Cam flinched. He said nothing, but the questions dancing in his dark gaze bored holes in the iron curtain shielding my soul.
I pulled my hands from his hair. “You do not want me to talk about this.”
Cam gritted his teeth and sat up. “I meant what I said earlier, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be there for you.”
“Do you think I need that from you?
“Yes.”
“You are arrogant, then.”
“So?”
He was still close enough that I felt the heat radiating from his warm skin, despite the ice packs that had slipped from his battered torso.
I retrieved them for something to do. Wrapped them in the damp towel and set them aside, out of sight, to deal with later. Words I’d never spoken clawed at my insides. My whole life I’d been strong enough to subdue them, but Cam had stripped those weapons from me the moment he’d met my gaze all those weeks ago. “What was your father like, Cam?”
“Strong,” he answered without hesitation. “And stubborn. It got him killed.”
“My father was weak, and he lived until he was seventy-eight.”
Cam shifted again, sitting up against the headboard. He gestured for me to continue.
I mirrored his pose, my gaze returning to the TV so I didn’t have to look at him. “He was a gambler—he lost everything we owned and then, when he had nothing left, he lost me too.”
“Lost you?”
“In an underground casino. Thevorwho ran it offered him the chance to clear his debt if he won the next hand. The price if he did not was me.”
“He let them take you?”
“Of course he did. My father was a chemical salesman with no money or status. The organisation he’d crossed were powerful and dangerous. They took me and I never saw him again.”
“What did they do with you?”
I rose from the bed and searched for the clothes Cam had taken off while I’d slept earlier in the night. His jacket was draped over his folded jeans, cigarettes stuffed in the inside pocket.
He always has what I need. I retrieved them and lit one, ignoring his piercing stare as I returned to the bed and offered it to him.
He plucked it from my fingers and pulled deep on it, then he returned it to my lips.
I took a lungful of my own and gave it back to him. “I do not want to talk about this for long, so I will give you the short version. My father was indebted to a crime syndicate that made their money from trafficking sex workers. They held me for two years before I wasprocured by someone else. I remained in their employment for ten years, and now I am here.”
Cam took another drag from the cigarette and rose from the bed to flick it from the window. As he turned back to me, his broad shoulders blocked the light from the TV, shadowing his face. “You were trafficked by your own father?”
“Indirectly, yes.”
“As a... sex worker?”
“Do you need a cruder definition?”
Cam came back to the bed, rounding it to where I sat, perching on the edge. He didn’t reach for me, but I could tell he wanted to. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“You were a sex worker for twelve years?”
“No. Only the first two, until the organisation was destroyed by another. Their leader saw I had other skills and gave me a different job. I did that for a long time before he set me free.”
