I blink against the dim light. I’m back in my bedroom at the bunker. A thick wool blanket wrapped around me. My head throbs, my ribs scream with every breath, and my throat feels like I swallowed glass.
“What…?”
“Shh.” He lifts a glass of water, carefully placing it in my hand. “Drink.”
My fingers tremble so badly the water sloshes over the rim, but I bring it to my mouth anyway. The cool liquid slides down my throat like a balm, and for a second, the ache dulls.
The memories crash back in a horrifying wave. The hunt. The trap. The brutal, humiliating assault in the dirt. Raze watching.I choke on the water and pull the blanket off, needing to see—needing proof.
My body is a wreck. A canvas of bruises and abrasions. Deep, blooming purples across my ribs, hips, and thighs. Scraped knees. Raw elbows. A constellation of pain painted across every inch of me.
But there’s something wrong.
The dirt is gone. So is the fresh blood in the scratches. My skin is clean, the tang of soap still clinging faintly to it. My hair’s damp at the ends. The dirt under my fingernails, scrubbed away.
He bathed me.
The thought is disorienting. He stripped me, washed me, touched every broken inch of me…and I slept through it. And worse than the horror creeping up my spine is the small, shameful part of me that’s grateful.
“You didn’t have to…” I start.
“Didn’t have to what?” The bite-mark tattoo on his forearm catches the light, a symbol of everything sick and twisted between us.
There’s so much I want to say. So much rage and pain and shame trapped in my chest. But none of it makes it past the lump in my throat.
Instead, all I hear is his voice.
I’ve never cared about anything more in my entire fucking life.
A lie. It has to be.
I look down at the bruises again. At the wreckage he left behind. And the worst part—the part I don’t want to admit—is that I feel a sick kind of pride. These marks are proof. Proof he wanted me enough to do this. Proof he wanted me to stay.
I feel disgusting.
“Priest…what you said, in the car?—”
“I meant it.”
My head snaps up. How could he? How could he say that after everything? After using me like I’m nothing? After hunting me down and violating every part of me in front of his friend?
The contradiction is a physical blow. He’s a monster. A cruel, sadistic monster. And yet…and yet his words…
He reaches out, his fingers hovering over a particularly dark bruise on my thigh, not quite touching. The air crackles between us.
“Raze told me…that a place broke you. A place called?Valcross.”
Every muscle in his body goes rigid. His eyes flash with something—pain? rage? I can’t tell.
“Did he now?”
I push through the fear tightening my chest. “He said I’m the only thing that quiets the noise in your head. That youneedme.”
For a heartbeat he looks away, a flicker of something raw and unguarded on his face before it’s gone, replaced by the cold mask I know so well.
“Raze talks too much.”
He grabs my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes. “Let me make something clear to you, Arlo. What Ineedis to be inside you. To hear you scream my name. To feel your body break against mine. That’s the only thing that matters. That’s the only truth you need to understand.”
