And even now, even while my heart dissolved into a pile of worthless acid, I still wanted her. My cock still throbbed for her. My body still tormented me until the end.
Bowing my head, I braced myself for her hatred.
I cowered for the curses I deserved.
I would do whatever she asked. I would free her. Love her. Worship her until I could make this right.
But...in that never-ending moment full of wretchedness and wrongness, she just gave me the tiniest of shrugs.
A shrug with glossy eyes and lips that quirked into a watery half-smile.
A shrug that somehow granted understanding. That wobbled with forgiveness. That miraculously accepted that I’d hurt her even when I didn’t want to. That I’d fucked her against her control.
A shrug that said...it’s okay.
And that fucking shrug broke me into smithereens.
I curled into myself.
I hugged the body that’d forsaken me.
I fell forward over a cock that still tried to control me.
And I screamed.
I screamed for help.
For salvation.
For deliverance from this never-ending nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WOULD never be confessed to anyone.
No matter if I managed to get home.
No matter how hot these secrets burned.
No matter how good it would feel to hug my mother and brother and tell them what I’d endured.
No matter if I climbed back to my life, my friends, my career...I would never utter a single word of what happened between Kas and me in that library.
Not because he’d raped me while trapped in a nightmare of his past.
Not because I knew now what it was like to have every inch of my power stripped away by a man so much larger and stronger than myself. And not because I’d left the kitchen, after doing his bidding and cooking him dinner no less, merely to find myself on my back with him rutting between my legs.
No.
None of those facts ensured this night would be swallowed until I died.
It would remain my biggest secret, not because of what he did...but because of what I did in return.
I didn’t understand it.
I couldn’t untangle it.
But watching the monster who’d trapped me, chained me...raped me...come apart in violence and grief, switched all my tears from my own pain to his.
I cried for him.
He’d shown me what he’d endured. What his life had been like. What it felt like to be stripped of everything—to be ignored when pleading, to be used when begging, to be unseen even while being so intimately joined.
He’d been nothing to them, just like I’d been nothing to him.
He’d been discarded and scrunched up, thrown away into the dark only to be dragged back out whenever they wanted him. He’d been scarred far, far worse than the wounds on his body. And those sorts of wounds (soul wounds) would never heal. They’d festered too long without company, without help, without compassion. He was a lost cause. He had nowhere else to go and no one in which to turn to.
And that pulverized me.
There was no hope for him.
No chance at happiness when he had no concept of the word.
No ability to be free because his own mind had caged him.
He was a man who’d hit rock bottom and had nothing left.
My tears rolled at the same speed as his, washing away what he’d done, leaving us in unfamiliar, dangerous territory.
I couldn’t look away.
I’d thought my homesickness crippled me but it was nothing compared to his. A homesickness he couldn’t even decipher because he had no home, no family, no one. He only had emptiness...and a mind full of evil.
I didn’t know how much time passed while he attacked the wall. His back bunched and his arms swung and he didn’t stop until blood smeared the shredded wallpaper.
I never looked away.
I let him purge.
I allowed his torment to seep through the carpet and coat me in the misery he drowned in. My pain was nothing compared to his. All my justified curses, threats, and anger didn’t stand a chance because how could I be mad at a creature so despicably distraught? How could I kick him when he was already downtrodden into dirt he couldn’t climb out of?
Maybe, that was stupid.
Perhaps, I’d been in this valley for too long and all rational thinking had fled, but there wasn’t a single part of me that hated him. Not after what he’d done. Not even while my core still throbbed from his rough thrusts.
Right here, right now, this was more than what’d happened between us. This was more than just a moral mistake. This was him breaking...and it overwhelmed me.
He finally stopped punching the mansion that’d kept him trapped, and a bone-deep heaviness settled inside my chest. A heaviness that crushed me with need to be kind instead of angry.
As he spun to look at me with eyes so achingly haunted, a hunger welled inside me to help. A terrible, undeniable desire to take away the shadows inside his soul before they killed him right here in this valley.