Chapter 20
ALEX
Zach was sleeping…sleeping so deeply that not even the sudden light, or my presence, roused him. I stood a foot away from the bars, clutching the remote to the shock collar. I wasn’t supposed to be down here, but the ache in my chest was an unbearable reality I couldn’t escape.
I needed to see Zach.
Needed to see him suffer.
Suffer like I was, trapped between numbness and burning despair.
Grief and rage.
I had no words to describe the emptiness inside me, and nothing else in my existence to compare it to…
Except for the time when I thought Rafe was dead.
The blood soaking the pad between my thighs left me hollow and a bit crazed.
Giving Zach no warning, I activated the collar, and he shot off the cot and hit the ground, curling into the fetal position.
In surreal detachment, I watched him writhe on the concrete, experiencing neither joy nor triumph.
Torturing him wouldn’t make the miscarriage less real.
It wouldn’t bring my baby back.
I turned off the electricity streaming through his muscles. He groaned, eyes squeezed shut, and tried to push to his hands and knees. I remembered all too well the power of that electrical current, the way it incapacitated one’s limbs. The way it stole the hope for survival.
Zach had raped me at my weakest, thanks to that collar, and if not for all he’d done, I might still be pregnant.
“Look at me,” I demanded through gritted teeth, full of bitter rage.
He lifted his head, and our eyes met.
“You think you’re in pain now?” I crouched, coming face-to-face with him, prison bars the only barrier between us. “It’s nothing compared to the anguish I want to bring to you.”
“Lex, please…” His breath sawed in and out with too much effort, as if he’d just finished running a race. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to love you.”
“You wanted to destroy me.”
“No,” he groaned, shaking his head. “Try to understand. You’re all I have.”
“You have nothing.” I spit in his face. “Nothing but this fucking prison, do you hear me?”
Zach didn’t display fear often, but his eyes widened with it now. “You can’t leave me in here.”
“It’s what you deserve,” I choked out, sickness rising in my throat at the thought of everything he’d cost me. “You killed my child.”
A heavy beat passed before comprehension dawned on his beaten face. “You’re pregnant?”
“Was pregnant!” I screamed at him, willing my eyes to remain dry as I wrapped myself in rage.
I returned to my full height and glared down at him, chest heaving from the force of my hatred.
“You fucked everything up.” I switched on the collar again, and the sound of his howls trilled through my veins.
This was what he’d turned me into.
A monster.
A monster without conscience.
The remote slipped from my grasp and thudded to the floor, and I didn’t move to pick it up.
In that moment, I wanted to watch him writhe in agony for the rest of my life.
I backed up, lost in a trance as Zach twitched with strangled grunts, and bumped into a warm body.
Rafe stepped around me and picked up the controller.
With a flick of his thumb, he turned it off.
“You shouldn’t be down here. Come back to bed. It’s late.”
By bed he meant the couch, because I still couldn’t bring myself to go upstairs.
“He needs to suffer.” A jab of my finger in Zach’s direction punctuated the wrath in my words.
“He will. I swear to you. He will suffer.” His hand slid along my cheek, searching for tears that weren’t there. “He’ll be gone soon, and you’ll never have to worry about him again.”
“It’s not enough.”
Rafe’s brows furrowed. “It’ll never be enough, baby.” He took me by the shoulder and ushered me up the stairs, and we left Zach alone in the dark.
“I don’t want him dead,” I said, yanking free of his grasp.
“We don’t have to talk about this right now. You’ve had nothing but trauma on top of trauma.”
Twelve hours had passed since I’d miscarried, but those hours had changed me in ways I never imagined time could change a person. I no longer recognized the survivor in the mirror.
I only saw a ghost.
“He doesn’t deserve death. He deserves to suffer every fucking day for the rest of his life for what he’s taken from us.”
My baby, Rafe’s son. The things on the list were endless.
“He should live the rest of his life in that prison, tortured by what he can’t have,” I said, holding Rafe’s gaze, finding bold courage for what I was about to say, because he wouldn’t like it. “I want you to fuck me in front of him.”
Rafe dragged a hand down his face. “Why would you want that?”
“Because watching the way it is between us…that will hurt him.”
“Think about what you’re asking of me.”
“I’m asking you to make him suffer. It’s what he deserves.”
“This isn’t the way to go about it, Alex.”
“I know him. It will destroy him to see what he’ll never have. I need him to see that we’ll go on living while he rots down there.”
“So let me get this straight. Instead of killing the sonofabitch, you want to keep him locked up in our cellar for the rest of his life?”
I crossed my arms, refusing to back down. “It’s a fate worse than death, and Zach deserves nothing less.”
“He does, babe. He deserves that and so much more. But you’re too upset right now to make such a huge decision. You’re not thinking this through.”
He wasn’t wrong. I was a mess, probably levels past the ability to think clearly. But the idea wouldn’t leave my mind. “Tell me you’ll consider it.”
Rafe gave a grim nod. And maybe he was placating me, being agreeable in hopes that I’d come to my senses.
I knew I wouldn’t.