Old wounds torn wide open #2
“Of course I did.” Jasper stopped us just before the bathroom and set his hands on my shoulders. “I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“You did. Thank you.”
The corner of his mouth kicked up, but it quickly fell. “Just to warn you, the mirror needs replacing. I couldn’t…well—” He sighed and pushed open the door, letting me in ahead of him.
He couldn’t remove etching from glass, clearly.
The tar was gone, but the words were scratched in so deep, there wasn’t a single angle they weren’t visible from.
I struggled to look away, and a rush of unwelcome emotions banged at a fragile door in my mind. They had little to do with how fucking tired and sore I was and everything to do with my life in recent weeks, with my life when I was nineteen and learned how little I could trust a man in power.
The brush of Jasper’s lips against my temple barely disturbed my transfixed state. “Ignore it, if you can.” Goddess, how heartbreakingly na?ve he was, standing beside the half-breed, bastard, Odessan whore. “I’ll run you a bath.”
He left my side, and my feet carried me to the sink. I turned on the tap and set my filthy hands under the running water, but the words were right there.
ODESSAN WHORE.
HALF-brEED BASTARD.
Goddess, they sliced into me, sank their claws agonizingly deep and locked me in place.
I could hear the words in a dozen different voices—mostly men, but a handful of women too.
Jeering, vicious words, threatening to eat me alive and spit out my bones as my stomach knotted, sending acid burning up my throat.
Fuck. It was happening all over again.
The last time had nearly killed me, even after spending my entire youth as a smudge on a good king’s ledger, building calluses to the names and stares.
I’d thought I had thicker skin than most after all that, but I’d been proven so wrong time and time again.
“Nor?”
I bristled, half from Jasper’s voice and half from the frigid water pouring over my skin.
The tub was filled, but my hands were still filthy, and I wasn’t sure how long I’d been standing there.
My next breath came as a sniffle, and when I looked in the mirror, beyond the scratched letters for the first time, my dirty face was tear-streaked and concerningly pale.
My entire damned body was shaking, too, but it was like I couldn’t feel any of it actually happening to me.
My lips parted, but only a choked noise came out.
Jasper moved across the bathroom in a hurry. He turned me gently, holding my face between the warm span of his palms, and my vision blurred immeasurably.
“Easy,” he breathed. “What’s wrong? Something hurts, or…?”
“No. I…I don’t know,” I rasped. It was a bald lie, but they were the only words that would form on my tongue.
The warmth of Jasper’s touch left my face, but his arms wrapped around me, tucking me against his chest, and I sagged against him.
The streaming tears I hadn’t been aware of before came on with force, with body-rattling sobs that stole my breath and made me cling to my oldest friend like he was the only tether in a storm of cataclysmic magnitude, taunting me from the horizon.
He held me through it all, just like he had dozens of times when we were young, before it all got ripped away. Before nothing was ever the same. Before being called the king’s half-breed bastard was the least of my concerns. Before the first in a long line of powerful men hurt me.
It had to be painful nostalgia that had me warbling to him, “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Then don’t, Nor,” he whispered into my hair with so much damn certainty. “Don’t do this to yourself. Maksym will fulfill your bargain whether or not you finish the Agōn Ferr. He’s a man of his word, and I see how he looks at you too, you know? How he—”
“No. I can’t back out of it,” I sobbed right over his placating words that were fucking unraveling me, one frayed strand at a time. “They will never look at me the same, and I—I…” A painful breath sawed out of my lungs, and my entire damned body shook. “I can’t do that again.”
Jasper’s hands stilled in their slow passes over my back. “Again? You mean another event?”
“No,” I exhaled. “The looks and whispers. The fucking humiliation. I finally got away from it. I have to finish the Agōn Ferr. Have to.”
The silence that spread between us then was agonizing; it culminated in a death blow to my heart when Jasper grasped my shoulders and put a bit of distance between us. “What happened to you, Nor?” he asked, his moss-green eye full of so much concern. “What the fuck did they do to you in Odessa?”
I couldn’t look at him. I scrubbed my dirty sleeve over my equally dirty, and now tear-stained face, and I shook my head.
“Nothing,” I whispered.
Jasper wasn’t keen on releasing his hold on me as I tried to move away, but one shot of side eye had him easing away.
I turned back to the sink and said a quiet prayer he would just vanish and leave me to have an ounce of peace as I tried to stuff this overflowing baggage back down where it belonged. It went unanswered.
“Something clearly happened to you, Nor.” Goddess, he was persistent. “Something awful.”
A dry laugh clawed out of me, but I focused on scrubbing the blood-crusted dirt from my hands. “Something awful,” I repeated. “You don’t say.”
Jasper sighed. “I can’t help you if I don’t understand what’s eating away at you.”
“I. Don’t. Need. Your. Help.” The words left me with venom I couldn’t control as I fixed him with a stare through the mirror.
“I have survived this long without yours or anyone else’s help, and I will continue to survive on my own without a man always thinking they need to rush to my fucking rescue. ”
Tension feathered along Jasper’s jaw as he took a step back.
“Right,” he said with a frosty bite. “I’ll just leave if you don’t need me. I’m sure Eilir will be happy to wait on you hand and foot instead, should you decide their help isn’t as far beneath you as mine is.”
Wisps of ink-black smoke kicked up, and he vanished before I could get another word in.
I lowered myself to the floor on unsteady legs.
What a goddess-damned fool I was. A moment of weakness, lulled into false security by how desperate my mind was to trust Jasper like I used to trust Kieran. The sort of true, boundless trust I had never fully found in anyone else.
Something clearly happened to you, Nor. He didn’t know the first thing.
I’d come dangerously close to telling him what happened to me involved a stupid young woman, saving herself for the boy she loved, convinced he would return, only to have her innocence stripped from her in a violent act.
An act that branded her as a whore who slept around to get what she needed.
The bastard half-breed who spread her legs wide enough to climb rank and title.
No one really knew the truth. Not besides me and the general who viciously assaulted me but told every eager ear at the card tables how the king’s beloved daughter had offered her virtue on a fucking platter in exchange for his military tutelage.
I’d almost unloaded every ounce of that on Jasper.
Would I have told him too that I used to blame him for what happened?
That maybe, deep down, I still blamed him, even though I knew it held no grounds anymore.
That little voice was just fucking hard to argue against. The wicked one that told me if Kieran hadn’t left, I never would have landed in the sights of a predator.
The same voice telling me I never would have pursued a line of work like that—been so desperate to get away from the fortress—if he had still been around.
Even now, knowing he hadn’t left of his own accord, I couldn’t shake the association.
Maybe most foolishly of all was how I’d believed I could somehow exist in his presence and not have these agonizing memories come back to rear their unwelcome heads.
How I’d thought the bliss of the time I spent in his bed, tangled in his arms, would give way to anything but my heart being decimated all over again.
My head rolled back against the cabinets on a shaky breath that rolled into a sob.
ODESSAN WHORE.
HALF-brEED BASTARD.