“Come on, my dear,” Grayson urges. “Let’s fix you up.”
He supports me into Cain’s office and helps me sit down on the black leather couch. My eyes move around the room, like it’s the first time I’ve ever been in here. There’s a second exit door, just like in my dad’s office. I guess all these men have a lot in common.
Grayson brings over the first aid kit and takes out a needle and thread to stitch me up.
Once it’s ready, he disinfects his hands and the skin around the wound.
“Lean forward,” he says, guiding me slightly so I don’t strain. “This is going to sting.”
I shake my head and brace myself.
He presses gauze against my back to stop the bleeding, then adjusts his grip and starts stitching. I suck in air through clenched teeth, trying to remain sane and still.
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to be as gentle as I can,” he explains.
“It’s okay,” I breathe shakily.
I still can’t believe what that bastard did to me.
He turned me into fucking merchandise, a possession he could cash in on whenever it suited him. A thing with a price tag, prepped and packaged for sale long before I even understood what was being taken from me.
I was nothing but a walking transaction, a body prepped for whoever could pay enough.
He pierced my skin without hesitation, jammed a tracker in like he was branding cattle.
He raised me for profit, not love, and that fucking bastard smiled through every second of it. Every time I clawed for his attention, every night I bit down on my pillow so my sobbing wouldn’t leak through the walls and earn me another lecture about being dramatic. Every time I begged like a dog for a single glance, for one shred of acknowledgment, he watched me do it and let me bleed for it.
He trained me to want him, to need approval that never came, to crawl for scraps he enjoyed withholding. He ignored my pain, and my spineless bitch of a mother did whatever he told her, like she didn’t even have a mind of her own. Or she did—and that makes her worse than him.
If there’s a hell, I hope he ends up in the deepest fucking part of it, begging for mercy he’ll never fucking get.
“Are you alright, Miss Calvano?”
“I hate him, Grayson,” I hiss, voice low and scornful. The tears are there, but I won’t give them the satisfaction. “I used to think I understood hate, but I didn’t, after all. What I feel now is poison.”
His hand touches my shoulder softly, contrasting the storm inside me. “Maybe it’s for the best.” I turn to him, eyes burning. “It’ll make it easier for you to accept what Adam’s going to do.”
I grit my teeth. “Does it make me a bad person if I want him dead?”
“No,” he says without hesitating. “It makes you someone who’s been through too much and finally stopped pretending it’s okay.”
I blink once, trying to swallow what he just said.
Two weeks. That’s all it took for him to treat me with more decency than my father managed in a lifetime.
“Do you have children, Grayson?”
He looks down at the couch. “Not exactly how you’re probably thinking. But yeah. These boys are mine. They all camefrom the only woman I ever loved.” He lets out a short, bitter laugh. “Maybe not all of them carry my blood, but that doesn’t change a thing.”
He raises his grassy eyes and looks at me over his glasses. “Some things just are, whether they make sense or not.”
I let out a quiet chuckle. “They’re so lucky to have you.”
“So were your parents,” he says gently.
My eyes snap back to him.
He wraps my hand in his, holding it like something fragile that still deserves to be held. “You’re a good woman, Isabella. Stronger than most. Kinder than you should be after everything. They should’ve seen that. They should’ve protected it.”
