Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Iris
The mattress dips, and a large, muscular body curls behind me. The tickle of his breath flutters across the back of my neck as a covered erection cuddles my rear.
Lips brush my bare shoulder.
Still half asleep, my gasp is sharp as goosebumps sprout everywhere he touches.
“Tell me to leave, sweetheart,” Dark whispers before he peppers a line of kisses up the side of my neck to the space behind my ear.
I don’t say a thing.
Sure, I’ve slept in bed with marks before, but not like this. Never like this.
Skating his lips across the top of my back, Dark abruptly stops and hisses. “Iris, what the fuck are these scars?”
Oh. Right. Those.
“He beat me.”
“Who did?”
“My father.”
Dark’s grumbled inhale, and the sudden shift of the bed expresses far more than words ever could.
They’re ugly, I get it.
One of the many chapters of my old life, of my childhood, when I was taken into the woods and beaten for not doing as I was told.
For not being good enough. Violent enough.
For enabling Dee to be a girl and have a heart.
I did what I could. A killer, I am not. Not unless provoked. Not unless it’s necessary.
A finger hooks under the thin strap of my tank top and slowly trails down my arm. I flatten my stomach to the bed and bury my face in the pillow as Dark exposes my back in the safety of my moonlit bedroom.
And I let him.
As tears stain my pillow, I give this piece of myself to someone else.
Nobody beyond Dee has seen them like this. I always wear shirts that cover my back. Even my tank tops are wide enough to keep everything hidden except for those I wear to bed. Just like this one, that Dark rolls down, so it’s nothing more than a band around my waist.
Gentle fingertips trail across the faded scars.
“He’s dead. Right?”
Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I nod into the pillow.
“What a fuckin’ monster.”
Yes. He was.
“I’d never do anything like this to my kids.”
I rest my cheek on the cotton, facing away from him. “You would if you stole them to raise as your soldiers, and when the oldest didn’t comply.”
“What the hell do you mean, stole you?”
“He wasn’t my real father. Or Dee’s,” I confess to the first person ever, freeing a secret into a world I never planned to tell anyone.
“How do you know?”
“I… I remember… before him. Sorta. Little blips. A woman smoking a cigarette. I had a bedroom and a dog that slept in there with me. He smelled bad, like smoke and urine. His fur was greasy to touch.” Is it weird that I remember the dog more than anything else?
“Christ. When did he take you?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. As a toddler? Maybe. I was too afraid to ask.” He would have killed me if I had. So I never brought it up.
“And your sister?” Dark asks, angry on our behalf.
“We aren’t related by blood. I don’t even think Dee knows that.
I think we were taken around the same time, but I don’t remember.
” Trust me, I wish I did. If I had any idea of where either of us came from, I would’ve looked it up long ago.
But when you have nothing to go on, what are you supposed to do?
“Fuck.”
Not knowing what to say, as I’ve already said too much, I hum.
Fuck is right.
This is why I don’t get close to people.
They don’t understand. They can’t. What do you say to someone who’s covered in scars?
How do you react to a woman who doesn’t have a mother, and her only father was a man who kidnapped her as a child to raise her into this?
That’s without considering what I look like…
I have no hair.
None.
Not in my nose.
Not on my legs.
Nowhere.
And while I’ve accepted this about myself… adding up the whole package, including a psychotic sister who kills men, how can you expect to get close to anyone?
You can’t.
Yet, here I am, in my bed, with a man staring at my back, touching my scars, and I’m not scared in the normal sense, and I don’t hate it.
Dark’s fingertips slide up my spine, and just like the night in the store, he cuffs his hand around the base of my neck.
“You may not know it yet, and that’s okay… But listen to my words… You’re mine, sweetheart. Today. Tomorrow. A week from now. A month. Next year. Five years. It don’t matter. We’re doin’ this. I’m not goin’ anywhere. I couldn’t, even if I tried.”
He can’t mean that.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tuck my arms under my pillow, ball my hands into fists, and shove Dark’s words from my mind.
I am no one’s.
This isn’t real.
Nothing ever is.
Dark doesn’t say anything more when he covers my bare back, cock nestled against my ass, and kisses me from shoulder to shoulder, slowly, before he settles beside me, curls his arm around my middle, and tugs me into the heat of his embrace.
And I’m too tired to fight him.
So, I don’t. I let it be and fall asleep with a tattooed arm around my waist, his breath on my neck, and wait for tomorrow to come. When the shoe drops… and he disappears again…
Like he always does.