She ignored me, but by the way her feet and thighs were straining, I knew she was getting close to cutting up the soles of her feet, if she hadn’t already.
No matter.
I set the booze on the table and walked over to the sink, filling each bucket with water before returning to her.
I grabbed the underside of her chair right between her knees and yanked it up, easily sliding the bloody ice cubes away from under her feet before replacing them with the buckets.
She didn’t say a word as I set her back down, submerging her feet into the freezing water, her entire body breaking out in another wave of goosebumps as the water turned pink. The tacks had cut her, decently enough too.
I grabbed my chair from the corner and set it in front of her, sitting down, crossing my ankle over my knee and folding my hands over my lap. Waiting.
She only glared, her jaw working tightly, that bruise screaming at me.
It wasn’t a self-defense class.
Was precious Steven taking his anger out on her?
Was she that much of an idiot that she stayed despite that?
No, I wouldn’t accept that. I read her books. I understood the way she was staring at me now. She wouldn’t stay with him if he was beating her, it had to be something else. I was wrong. I had to be.
Her throat bobbed and I heard the ice shift. She was trying tomove her toes.
“If I lose my feet, it’ll be pretty damming evidence,” she finally said.
I wouldn’t let it get that far.
Her eyes narrowed to slits before she sat back in her chair and looked towards the wall. Was she going to try and out silence me? Good luck.
Minutes passed.
She didn’t shift in the slightest. The only indication that she was in pain was the sweat at her brow and the gentle trembling in her shoulders.
She was newly 23, had three names, parents in Denver who she only ever spoke to every once in a while, had a dog she loved, a shitty boyfriend, and she loved to read and write about serial killers falling in love.
The first day I made contact with her in that club, watching her leave, I saw a weakness I thought to be pathetic. She was useless to me then, but the woman sitting before me was not that girl. The woman I had seen running, writing, surviving, this wasn’t her.
Jack made jokes sometimes about Rae’s masks. The girl she was at parties, in the bedroom, around Zo or Viv, was not who she actually was. She was still a mystery to him, even to this day, which is what drove him to her in the first place.
Olivia wasn’t a mystery to me. She was a means to an end. I didn’t care about the names or the reasons she ran from home or the reasons she remained with the dick who put her here. I only cared about the money.
But those eyes…
She finally turned back to me, her eyes finding mine, as icy as the water numbing her feet.
I watched her carefully. She was saying so much with those eyes. There was so much hatred and disdain. So much rage. Iwondered if that was real or just a show.
A show for me.
I angled my head to one side, letting her see nothing. We were trained from day one to keep our expressions cold and unreadable. It’s what made us the most dangerous. If our enemies couldn’t read what we were going to do, how we felt, they couldn’t hurt us.
But Olivia was a writer. She was a million different people all at once. Similar to Rae, I suppose, only she had never been forced to act out her characters until now.
Was what I was reading really what she felt or was she playing a part?
“Why haven’t you tried screaming?” I finally asked. “They all scream.”
She swallowed, working her jaw, stretching her neck. “There’s n-no—” She stretched her neck again, her hair falling in damp strings around her face as she tried to focus.
