Page 47 of Ricochet

She flattened herself against the wall and pushed her dress down her hips, covering it. “Don’t. Don’t fucking touch me,” she whispered on a shaky breath.

“He did this to you?”

“He did everything to me.” Her arms lifted to either side of her face, and she buried her head between them. “Please leave me alone.”

“Tell me the truth. How did you get that chip?”

“I told you the truth. I fucking stole it. Now leave me alone!”

I believed her. Five fucking letters sliced into her back suddenly had me seeing the woman in a different light, and for the first time, I believed she stole that vital information from the man who’d obviously betrayed her.

My throat went dry, my field of vision narrowing with the blackness seeping in from the edges. Slamming the heel of my hand against my skull, I stumbled back, catching myself against the wall, before I strode from her room, closing the door behind me.

From the other side, I heard her quiet sobs, and it occurred to me, even after the kidnapping, chaining her to the bed, threatening to kill her, that was the first time I’d heard the woman cry at all. Real crying, not the fake shit she’d pulled to swindle sympathy from me.

The pain I could hear then was real.

Rubbing the back of my head, I dialed Alec’s cell and made my way to the kitchen, where I rifled through cupboards for whiskey.

No answer.

I hurled the burner phone against the wall, where it crumbled to the floor in small pieces, and pounded my fist into the tiles.

The game was changing before my very eyes and I had no clue what to do next.

A switch had been flipped.

Scars came in different flavors. The selfish variety, like the one on her wrist, spoke of a different kind of struggle. Maybe she had problems, but everyone had problems.

The one on her back was something else entirely.

Every scar told a story, but it was the ones we didn’t want others to see that told a truth. Aubree’s truth had been etched into fine markings on her back, written with the clarity of someone who’d taken his time. Only a sadistic bastard could’ve done something like that.

In it, I saw something I didn’t want to see. Something painful. Broken. Something I hadn’t anticipated uncloaking when I’d lifted her dress. Something that no longer made her my toy. I saw Aubree Culling as a human being. A scarred, ravaged human being who probably needed more than what I’d offered her in silence when I walked out the door.

My stomach twisting in knots, I rifled through cupboards. Where the fuck was my whiskey?

In one blink, Aubree had turned from a vector for revenge, an object of hate, to a curiosity. What had she done to deserve the wrath of an evil man? No matter how much I tried to rearrange the variables in my head, the answer to that question made her proportionately good. The opposite of Michael Culling.

Three years. For three years, I’d watched her on TV, as I’d followed the Cullings from one event to the next, plotting, building my rationale for committing the ultimate act of revenge. In that time, how had I managed to overlook a very obvious truth? Aubree was a victim, too.

Not a monster. Not some Stepford bitch. A victim.

No. The label didn’t sound right inside my head.

I found the fifth of whiskey, twisted the cap off, and pounded a double to straighten the words clanging against my skull. Aubree Culling and victim didn’t belong in the same sentence, any more than Michael Culling and saint gelled together. Yet, I’d witnessed that fact, seen firsthand how wrong I’d been. How could I kill a woman who’d clearly been abused? How could I inflict my pain and suffering on her, when she’d bled from similar wounds and carried as many scars?

With every argument, the visual of WHORE flashed through my head and smashed each pathetic excuse into a million pieces of bullshit.

Maybe she’d asked for it.

Bullshit.

Maybe she’d lied to my face, by admitting that he’d been the one to inflict that kind of torment.

Bullshit.

I didn’t have to be a therapist to see the shame in her eyes. The hate and humiliation. The human being buried beneath some fucking twisted veneer, upon which, I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface.