The bitter realization of powerlessness.
The loss of autonomy.
The theft of justice.
Timber.
“It will get better.”
Daisy gasped, unsure how long she’d been crying, how long he’d been standing watching.
His voice was stripped of command, stripped of pretense.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, shoulders shaking, chest hitching with swallowed sobs.
A shadow fell across her as he set another towel on the ledge. “Take as long as you need.”
She didn’t look up.
He lingered a moment longer, then moved away.
She watched his reflection in the mirror, his tall, muscular figure wrapped in scars. Water still glistening on his shoulders, sliding in rivulets over the roughened landscape of his back until catching in the towel that hung low on his chiseled hips.
Beneath all that damage was a physically beautiful man. There were lots of beautiful men here tonight. Many of them evil.
He disappeared through a door she hadn’t noticed, tucked between the suite and the bathroom. A light flicked on.
Daisy let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding and sank deeper into the water, letting it close over her shoulders and ears. The bathroom fell silent, and for a brief moment, she shut her eyes.
She didn’t think. Didn’t worry about what happened next or how she would survive. For one precious moment, she allowed herself the simple pleasure of silence when she only needed to breathe.
Chapter Twenty-One
Under The Eyes of Giants
The shower did nothing to clear his head.
Jack stood beneath the scalding spray until his skin flushed red, until steam filled his lungs and heat replaced the bone-deep chill that had settled during his sprint through the rain. But clarity refused to come.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her huddled in that corner, trembling like a wounded animal. And when the water struck his back, he remembered the hideous moments when he’d been that terrified.
Then his memory jumped to the way her breath had caught at the sight of his scars. The scars he’d shown her.
Not by accident.
Not through carelessness.
But also not for any reason he understood.
Nick had inevitably seen what he’d tried to hide as a boy.
Myrtle was the only reason his scars hadn’t healed worse than the mangled wreckage they were. She’d been the one to care for him when his flesh was still raw and ripped open, forcing him to accept that he couldn’t heal on his own.
A handful of doctors had seen his body over the years. But that was before he had the money to hire private practitioners who took orders from him rather than the other way around.
No one else saw him so exposed.
He avoided mirrors, changed in private, kept his back to the wall whenever possible. The scars mapped a history he refused to speak aloud, a story written in raised ridges and cigarette burns that he had spent two decades trying to bury.
