I closed my eyes tight against the pain of that pet name and took a deep breath before I said, “Yeah?”
He tugged at my hand gently so I swirled to face him. His face was heartbreakingly beautiful, stern features softened by pain and concern, his eyes so green they glowed against his golden tan, his thick brown lashes. I blinked hard then looked away, angry with myself for being so easily bedazzled by him. Firm fingers took my chin in their grip, tipping my head back slightly so I was forced to look up into his face. His gaze swept over every corner of my expression, detailing every scar, every angle, plane, and curve of my features. I wondered if he was matching reality to memory, if I looked different than I had three years ago. There was a scar on my left cheekbone, just under my eye where one of Cricket’s rings had broken the skin, and another on the lower right corner of my bottom lip where my tooth had cut through the flesh when I’d fallen to the ground during one of his rages. One hand moved to cradle my left cheek, his thumb swiping over the slightly scar, while the other thumb dragged over my mouth, pulling it open into a pout.
Tears pricked my eyes even though I tried to steady myself with short, shallow breaths. “Stop,” I breathed.
He ignored me, his features metal hard and melded into shape with the heat of his rage and the cold of his pain. He leaned down into my face and spoke softly into my open mouth, hoping to feed me the words in a way I could easily digest.
“I want to apologize, but how can I when there are no words to erase what was done to you? You know, I’m a man of action, not words, Rosie, and fuck me, if I could, I would bring that bastard back to life and write a poem for you on his body with my fists and his blood. And you know, I’m not religious, because fuck that, but for you, I’d pay penance every day with a flogging, write lines until my fingers were numb and broken, self-flagellate until I was mutilated, if it meant taking this pain, this memory and especially, my part in it, away from you.”
I shuddered under his hands, sucked in a breath so big it ached in my lungs, and then let it out low and slow. I needed the air to prop me up, to inflate my shape for just a while longer so I didn’t dissolve into a puddle of tears right there on the floor.
“You’re such a fuckin’ martyr,” I told him, aiming for sassy but falling uncharacteristically short. “This isn’t your fault.”
His hand tightened briefly on my face, but I didn’t flinch because if I knew only one thing in my life, it was that I was safe with Danner.
“I left,” he muttered.
“You did,” I agreed, then because I wasn’t the kind of girl to hold back, I added, “It hurt like a motherfucker.”
His eyes flared. “Same for me.”
“Your choice, so I got no sympathy for you there. That said, don’t be a fuckin’ idiot and assume that your desertion led me to staying with a madman for longer than I should’ve. You didn’t use to be so full of yourself.”
“Rosie—” he started, but I’d found a flicker of fire in my belly and I latched on to it.
I shoved him away and backed up a few paces. “Stop calling me that, Danner. I’m not your Rosie anymore. My life doesn’t have anything to do with you. I fucked up, I killed Cricket, I was the fuckin’ cliché that let her man beat her because my head wasn’t right. Not you. Not my dad like that Bitch Cop implied. Me. Thanks for coming for me, thanks for gettin’ me out of that fuckin’ box. If you need to pay penance, there, you did it. Now, we can be done. Again.”
“Fuck that,” Danner snarled, the tendons in his forearms clenching in a way that I noticed was delicious even through my increasing delirium. “You think that’s the end, you haven’t grown up as much as I would’ve thought in the last three years.”
“Fuck you,” I shouted out at him with bared teeth. “You don’t know shit!”
Infuriatingly, he just raised an eyebrow and crossed his corded arms across his chest. “I’m the one just got you out of this shit, Harleigh Rose, you think I don’t know shit?”
“This bullshit doesn’t define my life,” I yelled at him, furious at the idea.
Too furious to notice the way his lips twitched with satisfaction, to wonder why he was antagonizing me after what I’d just been through.
Too furious to realize that he was giving me strength in the only way I knew how to take it—furiously—so that I could go out into that main room and face my family with strength the way I wanted to but was just seconds ago, incapable of doing.