Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-one
Tierney
He picked me up from the floor sometime later and undressed me.
Put me into a bathtub full of warm water.
Achilles then took a sponge and ran it over every inch of my body.
He didn’t dare touch my skin with his. Instead, he let the sponge do all the work.
His movements were practical and impersonal.
I wondered if he knew it was exactly what I needed—to soak myself in hot water and try to wash away the memories.
I stared at the small, dusty window in front of the bathtub, unresponsive.
“I made your favorite cabbage soup.”
I didn’t answer.
“And there’s the rye bread that you love.”
Nothing.
“You’ll get out of this place inside your head,” he said, his voice so sure, so full of conviction, I was almost tempted to believe it. “Just hang in there, Little Flame. I’m coming to get you.” His throat worked with a swallow. “Fuck, baby, I should’ve never left.”
I hated that he was trying to save me because giving up felt so much easier.
For the next two weeks, he spoon-fed me all my meals, brushed my teeth, did my laundry, and tucked me into bed. He read me my favorite books, and carried me outside to watch the sunrises, and the sunsets, and even the rainbow, once.
My favorite playlist was played every morning at a low, comforting volume, trying to lure me out of my room. Garbage and the Pretty Reckless and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
I really wished he wouldn’t try so hard. He gave me soul CPR every minute and every day, only to never find even the faintest of heartbeats.
His failures only made him more determined. They made him try harder.
Some days I wanted to die just to spite him—to be the one and only war he’d lost.
I told myself he’d give up eventually, return to his life, to his family, to his duties.
But it was a lie, and I knew it.
Achilles, like his namesake, would fight until death and beyond.
Especially for the things he loved.
Three weeks after we’d first arrived at the cottage, I understood the term cabin fever.
I couldn’t stare at these walls anymore. I knew every chip in the paint, every crack, and every smudge. It felt like I was trapped inside my head, inside my body, and now inside an unremarkable, dated house with a man I despised.
I stepped in front of the living room window to find that it was pouring rain outside.
“Where the hell are we?” The words ripped from my mouth like a Band-Aid, and I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t spoken in so long, I hadn’t even been sure I could produce words anymore.
“Maryland,” Achilles’s voice clipped from behind me.
Neither of us had stepped out of the house for these past three weeks. He had our food and toiletries delivered to us twice a week.
I turned around and headed to the door. I was still wearing my pajamas but no shoes. I didn’t even think I had a pair here.
“Where are you going?” he asked from behind me.
I didn’t answer. Just slammed the door in his face.
Rain danced across the rotten wooden banister of the front porch, but when I stepped into the storm, I couldn’t feel its cold nor its wetness. I moved down the three steps until my feet touched damp sand, then continued walking.
The ocean was fierce, the waves crashing over the shore. My head felt especially wet, and when I moved a hand over it, I realized it was completely shaved, with only peach fuzz between my skin and the rain. I ran my fingers down the back of my head and felt the jagged bone beneath my flesh.
I played my entire twenty-nine years back in my head.
I was ripped from my mother’s womb prematurely and snatched by my father’s enemy to a Russian work camp.
Spent the first fourteen years of my life starved, beaten, worked to the bone, and sexually abused.
When I finally escaped, I found a family I had little to nothing in common with.
My father looked right past me. My older brother didn’t care about anything that wasn’t his liquor, women, or gambling.
And Tiernan, although a good brother, didn’t have enough love in him to shield me from the awful truth—that I was all alone in this world.
Achilles had been the only source of light in my life, but even that got ruined. And the minute he thought I’d betrayed him, he’d made sure to hurt me in ways no other man could.
The rain poured down harder, and when I squinted ahead, I realized I couldn’t see a thing.
I turned back toward where I’d come from, but I was dizzy and lightheaded from weeks indoors and no physical activity. I sucked in a breath when I realized all I saw in front of me was white and gray fog filled with rain.
Standing still, I hugged myself. A few moments later, Achilles stepped through the fog.
He’d followed me here.
He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and his boots. Silently, he nodded in the house’s direction. I followed him.
The walk back felt like it lasted a lifetime. I was weighed down by my soaked pajamas and my own frailty. I’d have rather died than ask to lean on him—let alone be carried by him.
When we got back to the cabin, the first thing he did was grab my shirt and pants at the door and tug them off me.
The logical part of my brain knew that it was because he didn’t want me to catch pneumonia.
But the child who came back to life when I woke up from my coma felt the threat of his strong, capable hands and kicked into high gear.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I kicked and thrashed, pushing at him.
His steadfast hands continued wrestling the fabric off my body. My breasts sprung free. I let out an animalistic howl, reaching to claw his eyes out. He didn’t step away. Let me scratch and claw at him as he continued his work.
“You have no right to touch me. I hate you!” I cried out desperately. Tears leaked out, hot and angry, and the ball in my throat felt impossibly bitter.
After he was done taking off my clothes, he turned around and walked to the bathroom. I heard him flicking the bathtub’s faucet to life.
I knew he didn’t take care of me out of the goodness of his heart. He took care of me because I was an integral part of him, a part he refused to lose and let go of.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I acknowledged that I poured some of my rage and misery into Achilles in a way that wasn’t warranted.
He wasn’t one of those men who broke me when I was just a child.
But he was the man who took away my agency for years and the man who fucked me just because he could, because I needed his help, and bartered the one thing I had promised never to sell again—my body.
I wanted revenge.
Grabbing the closest thing to me—a candlestick of all things—I hurled it at the wall. It dutifully exploded into two pieces before falling to the floor. To my astonishment, the act of breaking something else felt…liberating. It made the knot in my throat loosen a little bit. I could breathe better.
Next, I grabbed an ugly, old vase. Smashed it against the wall. Then came the plates in the kitchen. Then, the chairs. I was soaking wet and trashing the entire place.
And it felt good.
Achilles reappeared in the hallway when I was already in the midst of my frenzy. I managed to break a good amount of the cabin he’d rented, and I expected him to stop me.
He didn’t.
He just propped a shoulder against the wall, crossed his arms, and smirked to himself.
This, naturally, pissed me off.
“What’s so funny?” I seethed.
He shook his head enigmatically.
“No, really,” I huffed. “Tell me.”
“You’re healing.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s true.”
“Fuck off.”
“You have color in your cheeks,” he pointed out. “And you’re communicating again.”
I hated that it was true. I hated that it was him who pulled me out of the hellhole in my head, the inferno I, myself, couldn’t claw myself out of.
More than anything, I loathed that the dark place I used to run away to in the hospital, and that first week in the cabin, was now unreachable.
I had nowhere to hide. I had to face all of it.
The past. The future. And the decisions they both dictated.
“Take me home to Tiernan and Lila.”
“Soon,” he said, unaffected. “Let’s give you a bath. I ordered pizza.”
Pizza sounded good. Actually, it sounded really good.
My stomach growled loudly, asking for garlic bread rolls, too.
I realized I was famished.
Famished like I hadn’t been since Europe.
Hunger. I really was starting to feel again.
And this was bad news, considering the biggest threat to my heart was less than a heartbeat away.