“Some of it.”
His gray-eyed gaze captured mine, and the fear swimming in them was unprecedented. “Do you hate me?”
I hated everything that had happened in that room. Everything that had ever taken place at the Savage Spectacle. Everyone who’d ever worn the uniform or handed over a credit card. But Gallagher?
“No.” The truth was there, sitting right on the surface of our shared trauma. “You had no choice. The crime is theirs.” But I didn’t know how to look at him anymore. I didn’t know how to be near him.
“Indeed. Release me from my promise and let me rend limbs from the people who would send you on such an engagement, as well as any man who would pay to see you abused in such a manner.”
“Gallagher...”
His brow furrowed and his thick fists tensed with pent-up wrath. “Delilah. I cannot stand by and watch while you suffer.” Outrage burned deep in his eyes. “Let me do what I was born to do.”
Every muscle in his body strained against the promise he’d made me. He actually shook with rage, but beneath that was something even more visceral. Some combination of intense pain, profound affection and acute distress. And that’s when I finally understood.
It wasn’t just that the promise I’d demanded from him was in direct opposition to his oath to protect me. It was that with or without his oath, beyond the respect he had for my calling, he cared about me as a person. Probably in some honorablefear deargmanner that defied human understanding and vocabulary.
And watching me suffer—becoming a part of my suffering—was killing him.
If he knew I’d been sent on another engagement of a similar nature...
Oh, shit.
Suddenly the memory was there, disinterred by digging through my own psyche.
I’d realized that breaking his oath to me to keep a lesser promise was literally killing him. That’s why I’d had my own memory wiped.
I hadn’t been trying to forget what Gallagher and I were forced to do. I’d been trying to forget theotherengagement, because if I didn’t know about it, he wouldn’t know. And if he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have to choose between slaughtering everyone involved—and getting himself killed in the process—or dying from breaching his own oath to do that very thing.
“Soon,” I promised. “Soon. We’ll get our chance to escape, and you’ll be free to tear the entire world in two, if that’s what it takes to get us all out of here. But that time hasn’t come yet.” And it couldn’t, at least until I knew about the baby. If it was Gallagher’s, he would never have to know about that other engagement.
“The time for patience has passed. Vandekamp doesn’t deserve to live, much less profit from what he’s doing to you. To all of us.”
“You won’t have to wait much longer. You have my word. Okay?”
Gallagher nodded reluctantly. “Until then, I will sate my thirst for blood on the memory of past vengeance and the promise of more to come.”
Delilah
Pagano came for me the next morning, before my breakfast arrived. Before the sun had truly topped the horizon. He led me to the basement lab, where the elevator doors slid open to reveal Tabitha Vandekamp standing next to a doctor in a white lab coat.
The sight of her there, next to the padded table already prepared for me, struck me with a startling sense of déjà vu.
We’ve been here before. Together.Was that during my initial pregnancy test?
“Delilah,” the doctor said by way of a greeting. “Lie down.”
As I settled onto the table, he pulled a wheeled tray of instruments closer, then rolled an ultrasound machine toward the head of the table. He didn’t look me in the eye or tell me what he was doing, but not because he was scared. In fact, he didn’t seem nervous at all. Somehow, the Vandekamps had actually managed to keep his colleague’s condition from him.
Tabitha rounded the table to stand on my other side, where she had a much better view of the machinery than I had.
“Because she’s not yet in her second trimester, it’s too early to safely use amniocentesis, so we’re going to try chorionic villus sampling instead,” Dr. Grantham said to Tabitha, without even glancing at me. “Rather than sampling the amniotic fluid, which isn’t present in large amounts at this stage, we’re going to take a sample of the placenta.”
“Is that safe for the baby?” Tabitha asked, while I tried to swallow my rage over the fact that neither of them seemed to think I belonged in the discussion about what was about to happen to my body.
“There are risks with CVS, but they’re much fewer than with amniocentesis.” Dr. Grantham pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then ducked to take something from beneath the table.
Fear obliterated all logic when I saw the padded restraint, and when he took my arm, I jerked it free. “That won’t be necessary, Doctor.”
