Chapter 3 #2
Slowly, I leaned forward and brushed my nose against his, testing him.
His breath skittered over my lips, shallow and uneven, and his hands drifted down to the dip of my waist, wedging beneath my jacket, his thumbs circling gently, almost hesitantly, the movement sliding my shirt up just enough that his warmth brushed mine.
My body curved toward his on instinct, and for one fragile moment it felt like us.
I let my hands drift down the hard planes of his chest and stomach, gliding beneath his shirt, pressing my palms flat against his abs, my thumbs tracing the divots of the old scars I knew by heart.
He stiffened when I touched him like that, a sharp inhale tearing from his throat, and when our eyes met again, something had changed.
The softness was gone.
His gaze was dark and unfocused in a way that made my stomach twist, and his grip on my waist sank tighter as he yanked me against him, not affectionate but urgent, like he was afraid I’d disappear if he didn’t hold me hard enough.
I gasped, but it was the only sound that could’ve left me before his mouth stole anything else, his kiss crashing against me, rough and consuming, his bandaged palms sliding to my rib cage as he pressed me down into the dirt.
His body bore down against mine in a way that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with survival.
“Rafe?” I murmured against his lips, knowing he’d feel me speaking and pull back, knowing that was the moment he would recognize me and smile and ground himself the way he always had.
Except he didn’t.
The smallest thread of fear slid down my spine as his mouth stayed on mine, unrelenting, his movements repetitive, automatic, like he was following a script.
“Rafe, I…don’t know,” I said softly, pushing lightly against his stomach, trying to coax him back without breaking whatever fragile thing was holding him together.
His grip only tightened, and my fear kicked into overdrive as realization dawned slow and sickening.
His eyes were glassy, fixed on some place far beyond my face, like he was looking through me instead of at me.
His mouth kept moving in the same rhythm, the same learned urgency, but there was nothing intimate about it anymore.
It was mechanical. Practiced. The way a body moves when the mind has checked out.
I knew that look. I had worn it for years. It was the same blank distance I’d seen in my reflection as a Doll, the place you go when staying in your body hurts too much, when it’s easier to disappear and let something else take over. That was where Rafe was. Not with me. Not in the woods.
He was back there. With them.
My chest tightened painfully as I looked at him and saw not the man I loved but the survival version of him, the one forged in rooms with locked doors and guns and commands, the one who had learned that submission was the only way out.
In that hollow, distant stare, I might as well have been just another Buyer.
“Kane?” I asked, turning my cheek away as Rafe kept kissing me, his lips grazing my jaw and my neck in a robotic manner. “Kane!” I shouted.
Kane jerked awake from his side of the fire and took one look at me trapped beneath Rafe before his lips curled into a snarl, rage snapping across his features as he dove over and tackled Rafe off me.
He pinned him down hard, his body made wholly of violence and instinct, and I scrambled back in the dirt, shaking, tears stinging my eyes as the reality of what almost happened crashed into me.
Kane punched Rafe square in the jaw and I covered my mouth.
“Don’t hurt him! He’s not fully aware!” I shouted, my voice breaking.
“I know, but this is the only thing that’s ever worked,” Kane snapped, and punched him again, blood trickling from Rafe’s nose as his body finally went limp beneath him. Kane shook out his fist, breathing hard, then looked over at me, his expression cracking as the rage bled away. “Are you okay?”
I rubbed at my throat, swallowing against my fingers before I shook my head. “No,” I whispered hoarsely. “If you weren’t here…Kane, he wouldn’t have stopped, would he?”
Kane hung his head for a second before he stood and trudged over to me, settling next to where I’d balled up next to the fire, my arms hugging around my knees.
“I want to tell you that he would. I really desperately do, because I know if I don’t, you won’t trust him, but Arden, right now, I don’t know that you should. ”
“He never acted that way before?”
“You mean at Halden’s? It’s easier to ignore the pain when you’re still in the middle of enduring.” Kane sighed. “Sweetheart, you endured Room 82 for 2 years. Imagine, for a moment, that you’d never been given your lighter back.”
I shuddered.
“Now imagine that was your life from the time you were eleven.”
“What?”
“How is it possible you don’t know this?” he asked, seeming genuinely confused. “Has he really never talked about his Buyers?”
“I just know that your tattoos are brands. I thought it was like being a Doll, like with Viktor.”
“Some Buyers, sure, but most of them were Haldens, Arden. To them, we were the boys that could fuck and kill.”
“We?” I whispered.
Kane glanced down at his tatted chest. “I only got pulled into it around fifteen. Rafe was going at it alone for years before.”
I scraped my hands over my face. “I had no idea it was that bad for that long.”
Kane shrugged. “The fucker doesn’t talk much.”
“But you do,” I said, frowning. “Kane, why didn’t you ever talk to me about this? You can’t just hold that shit in.”
He grimaced. “I don’t know, Arden. Why don’t you ever talk about Room 82?
About how we had to—” He cut himself off, looking stricken.
Then he forced out his next words, “We hold it in because we need to let it hollow us out if we want to survive it. Then we let it out when we get to fight back. It’s a simple exchange of energy really. ”
“But prison didn’t give us that exchange. Not much anyway,” I realized.
“No. It really fucking didn’t unless we took it out on ourselves.”
My gaze traced his profile at the note of hoarseness to his voice. “But you and I, we’re not dissociating like him. I did…in the beginning. But I found my way out of it. It’s been years, Kane. I don’t understand.”
He blew out an exhausted breath. “Rafe has twice as many brands on his body, Arden, and he’s spent the last eight years being unable to sign by the looks of his hands.
We, at least, could scream at our prison.
Rafe? I think he internalized all of it.
His trauma. His guilt. That’s not something that gets fixed with a hug and a kiss.
It’s going to take time.” Then he gave me a serious look.
“So yes, he wouldn’t have stopped, and yes, you should not be alone with him for the foreseeable future. ”
I hugged myself. “I just got him back.”
Kane looked over at Rafe’s sleeping form.
“No, sweetheart. You didn’t. That’s not Rafe.
He’s in there, and we’ll find him, but it won’t be tonight.
” Then he patted my knee and laid back. “Sleep. We got a kid to find and you need your rest. If he wakes up and tries to come for you, I’ll be in his way. ”
I laid down beside him, my eyes cast to the drifting smoke of our fire and the twinkling stars above. “Kane?”
He grunted in acknowledgment already nodding off back to sleep.
“At the prison.” I drew in a breath. “By the cop car. I’m sorry I flinched away. You didn't deserve that from me, and I mean that Kane.”
He turned his cheek into the dirt, his green eyes tired but sad. “You don’t need to apologize to me.” His face fractured. “It’s…because you saw it. Isn’t it?”
My chin trembled. “It wasn’t your fault. All of you tried to stop it. And I told you to use me. Even having seen that footage, I would’ve still said the same thing. Your lives were everything to me, and they still are.”
Kane turned his head back to look up at the stars. He was pale and distressed, his jaw flickering with tension. “I could’ve tried harder,” he muttered. “Somehow. I know I could’ve, and I didn’t. So I’m sorry, Arden.”
"You couldn't have Kane. That's just your heart talking, you know?
I know you think it's not that big, but it is.
Fuck. No, there was nothing you could do.
I saw with my own eyes that there wasn't. So please, don't you dare put that on yourself.
You're a victim too." I sniffed and played with the frays on the hem of my jacket.
“God, I hadn’t even remembered any of it.
It was easy to pretend it never happened until I was forced to watch it.
I hate myself for the things I thought about you and Thorne and Rafe after I did.
I…hated you, and it was killing me because I also love you so fucking much.
Even when I first got out, when I flinched back, it was only because I was still in my head about it.
It'd been so long since I'd seen you. I just…needed a second to recalibrate, to remember you as you are.”
“It's okay if you do hate me, Arden. Two things can exist at once,” he said softly. “Just like we had each other during all of our shit. I don’t know if I really believe that anything is ever just one thing anymore. Good. Evil. Perspective corrupts both.”
I grinned a little. “Prison made you wise, Kane Creed.”
“Fuck you, I was always wise,” he said, but he was grinning too. It faded fast. There one finite second and gone the next, but in that second, I felt like a tiny piece of Thorne was still alive.
“Are…you okay?” I whispered.
He shook his head subtly no and laid his arm over his eyes. “In another life? I hope so.” Then he peeked out. “And you?”
I rolled onto my side, putting my back to him. “I will be,” I vowed, peering into the crackling embers of our fire.