t hurt me.”
He let go, but she stayed bent over the counter, afraid to move.
“Get up.”
Pushing herself back, she slouched in the stool and drank the shot. Hunter poured two more shots for himself and swallowed them down in quick, practiced gulps. “I’m not interested.”
She kept her eyes on the ivory countertop.
“Understand? Fucking you would be a punishment for both of us.”
She should be relieved, but such harsh rejection held so much revulsion she felt like the world’s worst pariah.
“Say you understand. When I speak directly to you, you respond.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a notepad and pen, sliding it to her. “I ask the questions, and you write down the answers. Start with your brother’s phone number.”
Her hand trembled as she lifted the pen. The vodka had made her thoughts heavy and she couldn’t recall the last few numbers. “I can’t remember—”
“I’ll wait until you do.”
The pressure to write something only added to her distraction. In the end, she put something down but was only partially sure it was right.
“I want the names of all his schools and employers.”
“Since high school?”
“Since birth.”
Over the next hour, she wrote down every detail she could remember about Jordan.
Several times she reminded Hunter that Jordan was older and not her full brother, so there were parts of his past she simply didn’t know, but he didn’t care.
In the end, her treachery filled six pages, detailing every identifying trait of Jordan in blazing betrayal. Her family would never forgive her.
When she set down the pen, Hunter collected the notepad and left. She let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for more than an hour.
No matter how many times she tried to settle in, something always came along to remind her she was the enemy, the unwanted captive they had to feed and could fuck at will.
This wasn’t home. It was her prison. She couldn’t figure out if the wise response was to accept her fate and surrender, or do whatever she could to escape.
She needed to escape his lingering scent, escape the way she could still feel him on her skin.
Sadness shrouded her every step as she wandered through the halls. The house was quiet and isolated. Sometimes it felt like she was all alone. But she was never alone. Someone was always watching.
Time didn’t exist here. The clocks were merely a decorative reminder that life moved on outside of these walls that both protected and imprisoned her. Her sleep schedule was so messed up, she was often taken off guard by the setting sun, sometimes pausing to decide if it was dusk or dawn.
Perhaps it was the vodka that put her in such a haze. But more likely it was the compounding trauma she’d suffered finally taking it’s toll.
“I’m not crazy,” she whispered, wandering down a narrow hall that opened to a wide corridor.
She found Ash in the lodge’s library an hour before dawn, reading by lamplight as another storm exhausted itself outside. Relief flooded her. Of all the men, none should put her at ease, but for some reason, Ash did, so she knocked softly at the door.
Without glancing up from his novel, he turned a page and said, “Printessa, come in.”
Floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the first hints of grey light bleeding across the horizon, and for the first time since her arrival, the world beyond the glass looked almost peaceful.
She stood in the doorway, a moment longer than necessary, simply taking him in. He’d changed into dark jeans and a thermal shirt that clung to the lean muscle of his torso, but there was something softer about him in the quiet morning light. Less predatory.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, still not looking up from his book.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Your scent.” He glanced up with a slight smile. “You smell like fear and flowers. It’s... distinctive.”
She moved into the room, trailing her fingers along leather-bound spines of ancient first editions that were probably worth more than most people’s cars. “What are you reading?”
He held up the book—thick, Russian text she couldn’t decipher. “Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment. Seemed appropriate given recent developments.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Dark humor is how we cope in my family.” He set the book aside and patted the space beside him on the leather sofa. “Come here. You look like you’re about to shatter.”
She was. The events of the past few hours had left her feeling like glass stretched too thin. One more shock and she’d fragment completely. But something about Ash’s quiet presence drew her forward until she was curled against his side, breathing in his masculine scent.
“Tell me about the facility,” he said quietly.
The words hit her like a physical blow. “What?”
“You said they committed you for eighteen months. For trying to protect other girls from your brother.” His arm tightened around her shoulders. “Tell me what that was like.”
“Why?” She pulled back to look at him, searching his ice-blue eyes for some hint of his motivation. “So you can decide if I’m damaged enough to be trustworthy?”
“So I can understand what it cost you to be here. What it cost you to choose us over them.”
The gentleness in his voice almost undid her. When was the last time someone had asked about her pain without wanting to use it against her?
“It wasn’t a hospital,” she said finally. “Not really. Whitmore was private. Exclusive. They protect the secrets of their benefactors at all cost.”
“I assume your family is one of those benefactors.”
She nodded. “Wealthy families need places to send inconvenient relatives. I just never expected to be one.”
“Inconvenient how?”
“I ask too many questions. I see things I shouldn’t see and refuse to smile and stay quiet while others are getting hurt.”
“Yet you honored our convictions, even at the inconvenience of others.”
“Yes.” She cuddled closer to his chest, focusing on the steady beat of his heart beneath her palm. “Family image is everything to my father. He never loved me the way he loves Jordan.”
Ash waited patiently as she gathered her words.
“I tried to tell them I hadn’t done anything wrong and that Jordan was the dangerous one, but Jordan is a master manipulator and an even better liar.
They said it was only for a while, but then the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months.
” Pain engulfed her heart. “When my mother died, and they wouldn’t let me leave, I lost it. ”
“How?”
“Screaming, fighting, basically threatening to burn the place down if they didn’t let me go to the funeral. I know Jordan talked our dad into keeping me away on purpose. He wanted to hurt me.”
“And he succeeded.”
“Yes.” She lowered her head, always questioning if she would have controlled her emotions if they might have let her attend the viewing. Closing her eyes, she let the endless regret seep through her.
“What happened after that?”
“They kept me medicated. Heavy sedatives that made me foggy, so foggy it became hard to think. They told me I had a psychotic break.”
“Did you?”
She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I don’t remember anything like that, but they kept me so medicated, I’m not sure. I was angry, but I think—based on my circumstances—that was a normal emotion.”
“Sure.”
“Since then, I’ve been unable to trust my own thoughts. I even question my memories.”
“Trauma can do that to a person.”
“They said my delusions about Jordan were symptoms of severe mental illness.”
“What do you feel in your gut?”
“I know what he is. What he did to your sister only confirms my instincts. Jordan’s a predator.”
He looked away, and the library chilled. “So you know better.”
“I know what I saw before they had me committed. The girls he brought home. The way they looked afterward. Broken. Confused. Regretful. Jordan knew I was on to him, so he convinced my father to send me away.”
“Why didn’t your father question his accusations?”
She bit her lip. “I’ve always had anxiety.
When I was young, I’d have attacks. My mom used to talk me through them, because my father couldn’t understand what was happening.
He doesn’t like inconvenient emotions. Jordan said my behavior was getting worse.
He played on my father’s fears of social ruin and convinced him I was a danger to the family’s reputation. ”
“And your mother?”
“She tried to stop him. But she couldn’t get through his fear. He needed to protect the Calder name, and my accusations about Jordan were a threat.” She let out a breath. “After that, every time I tried to tell someone, tried to make them understand, they’d increase my dosage.”
The memories came in flashes—white rooms, white uniforms, white pills that turned her thoughts to cotton. The taste of chemical compliance on her tongue.
“How long before you stopped fighting?” Ash asked.
“Six months.” The admission felt like failure. “Six months of being told I was crazy, that my memories weren’t real, that Jordan was perfect, and I was sick. Eventually, I believed them.”
“But not completely.”