That’s what I thought. “Your husband made you wear it?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes are hyper-focused on my face as she looks for signs of a reaction she isn’t happy with.
“For what reason?”
Her eyes flutter closed, and she releases a slow breath. “He wanted to reshape my body so that he could wrap his hands around my waist until they touched. It also had the added benefit of reducing the amount of food I could tolerate.”
A tremor runs down my spine, and I force myself to relax my grip around her. This is so much worse than anything I imagined. I’d thought her food intake was because of a perceived flaw he worked into her psyche. Instead, he effectively gave her a non-surgical gastric band.
She keeps her eyes closed but continues to explain. “It took a few months of him tightening it to get my body to submit to his desired shape. He got it into its final position a few days before I ran. He said I’d need to wear it continuously for weeks to get my body to hold its shape.” I’m unable to suppress a rumble in my chest, making Cleo’s eyes fly open. “When I ran, I discovered he had padlocked the straps into place. I had to be cut out of it.”
I am going to murder him, and it’s not an empty threat. I know a hundred ways to kill a man slowly, and I have the perfect combination in mind for this poor excuse of a human being. My new focus isn’t on learning who Cleo is, because a name is just a set of letters pushed together. Her soul, her light—despite the darkness she’s endured—is everything I need to know and understand about her. But him? I need a name, because his days are numbered.
“Why keep it?” I wonder.
“It’s a reminder of why I keep running. It’s what awaits me if I ever give up—if he ever catches me. When the exhaustion sinks into your bones so deep that you’d give anything to stop being hunted, even give in to the monster nipping at your heels,you need a reminder. It’s a representation of my fate. The control, the devastation, the inadequacy, knowing nothing I do or say will ever be enough. It’s proof that for some people, loving them harder won’t save you—it just gives them deeper access to your soul.”
My heart breaks a little that she, like many domestic violence survivors, believed that loving someone harder would stop the pain. “What if you could stop running?” I ask.
She swallows and dips her head. “I can’t. It’s too dangerous, Fox. The potential pain I would bring to anyone helping to shield me—I can’t do that.”
My fingers wrap around her throat, and I gently tip her chin up so she can stop avoiding my gaze. “Perhaps I am strong enough to battle your demons.”
She squeezes her eyes closed. “I wish I could believe that, Fox, but I’m not worth the risk.”
“Isn’t that my decision?”
“No, it’s mine. The pain was so deep, I couldn’t breathe, Fox. When I ran, I was a shell of myself. All I had left were my broken pieces. The good parts of me were already overwritten by his control.”
“Can you breathe now?”
Her gaze drops to my lips, and a tremor runs through her body. “Yes,” she whispers, like something is going to steal her oxygen if it overhears her declaration. “But I can’t fall again.”
“I will catch you.”
“I don’t want to lose myself.”
“You won’t.”
I can see her teetering on the edge of wanting what I’m offering. To fall is a surrender of control.
“I’m scared, Fox.”
“I know, and I’m telling you I am here to protect you.”
“Not of him. Of us. I’ve known you less than a week, andI’m already in deeper than I was with the man I married. That makes me sound a little crazy.”
“Only if it’s not reciprocated.”
Her eyes flare with hope, and something curls tight around my heart as I will her to take that leap with me. “Is it?” she whispers.
“Yes, firecracker, it most definitely is.”
She blinks and a tear escapes down her left cheek. My hands clasp around her tighter as I tread water to keep us both afloat. It’s an apt metaphor, because I will take the burden of her demons and be enough to hold us both up. I have three weeks to prove to her that she belongs in my arms, and that isn’t achieved by pussyfooting around what makes her quake. It’s by making her grasp her nightmares and strangle them until they submit.
First on the agenda—make sure she can shoot straight. Then the only thing she needs to be scared of is me owning her pleasure, because I’m about to turn her inside out and destroy any notion that she is fucking broken.
