Chapter 11
eleven
Remy
The girl they pulled out of the container last night won't look at me.
"Normally I'd use the inside of your elbow," I told her while I prepped the site, "but yours is too bruised." Bruising that has nothing to do with needles.
She flinches when I reach for the blood pressure cuff.
I stop. Pull my hands back six inches, keep them where she can see them, palms flat and open. "I'm going to put this cuff on your left arm. It's going to squeeze and then let go. That's all it does."
I wait. Count to five in my head. She doesn't nod, but she doesn't pull away, and after weeks of captivity that distinction is the entire language she has left. "I'm reaching for your arm now."
The cuff inflates. Her breathing picks up, but she holds still, eyes fixed on a point somewhere past my shoulder. I read the numbers, log them on the tablet Miguel left on the counter, and peel the cuff off slowly, letting the velcro separate in a slow tear instead of a loud rip.
"Blood pressure's good. Heart rate's a little fast, but that's normal right now.
" I keep my voice at the same register I've used for the last forty minutes, low and even, a nature documentary narrator who never raises his voice.
Nothing that spikes. Nothing that drops.
"I'm going to look at your wrists next. I won't touch them until you tell me I can. "
She looks at me for the first time. Brown eyes, enormous in a face that's lost enough weight to make the bones stand out underneath her skin.
She's maybe twenty-three. The ligature marks run parallel across both wrists, layered, some scabbed and some still raw because whoever restrained her used the same point of contact every time and the skin never got a chance to heal before it was abraded again.
"You can." So low I can barely hear it.
Two words. I've performed battlefield surgery under fire that cost me less than what those two words cost her.
I lift her right wrist like it's made of paper and glass, turning it just enough to assess the depth of the abrasions under the fluorescent light.
Superficial to partial thickness. No tendon involvement.
The infection risk is the real concern, and the redness tracking up from the deepest wound tells me it's already started.
"Topical antibiotic first, then I'm going to wrap them loosely. It'll feel strange but it shouldn't hurt." I pull the gauze and bacitracin from the kit without looking away from her hands. "If anything hurts, you tell me to stop and I stop. No questions."
She watches me dress the wounds. Her pulse under my gloved fingers is quick and light. I tape the gauze.
Kade fills the doorway, arms crossed. He doesn't come in because another body in this space right now would undo twenty minutes of careful work.
"Pharma angle from the supply chain is confirmed." His voice is pitched for me, not her. "Victoria flagged three shell companies routing through the same port authority contact."
"Same medical-grade inventory?"
"Sedatives and antibiotics. Bulk quantities, no legitimate end user."
I smooth the last strip of tape. "Someone's running a field hospital for product they don't want dying before sale."
Kade doesn't blink. "Miguel's pulling records. Damian's downstairs."
"I'll be down in ten."
I turn back to my patient. Back to the same voice, same register, same careful low tone I've held for forty minutes, like Kade's words never happened. "You're going to rest now. The IV will run for another two hours and someone will check on you every thirty minutes. You're safe in this room."
She doesn't say anything. But her hand unclenches on the exam table, fingers loosening one by one, and that is enough.
My hands are steady when I strip the gloves. They're always steady.
I finish charting her vitals, flag the infection concern for Miguel's follow-up, and leave the room without looking back because looking back means feeling it, and I have work to do.
They cook. Darcy talks. The kitchen light turns everything gold and I eat what's put in front of me and laugh where I'm supposed to.
I don't think about brown eyes, or the fact that my hands, which are always steady, have started reaching for things in this house that they have no business touching.
The third step from the landing creaks if you put weight on the left side. I take it on the right, barefoot, and the wood stays quiet under my heel.
The hallway is cooler than my room. I'm standing in front of her door, and the gap between the frame and the edge is exactly two inches because she sleeps with it cracked, and I know that because I've been coming here long enough to learn it.
The first night was just standing where I'm standing now.
Listening. The second time was pushing her hair off her face while she slept.
The third, my fingers found her wrist and I counted her pulse for sixty seconds and told myself it was a welfare check.
It stopped being a welfare check somewhere around week two.
My hand finds the door at the hinge side where it swings without resistance. I oiled the hinges the second week. I ease it open just enough to slip through, and the carpet absorbs the shift of my weight as I step inside and pull it back to the two-inch gap behind me.
Her room smells like her. Warm skin and whatever lotion she uses before bed, something with vanilla that sits underneath the clean cotton of the sheets.
Moonlight from the window where she never fully draws the curtains cuts a pale stripe across the bed, across the rise of her hip under the sheet, across the dark spill of her hair on the pillow.
I kneel beside the bed. My knees find their usual place and I settle into the position without adjusting because my body knows this.
How she sleeps on her side, curled slightly with one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting on her thigh.
The distance between the edge of the mattress and where her hip rests. I don't have to look anymore.
The medic is a liar. The medic has been a liar for weeks.
Her breathing is slow and even. Twelve breaths per minute, maybe thirteen. Stage three, non-REM. Her eyelids stop flickering, her fingers go slack, her whole body surrenders to gravity, which it never does when she's awake and performing.
I draw the sheet down an inch at a time, gathering the fabric in my left hand so it doesn't drag across her skin.
She's wearing my t-shirt, the blue one she took weeks ago that I've never asked for back, and a pair of underwear, pale cotton, simple.
The shirt has ridden up past her hip in sleep, exposing the curve of her hipbone and the bird tattoo drawn in a single unbroken line.
The strip of bare skin between the hem and the elastic is so soft it doesn't look real in this light.
I turn her onto her back, careful, one hand on her hip, the other bracing the mattress so it doesn't dip, and I guide her over in a single controlled movement that keeps her breathing even.
She settles into the new position like her body expected it, one arm drifting above her head, her thighs falling open a fraction under their own weight.
I wait. Count her breaths. Twelve. Thirteen. Still under.
My fingers hook the edge of her underwear and nudge it to the side. Not off. Never off.
She's wet. Already, before I've done anything, her body slick and warm against the pad of my thumb when I brush it across her. Her hips shift a fraction toward the contact and her breathing doesn't change. Her body knows me before her brain does.
My mouth replaces my thumb.
Wasn't going to do this. Fingers were the line. This is past the line.
Her pussy is hot and wet against my tongue. The taste of her floods my mouth, and I stop thinking about lines entirely. I lick her with the flat of my tongue, base to clit, and she makes a sound, low, raw, pulled from somewhere beneath sleep.
Heat floods my groin so fast my vision narrows. My cock is hard against my sweatpants, aching, and my free hand grips the edge of the mattress because if I touch myself right now I won't stop.
I have to press my forehead to her inner thigh for two seconds and just breathe.
The raised lines are there under my lips, the ones I mapped with my mouth in the Quarter and committed to memory because they told me everything about this woman before she said a word.
I know them differently now, taking my time in the dark where I couldn't in that hotel room.
The oldest ones are flat and pale, fully matured, at least a decade old.
A child did these. The newer ones are thicker, still ridged, and the spacing got less careful as they moved up, need overtaking caution, and the medic in me wants to find whoever left a girl that young with no option but a blade and break something that matters.
I kiss the ridge of the longest scar, slow and open, the way I treat everything about her body, careful, like damage I can't undo but refuse to make worse. That sound, that sound she doesn't know she's making, is going to kill me.
Her clit is swollen under my tongue when I circle it.
I keep the pressure light, consistent, reading the involuntary responses the way I read vitals.
Her breathing shortens. Her fingers twitch against the pillow above her head.
Her hips start to chase me in a rhythm she has no control over, and I let her, let her body use my mouth.
I slide two fingers inside her, curl them forward.
Her back arches off the mattress in a wave that has nothing behind it but nerve endings and a body I've taught to expect this.
Doesn't count. I didn't fuck her. It doesn't count.
I don't believe it. I'm not sure I believed it the first time. Knowing doesn't stop the groan I bury against her pussy when she clenches around my fingers and her thighs tense against the sides of my face.
She comes with her eyes closed, lips parted on a sound that's barely a breath, a high thin whimper that catches once in her throat before her whole body shudders and goes liquid.
"Stay." One word against her skin, timed to the crest the way I time it every night, because repetition is how the body learns.
I stay with her through it, mouth gentling as the aftershocks roll through, and her hand slides off the pillow, finds the back of my head, her fingers threading into my hair to grip.
She doesn't wake up. Her hand falls away after a few seconds, drifting back to the pillow, and her breathing starts the long slide back toward deep sleep.
I withdraw my finger and slide the cotton back into place, smoothing the fabric over her skin. Pull the t-shirt down over her hip, draw the sheet up to her waist. My hands are not steady. The right one has a fine tremor when I flatten it against my thigh and I watch it shake in the thin light.
Involuntary orgasmic response during stage-three non-REM sleep. That's what the medic calls it.
What I call it is making her come in her sleep with my mouth on her pussy while she trusts me enough to leave her door open.
I stand. My knees ache from the floor. I ease through the door and pull it back to the two-inch gap behind me.
The hallway is cool. Twelve steps to my door and I take them silently.
My door closes behind me. Dark. Her taste on my tongue, my fingers, the tremor I can't stop. I press my back against the door and breathe her in, and the line I told myself I wouldn't cross is so far behind me I can't even see it anymore.
I don't wash my hands.
I press the back of my head against the wood and stare at the ceiling I can't see. My sweatpants are tented and my breathing is ragged and the tremor in my right hand has spread to my left and I can still taste her.
Darcy's best friend. Senator's daughter. Eight years younger. Asleep.
You're in control of this.
My hand is inside my waistband before I can pretend I wasn't going to.
My fist wraps around my cock, hard to the point of pain, and the first stroke pulls my hips off the door.
My head drops forward and I can smell her on my hand, on my fingers, the two that were inside her five minutes ago and still carry the slick heat of her pussy.
I bring those fingers to my mouth. Taste her again. Taste her while my other hand works my cock in the dark and the denial loop turns to ash somewhere between the first stroke and the second.
Her back arching off the mattress. The whimper that caught in her throat.
The hotel room in the Quarter, May humidity pressing against the windows, and the sound she made when I pushed inside her for the first time, the sound that wasn't pain. Discovery. Her whole body opening for me and her eyes going wide and her mouth forming a word she didn't finish.
Don't you dare stop. Voice steady. Accent pure Louisiana. The senator's daughter giving me an order with her thighs locked around my waist.
I stroke harder. My thumb drags over the head of my cock and my breath hisses through my teeth.
Tonight and May bleed together. Her fingers gripping my hair.
Her back arching off the mattress. Asleep or awake, the memories won't separate, and my hand doesn't know which night it's chasing.
Doesn't care. The sound she makes, conscious or not, the high thin catch in her throat that was built to undo me.
à moi.
Tripp.
Her voice. Conscious, that night, her mouth against my ear, saying the name of a dead man and raising him.
I come so hard my knees almost buckle. My back grinds against the door, the only thing keeping me upright, and the orgasm tears through me hot and vicious, spilling over my fingers while her taste sits on my lips.
My cock pulses in my grip and I stroke through it, all of it, because stopping means thinking and I am not ready to think about what I just did.
My breathing slows. My hand is wet. Hers on my right, mine on my left. Same hands that dressed a trafficking victim's wounds this afternoon. Same hands that eased a sleeping woman's underwear to the side eight hours later.
The medic doesn't have a diagnosis for this.
I wipe my hand on my sweatpants and the tremor is gone now, my fingers steady again, and the steadiness is worse than the shaking because it means I'm already settling into what I've become.
Tomorrow night. Lighter pressure on the initial contact. She responded faster when I used the flat of my tongue before isolating her clit. Build the sequence longer before the fingers. See if she stays under through a second orgasm.
I'm writing a treatment plan for a woman who doesn't know she's my patient. I used to think the steadiness meant I was good at this job. Now it just means I've stopped flinching.