CHAPTER ELEVEN

Screaming, Ellie bolted upright, her arms swinging out in front of her, her legs kicking furiously. It took her a moment to realize there was no immediate threat, that she was, in fact, still on Dirty’s couch, covered with an old black comforter, wearing the same sweats and tee she’d fallen asleep in.

It took her another second to realize that it hadn’t been her screaming but…Dirty?

Without thinking, just panicking, she scrambled out of bed, tripping over the entanglement of covers as she tried to run from the living room to the hallway, toward Dirty’s bedroom where those god-awful sounds of agony were coming from.

Grabbing the doorknob, she threw open the door and rushed inside and…froze.

Dirty was naked, curled up on his side, gripping his shredded pillow with one hand and the other was…

Oh my God.

Tears were streaming down his cheeks while he periodically cried out in loud gasping sobs.

“Please,” he begged, his voice hoarse and strained, sounding more like a little boy than a grown man. “Please don’t hurt me…please…please, Mommy.”

Mommy?

But he’d seen her, his eyes had opened and zeroed in on her, and now he was sitting up in bed, looking straight at her.

“You fuckin’ bitch,” he seethed. “You disgustin’ fuckin’ bitch!”

In a flash, he was out of bed and grabbing the gun on his nightstand. Ellie cried out as she spun around, her mind spinning. Where did she go? Right? Back into the living room or left, out his door and down the stairs and into the street? She didn’t know, all she knew was she had to get away from him. In the midst of her panic she made a split-second decision to turn left, deciding to take her chances with the street.

She had her hand nearly on the doorknob when she was slammed into from behind and thrown face first up against the door. The impact caused her surfacing scream to lodge in her throat.

“I dream about hurtin’ you,” he growled, pressing his face into her hair. “Hurtin’ you the way you did me. Doin’ all that dirty shit you did, not carin’ that I was screamin’, beggin’ you to stop.”

Ellie’s breath caught. He was still dreaming or…he was caught up in whatever he’d been dreaming about, hadn’t yet realized he’d woken, or was too entangled in the memories of his pain.

That’s when she felt it, the protruding hardness pressing painfully against her backside and the cool metal of the gun barrel being jammed against the side of her neck.

“I want you to scream for me,” he hissed. “The way you used to make me scream for you.”

Oh God, oh God, he was going to rape her. This couldn’t be happening; how could this be happening to her?

“N-n-no,” she choked out. “D-d-dirty, please, you’re dreaming.”

Her sweatpants were wrenched down and—

She found her voice and screamed at the top of her lungs, desperately trying to turn her body, no longer caring that there was a gun pressed to her throat, only caring that she was seconds away from being nearly raped again and she was not going to let that happen. At the very least, she was going to do everything she could to not let that happen.

The next thing she knew Dirty’s weight was gone and she spun around to find he’d backed several feet away from her. He was shaking violently, his eyes wide, focused solely on the gun in his hands.

Trembling, she reached behind her, trying to find the doorknob, when he glanced up and caught her gaze. She froze, waiting for it, waiting for him to come at her again but he did nothing, said nothing, just stood there looking horrified and terrified and pained and sad and, oh God, so utterly broken.

The gun fell from his hands and dropped to the floor with a loud thud. Ellie used that moment to pull up her pants, yank open the door, and burst into the hallway. She was only five steps into her mad dash to safety when she heard a slapping thud and a superseding grunt of pain. She faltered, paused, and then decided to continue when she heard another noise, this one worse than before, and she couldn’t stop herself from turning.

Dirty had fallen to his knees, his gun in his hand, the barrel pressed up against the bottom of his chin while he slammed his face forward and into the wall. Ellie winced as the meaty thud radiated out of the apartment and into the hall. Blood ran down the side of his face and yet he didn’t let up; he continued to smash his face into the wall over and over again.

Ellie’s skin began to crawl as nausea settled low in her gut. It made sense now; Dirty made sense. Dirty wasn’t the biker pig she’d remembered him to be; in fact, she was pretty sure he wasn’t a pig at all, but instead a damaged, deranged shell of a man more than likely with a past worthy of a Lifetime movie. She’d taken enough psychology classes and had interned at women and children’s shelters to know a history of abuse when she saw it.

Please don’t hurt me…please…please, Mommy.

He’d been crying out in pain yet simultaneously jerking off, screaming and begging for whatever demons his memory was forcing him to relive, to stop…

Bile rose in her throat. Her vision grew fuzzy and her body heavy.

“Oh God,” she breathed, reaching out for the wall, suddenly no longer able to bear her own weight.

His mother. His mother had hurt him. His own…mother.

Her vision swimming with unshed tears, she backtracked her steps into the apartment and shut the door softly behind her.

Blood dripping down his face, he warily watched her approach him, his body suddenly rigid. She made sure to keep her distance for both his sake and her own, and took a seat several feet away from him but still close enough that she was able to extend her arm and offer him her hand.

He stared at her hand, unblinking, unmoving, until eventually the hand holding the gun to his jaw slowly lowered.

“Don’t touch me,” he said, his voice strained.

Ellie immediately retracted her hand and placed it in her lap. Dirty turned away from her, but not before she saw the tears that had slipped from his eyes, joining and blending with the rivulets of blood still streaming down his cheeks. Her eyes traveled from his face to his bare chest where she couldn’t help but stare, horrified by what she found. And then lower, to his groin and his thighs and, oh my God, he was covered, literally covered in scars.

He’d been burned repeatedly. There were small circular burns as well as larger rectangular ones scattered in between long thin slashes, all spaced evenly apart, some running diagonal, some horizontal, all apparently methodically administered.

Releasing a deep breath, she let her head fall back against the wall.

It was so pitiful and yet rage-inducing. How could anyone hurt an innocent child? How could a mother hurt her child?

She didn’t feel safe by any means, but as strange as it was, she felt safer with Dirty than she did knowing that, if she were anywhere else, Daniel could get to her.

Was that weird?

Maybe. But she was too damn exhausted, both physically and emotionally, to really give a damn.

• • •

“You need stitches,” Ellie said, both looking and sounding irritated.

From his seat on the windowsill, Dirty turned to glare at her. “I’m fine,” he muttered and took another drag off his cigarette. He didn’t have a clue why she’d hadn’t continued her screaming run for safety but had instead come back inside and taken a seat beside him, had even gone so far as to offer him comfort.

What the fuck?

He’d been seconds away from raping and killing her and she’d offered him comfort?

Jesus, God only fucking knew what she’d heard come out of his mouth during his nightmare. He could only imagine.

Fuck, he hadn’t had a nightmare in so fucking long. Years. It was all this shit with Ellie, seeing her being attacked, her touching him, seeing her naked.

Then watching her cry while she asked to stay with him. With him? No one needed him. No one had ever once, not fucking once, needed him for anything. But she’d needed him.

And then, hearing her laugh, watching her laugh, knowing that he had made her laugh despite what she was going through, the fear, the unknown. He, a fucking worthless, piece-of-shit scumbag, had made her laugh.

He was so incredibly fucked-up. His thoughts were going a mile a minute, veering off in directions he wasn’t familiar with, new territory, dark and confusing roads lined with guilt and a new sort of pain, one he wasn’t handling well, one he didn’t know what to do with or how to push away or relieve it, because, fuck, nothing was working.

Fucking the whore hadn’t worked, jerking off thinking of Ellie hadn’t worked, no, nothing had worked. He was still thinking about Ellie, about her body, about her laughter, and he was feeling guilty, guilty about the way he’d been handling his thoughts, guilty for the way he’d been living his life because, FUCK, who was he to save a girl from the same fate he’d handed to too many women to count. WHO THE MOTHERFUCK WAS HE?

He was nothing. He was shit. He was a damaged, deranged, sick motherfucker who deserved to be put the fuck down. He shouldn’t have lived for as long as he had; he didn’t deserve to share the same earth with people like Ellie, people who laughed over burnt popcorn even after they’d been stripped of their dignity.

And at the same time, he hated her for all of it. For making these fucking emotions surface, slap him in the face and fuck up everything he’d worked so hard to repress the best he could.

No, it wasn’t a life he’d recommend to anyone, but it was how he’d survived this long and now…

After snapping the fuck out of it, realizing he’d been about to rape her, probably kill her, he knew he didn’t deserve another second of air. Because if she knew, if she fucking knew the man she’d tried to comfort, even after what he’d done to her, that he was no better than the man he’d saved her from, she’d run away screaming and she wouldn’t come back. She wouldn’t laugh over burnt popcorn, she wouldn’t care that he had a giant gash on his forehead, she wouldn’t give two fucks if he lived or died.

WHY THE FUCK DID HE CARE IF SHE CARED?

If he had one iota of intelligence, he would get Ellie the fuck out of his apartment before she fucked him up even more and he ended up doing something he absolutely did not want to do to her, because he needed a fucking place to put all the bullshit she was stirring up inside him.

“Dirty,” Ellie said. “You are bleeding all over the place. If you won’t go to the hospital, at least let me help you stop the bleeding.”

He glanced up from his smoke and found her standing way too close to him.

“Back up,” he growled. “Back the fuck up right now.”

He watched, stunned, as fear momentarily twisted her features, but was immediately replaced by determination.

“Dirty,” she said quietly. “I just want to help you.”

He nearly choked on his own tongue. Help him? Now that was motherfucking priceless. No one could help him. And he was starting to feel like he could no longer help himself.

“You need to wash your face,” she continued. “You’re…um…you need to…clean the area around the wound.”

“I’m dirty,” he said flatly. “You can say it. It ain’t as if I don’t know.”

Her big blue eyes softened. “You’re dirty,” she said softly. “And you’re hurt, meaning you can get an infection.”

He stared at her, at her long, tight black curls, her caramel skin, bruised but still smooth and clear, her big blue eyes ringed with heavy dark lashes, her full lips.

She was so different than what he was used to. She was like his brothers’ old ladies—clean, good women. Women who should never be left alone with a man like him; a man who could, who most likely would, hurt them.

He continued to stare at her, and then suddenly he found himself thinking about fucking her, her thighs spread wide open, watching himself disappear inside of her, watching her belly quiver and her breasts bounce with the force of his movements, and then lastly, looking up into those big blue eyes.

His stomach rolled and acid shot up into his throat.

“Move,” he gritted out, sliding off the windowsill, forcing Ellie to back up or get run over by him.

“Dirty,” she called after him. “You really need to clean your—”

“I’m gonna take a fuckin’ shower!” he yelled as he rounded the corner, hurried down the hall, and all but fell inside the bathroom in his mad dash to escape the fucking nagging. Is this how women were? He wouldn’t know; he hadn’t lived with a woman, hadn’t truly been alone with a woman since he’d been a child.

He needed away from her, away from all of it, from everything she represented, but most of all he needed away from those…those goddamn motherfucking eyes of hers.

Gripping the sides of the sink, Dirty bent down and, in an attempt not to throw up, tried to slow his breathing. Once his heart rate had slowed, he lifted his head and found himself staring back at him. He gingerly touched the wound on his forehead.

Fuck. She was right. He probably did need stitches. Fuck it, he’d sew it up himself; he’d done it before.

But first he was going to have to wash the dried blood from his face. Actually, since he’d been naked, he was covered from head to toe in dried blood. He might not be a big fan of hygiene but that didn’t mean he wanted to walk around looking like he’d just stepped off the set of a B-rated horror film.

He glanced over at the shower and then back at himself. Fuck it, it was just a shower. He took Mexican showers all the time. Water, some soap, get all the important areas.

But when he turned on the water and stepped inside the tub, why did it feel like it was so much more than just a shower?