Chapter 4
Aurora
Two and a half months ago
The wind blew dry leaves along the clinic’s paths. Sitting on a bench in the park, I pulled my cardigan tighter, staring blankly at the gray tree trunks. The doctors said fresh air was good for my mental health, but all I wanted was to hide in my windowless room.
The crunch of gravel caused me to flinch, then I froze as a brown-haired boy with a tense face approached my bench. It wasn’t his features that made my heart stop and plummet into my stomach.
He slowly extended his hand to me. Mirrored Oakley sunglasses. The kind the man in the mask had worn over his balaclava. The ones that had hid my captor’s eyes.
The air rushed out of my lungs with a hiss. I pressed into the bench as an icy, paralyzing horror—a horror I knew all too well—spread through my veins.
“Hi, Aurora. Do you recognize these?” His voice faltered, but he quickly composed himself.
“Who … who are you?” I whispered, barely able to speak.
He sat at the other end of the bench, and his darkened eyes never left me. There was something broken in his gaze.
“My name is Zack. Zack Thornton.” His last name made me nauseous. My tormentor. The maniac from the cabin. “That bastard, Alistair …, he was my father.”
I shot to my feet, ready to run, to scream, to call the clinic security, but his next words pinned me in place.
“Forgive me, Aurora. Forgive me if I was rough with you in the woods, if I scared you. I just wanted to stop that nightmare.”
My world spun. My savior? Is the cruel, dominant monster who forced me to take his cock in my mouth and wrapped a chain around my neck this guy?
“You … you came there—” I gasped, trying to reconcile the image of the colossal Prince Harming in the white-and-gold mask with this young nervous boy.
“I found out he was keeping you there.” Zack swallowed, dropping his gaze to the mirrored sunglasses in his hands. “I had to stop him. I had to kill my own father to make him stop hurting you.”
He killed his own father. For me. The thought struck my raw nerves. Beneath his apologetic, almost disappointing tone, I suddenly saw it—that terrifying dark shadow of my Prince Harming. The shadow of the man who coldly pulled the trigger and took me for himself.
Instead of disgust, I felt it: that same sense of safety. No one in this world—not my family, not these doctors with their pills—had done for me what he had.
“Why did you come here?” My voice grew quieter as I stood there trembling.
“I can’t stop thinking about you since that night.” He leaned forward, his voice growing more insistent. “I want to come to you. Please let me visit you here. Secretly. No one should know who I am or that we’re connected. Your parents probably wouldn’t understand.”
My mind screamed that this was madness. That he was the son of that psychopath. That he was broken and dangerous.
But as I looked at those mirrored sunglasses, my body treacherously responded with phantom heat and the phantom weight of a chain around my throat.
“Okay,” I breathed out, surrendering.