Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
A shley
“Wait, I have to see him. He’s hurting!” I yell as my sister or someone attempts to drag me out of Christophe’s hospital room.
Tears blur my vision as I watch him writhe around on the floor in pain. His injured leg hangs limply behind his uninjured leg that kicks as if trying to flick away pain. His large hands slap at the sides of his head as he screams for someone to get away.
“Don’t touch him,” I tell the nurse who’s crouching over him, trying to get him to calm down. “Stop it! You’re hurting him.”
He keeps yelling for her to get away, but she won’t move. Why won’t she move?
“Ashley, we have to go,” Emery says behind me.
I brace my hands on the edges of the doorframe, holding tightly to keep her from pulling me out of the room. I will not leave Christophe like this. He’s hurting and he needs me.
“No!” I tug and try to pull myself back into his hospital room even as Emery uses her strength to pull me out. I’m growing weaker by the second. The fight is fleeing my limbs, but Christophe’s screams propel me forward. They urge me to continue fighting to get to him.
“She’s hurting him,” I call out, not understanding why the other men in the room don’t understand that the nurse over him is hurting him. He keeps saying to get her away.
She must’ve done something to him.
“Get that nurse away from him!”
My view of Christophe is suddenly replaced by a large body.
“Ashley.” A deep, compelling voice calls my name, making both my human and my wolf pause. “It’s not the nurse that’s hurting him,” Chael tells me as he peers down at me.
My fight wanes as I look up at him. On the surface he appears calm with folded arms across his broad chest, but in the depths of his eyes, I see a struggle that I don’t quite understand.
“He’s hurting. She’s?—”
“It’s you that’s causing him pain,” he finally tells me.
I gasp as his grave words sink in. Behind Chael, Christophe’s yells and cries for her to get away from him can be heard.
But it’s not some mysterious her that he’s referencing. And no, it’s not the nurse who’s doing her best to take care of him.
It’s me.
I’m the person bringing Christophe pain.
It happened the moment he looked at me.
The realization has my knees going weak. As I start to crumble to the ground, Emery’s there, holding me up.
“Come on, Ash,” she says in my ear. “Let’s go back to your room.”
This time I don’t fight her. She keeps one arm locked around my waist and allows me to lean into her body for strength I no longer possess.
“It’ll be okay,” she murmurs as I walk beside her toward my hospital room.
I don’t have the energy to tell her that it feels like nothing will ever be okay again.
* * *
“I have to find out what happened to him,” I tell Emery.
We’re now back in my hospital room. I stand at the windowsill, looking out into the distance but seeing nothing.
“Finish your water.” She moves to stand in front of me, pressing yet another cup of water into my hands. This is the third one since she brought me back to my room.
Since I no longer have my IV in, she must think I’m on the verge of passing out from dehydration.
I know my body is fine physically. It’s the rest of me that’s on the verge of cracking in half. Especially my heart.
“You saw what happened in there,” I reply. “That’s not normal. Something’s wrong. We have to find out.”
“We will.” She lovingly strokes my arm up and down—a gesture she used to console and even cajole me into doing whatever our adopted mother wanted.
“Em …”
“We’ll find out. Just finish your water.”
I placate her by swallowing down the half cup of water in only a few gulps.
As Emery takes the cup from me, she asks, “Ashley, do you think you can tell me what … what happened in there?”
“There?” I ask. “You mean that prison our parents locked me away in?”
Emery’s expression tightens in pain. Though she turns her head away to look out the window, I don’t miss the way her eyes mist over with unshed tears.
Squeezing her wrist, I bring her attention back to me. She swipes at the unshed tears and then wipes her hands against the blue jeans she’s wearing.
“I don’t want to ask you to relive painful memories, but it might be helpful to Christophe. Maybe we can figure out what his reaction was all about.”
I nod because her comment makes sense. And at this point, I’ll do anything to help him.
“Everything’s so hazy and mixed up in my mind,” I confess. “The days and nights all blended together. I don’t even know how long I was in there.”
“For about eight months,” she tells me.
I blink in surprise. Every moment in that place felt like a lifetime. Every second an eternity. Had less than a year passed?
“Are you sure?”
Emery nods. “It was last summer when you called me to tell me you were going to Florida.”
She grabs my wrist, imploringly. “Do you remember who it was you spoke to that led you to Florida?”
I look out over my sister’s shoulder as I try to recall the name of the private investigator I got in contact with.
“Mike, Rick … Ronald? Something with an R. It was actually da—” I cut myself off. I was about to say it was dad who gave me his name, but that man was not my dad or my father.
He was a lying son of a bitch who helped throw me away in that prison.
“David Clarke,” I use his actual name, “gave me the name when I told him I wanted to find out more about our birth parents.”
Emery’s face hardens, and her voice turns cold and hard. Colder than I’ve ever heard it before. “Our adopted parents,” she says, “are dead. Along with the doctor they used to make those pills for us.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
My face falls into a frown, and confusion echoes through me. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
Shaking her head, she pushes out a breath. “Do you remember anything else?”
I turn toward the window once again. “They kept us in the dark all of the time. It was so dark that it began to feel like a weight pressing on me. One of my first nights there, I don’t know when, but I started to cry because I couldn’t see anything in front of me. The darkness became like an entity all its own.
“That was the night I started to have a panic attack, I think, and …” I trail off.
“And what?” Emery encourages.
“That was the first night he spoke to me through the wall.”
My sister balls her face up.
“Christophe,” I respond to her unasked question. “That’s how we communicated. Our cells were right next to one another. And there was this small hole at the bottom of our wall. I didn’t even know it was there, until I heard his voice.”
“What did he say?”
“He, um, asked me what my name was, told me to stop crying, things like that, at first.”
I recall that first time I heard his voice.
“He asked me if there was a special place. Like a place I visited or wanted to visit,” I explain when she gives me another questioning look. “Hawaii,” I whisper. “That was my place.”
Emery squeezes my arms, continuing to stroke them for comfort. “The land of rainbows,” she says softly, knowing Hawaii’s a place I always fantasized about visiting due to its nickname and my love for rainbows as a kid.
Seems like the wants of a wistful child right now.
“I think we talked every day after that first time,” I continue. “And whenever the guards came for me, he would remind me to hold onto my special place or my favorite memories. It really helped when?—”
I look at Emery, not wanting my next words to hurt her.
“What is it, Ashley?”
“They tried to turn me against you.”
Her head juts back. “How so?”
“They would tell me that it was you who set me up to be locked away. That you sold me out to get rid of me.”
Emery shakes her head furiously as a tear rolls down her face. “Ashley, I would never?—”
“I know,” I tell her at the same time I touch the pendant still around her neck. “When they brought me back to my cell, Christophe would ask what they did to me. I told him how they said you wanted me there. He reminded me that they used our greatest weakness against us. They twisted whatever it is we loved to subject us to the most amount of torture.
“He made me remember the best memories I had of you. Christophe reminded me to hold onto those memories for dear life. It was his reminders that helped to keep from going crazy in there. It would have driven me mad to believe my sister sent me there. And they knew that.”
My voice cracks, and the tears flow as I say those final words.
“Oh, Ashley.” Emery pulls me tight against her body, holding me and rocking me as we both cry together.
It’s not until the tears dry that she finally pulls back.
I gasp and look Emery in the eye.
“They tried to use psychological manipulation on me. Do you think that’s what they did to Christophe? Some sort of mind manipulation. Is that why?—”
“That’s exactly what happened.”
Emery and I startle as we turn toward the door to find Chance and Chael standing there. Both of them wear grim expressions.
I rush over to them. “What did they do to him? Is he still in pain? What happened to him?”
I spit the questions out rapid-fire, not giving them time to answer one before I ask the next.
“Ashley,” Emery says, coming up behind me and lightly grabbing my shoulders.
I shake her off. “Is he still in pain?”
They look at one another.
“He’s resting right now. The doctor had to give him something for the pain.”
A whimper bursts from between my lips, and I quickly cover my mouth with my hand.
“It looks like they tortured him over an extended period of time.” Chael drops his head, but then lifts it again to say, “They used your image.”
“What do you mean?”
“From what we can figure out, at some point, they started using a picture of you while torturing him. And in his mind, he began to associate your face with pain. The guards or whoever did this must’ve realized there was some sort of attachment between you two.”
“No,” I cry out, shaking my head. Emery tries to pull me into a hug, but I yank away. “D-Does this mean every time he sees me he … he’ll have that same reaction?”
Chael doesn’t need to answer.
The way he and Chance look at one another tells me all I need to know.
“No!” I cry once again.
Those bastards.
Those horrible, horrible bastards.
Whoever they are have destroyed my bond with my mate before it ever could begin.
They took him from me.