Twenty-Five Gemma
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WOULD never be confessed to anyone.
No matter if I managed to get home.
No matter how hot these secrets burned.
No matter how good it would feel to hug my mother and brother and tell them what I’d endured.
No matter if I climbed back to my life, my friends, my career...I would never utter a single word of what happened between Kas and me in that library.
Not because he’d raped me while trapped in a nightmare of his past.
Not because I knew now what it was like to have every inch of my power stripped away by a man so much larger and stronger than myself. And not because I’d left the kitchen, after doing his bidding and cooking him dinner no less, merely to find myself on my back with him rutting between my legs.
No.
None of those facts ensured this night would be swallowed until I died.
It would remain my biggest secret, not because of what he did...but because of what I did in return.
I didn’t understand it.
I couldn’t untangle it.
But watching the monster who’d trapped me, chained me...raped me...come apart in violence and grief, switched all my tears from my own pain to his.
I cried for him.
He’d shown me what he’d endured. What his life had been like. What it felt like to be stripped of everything—to be ignored when pleading, to be used when begging, to be unseen even while being so intimately joined.
He’d been nothing to them, just like I’d been nothing to him.
He’d been discarded and scrunched up, thrown away into the dark only to be dragged back out whenever they wanted him.
He’d been scarred far, far worse than the wounds on his body.
And those sorts of wounds (soul wounds) would never heal.
They’d festered too long without company, without help, without compassion.
He was a lost cause. He had nowhere else to go and no one in which to turn to.
And that pulverized me.
There was no hope for him.
No chance at happiness when he had no concept of the word.
No ability to be free because his own mind had caged him.
He was a man who’d hit rock bottom and had nothing left.
My tears rolled at the same speed as his, washing away what he’d done, leaving us in unfamiliar, dangerous territory.
I couldn’t look away.
I’d thought my homesickness crippled me but it was nothing compared to his. A homesickness he couldn’t even decipher because he had no home, no family, no one. He only had emptiness...and a mind full of evil.
I didn’t know how much time passed while he attacked the wall. His back bunched and his arms swung and he didn’t stop until blood smeared the shredded wallpaper.
I never looked away.
I let him purge.
I allowed his torment to seep through the carpet and coat me in the misery he drowned in.
My pain was nothing compared to his. All my justified curses, threats, and anger didn’t stand a chance because how could I be mad at a creature so despicably distraught?
How could I kick him when he was already downtrodden into dirt he couldn’t climb out of?
Maybe, that was stupid.
Perhaps, I’d been in this valley for too long and all rational thinking had fled, but there wasn’t a single part of me that hated him. Not after what he’d done. Not even while my core still throbbed from his rough thrusts.
Right here, right now, this was more than what’d happened between us. This was more than just a moral mistake. This was him breaking...and it overwhelmed me.
He finally stopped punching the mansion that’d kept him trapped, and a bone-deep heaviness settled inside my chest. A heaviness that crushed me with need to be kind instead of angry.
As he spun to look at me with eyes so achingly haunted, a hunger welled inside me to help. A terrible, undeniable desire to take away the shadows inside his soul before they killed him right here in this valley.
That desire to rescue him didn’t absolve or forgive him. The feeling pooling inside me was borne from something far, far deeper than being mistreated and mishandled. It was honest and righteous and true.
It was the right thing to do, even if no one else would ever understand.
Even if I didn’t understand.
Even as I gave him a tiny shrug and a smile that took so much effort to conjure and watched him crash to his knees in tears, I still couldn’t name what unfurled inside me.
Our war was deleted.
Our status between warden and prisoner, slave and master, friend and enemy dissolved.
I was transcended in a way I couldn’t explain. Watching him bury his face into his hands and yell as if he was being eaten alive by demons shoved me into an evolution that freed me from hate, animosity, and every other emotion that suddenly seemed so trivial.
This wasn’t about what he’d done to my body against my will.
This was about so much more than that.
This was about his mind being trapped his entire life. About his lostness, his brokenness, his very immortal being.
I’d driven him to tears with just a shrug.
And I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t sit there and listen to his snarls suffocated by his palms.
It hurt.
He hurt.
I crawled to him.
The chain tethering us together clinked and hissed on the carpet, reminding me we were joined regardless of what happened here.
And I suddenly understood why he’d bound me.
He hadn’t done it because he was selfish about letting me go.
He’d done it because he couldn’t survive knowing I had free will.
Knowing I could walk away and never come back.
Knowing I would choose others over him, just like so many people had before.
That was what scared him.
Free will.
Because he’d never had it.
Never been given it.
Oh, Kas.
I stopped crawling as I reached his huddled, bleeding shape by the wall. I did what others had never done and approached him softly, slowly, sweetly. And when I touched his knees, it was with a gentleness that made his spine buckle and entire body quake.
His skin was like ice as if he’d been in a blizzard. Wet with sweat and covered in shame, he trembled. He flinched away from me as if fully expecting me to carve him with a knife or set fire to his body with a match.
I had no doubt both those things had been done to him.
Silently, I caressed my way from his knees over his hands, his arms, his shoulders, to his face. I didn’t speak. I didn’t think I could. The pressure in my chest had lodged into my throat, choking me just as his own grief choked him.
If, on my dying bed, I broke my promise and spilled this secret, I would ensure whoever I told understood that treating this man with respect and tenderness wasn’t some misplaced ideology formed by a silly girl who’d been held captive against her will, but because the very same man who’d hurt her had shown such heart-shattering remorse.
His tears were genuine.
His horror was real.
That was what allowed me to forget about what he’d done and pull his face from his palms.
He fought me, burying deeper as if he couldn’t stomach to look at me.
I tugged harder, inching closer until I pressed myself against his quaking legs. Slowly, ever so slowly and with the utmost reluctance, he raised his chin and gritted his teeth.
And God, I couldn’t cope.
I’d never seen a man stripped so bare. So utterly flayed alive with guilt and anguish. His cheeks glittered with tears. His eyes were dark and glossy with eternal sadness. His lips were bitten and parted, panting for oxygen as if his lungs forbade him from breathing.
His gaze met mine.
And the stark, raw emotions crashing off him punched me square in the chest, tattooing his pain onto my heart forever, ensuring I would always remember him, always worry about him, always protect him.
Maternal instincts rose swift and sharp—a direct contrast to the feminine side of me that burned beneath his stare.
I didn’t know how I could look at him and feel so many things.
Too many things. I recognised a haunted man who could so easily cause me harm...
and had. I saw a beast that ought to be put down to cease his suffering.
And I also saw a lover who had the power to summon equal parts fight and desire, violence and passion, and the rarest forms of electrical, mystical connection.
He shook his head.
At what, I didn’t know. Perhaps, I was too close for him. Maybe, he begged even now, for me not to hurt him. He stayed coiled against the wall, a hulking shape of savagery but at the same time trembled—conditioned to expect torture instead of comfort.
He shook his head again, a guttural groan escaping him.
I didn’t move away.
I moved closer.
Slowly, so as not to spook him, I inched toward his side and kneeled next to him. Pushing away his discarded jeans, I settled close. As close as I dared to a wounded animal.
He shuddered as his gaze dropped from mine and locked onto my bare legs.
He stiffened to stone even as his hips pulsed with phantom need. His erection was angry and painfully hard. His groan came again, this time so deep and rough it reached between my legs and stroked.
My nipples pebbled as my breath caught.
The web of chemistry between us sprang from every corner, a net of lust falling over us, shimmering with persecution.
“No,” he whispered, unable to tear his eyes from my naked thighs.
I hadn’t bothered dressing after our walk to the river.
I still only wore the shirt that’d dried in the sun with no underwear or protection.
While I’d been cooking, it’d almost been vindictive to remain that way.
My way of proving to myself that I didn’t need scraps of cotton to feel covered.
The only way I’d feel myself and safe in this place was to accept that I lived with a mentally damaged man who didn’t mean what he did but was too unreachable to reason with.
That man now drank me in as if I was both poison and elixir.