I awoke from the deepest sleep I’d ever experienced. I had drifted down so low, I had to will my consciousness upward, away from the dark nothingness that had clung to my mind and held me down in the deepest recesses of slumber. Up, and then up a little more. It was exhausting, so much so that I almost gave up and let it pull me back all the distance I’d come.

Just as I was about to surrender, the world around me brightened at the edges. The feel of something firm but smooth beneath me. The quiet inhale and exhale of someone else’s breath. And then pain. It went off like a camera’s flash and shot me above the surface.

The men. My hell. It all came pouring over me as the darkness receded, further and further away by the second. No, don’t leave. I wanted to reach for it, to follow it down, but it was too late.

I didn’t open my eyes. Maybe he didn’t know I was awake yet. A few more seconds, and it wouldn’t matter. He would take what he wanted. I’d long since accepted it. There was no sense in fighting it. I couldn’t fight it. But I could have these few seconds. They were mine. At first, I’d used them to dream, to imagine an escape, like the blissful nothingness death, could bring. But it never came, and even the dream of it had become a torment. So no more dreams. No, these few seconds weren’t for dreams anymore. They were just seconds. Precious seconds before the torment began anew.

But seconds passed, and then a minute. Two minutes. Something was wrong. Different. He had to know I was awake. Why was he letting me lie here in bed?

A bed. No cold, stone floor beneath me. I was in a real bed.

Derek’s image flashed behind my eyes. Not an image I’d called up before. This was different. He was angry. No, not just angry. Crazed with fury. His movements were swift and sure as he…

It all came flooding back. Derek was alive. Alive. He was alive, and there in my hell. His fury-filled face had been the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. But I didn’t want him there. It was too late. Far too late. And yet, he’d ignored my protests. Those men—my tormenters, the stranger…my father…they’d all died.

I’d killed the man who I’d called father for twelve years. It hadn’t been because of what he’d said. Not the discovery that he was the one responsible for my hell. He’d aimed a gun at Derek, and I’d had enough. He’d taken everything from me, everything that had made me…me when he’d had me ripped away from Derek to destroy me. He couldn’t have Derek. I wouldn’t let him.

And then Derek had carried me out of hell. Just put me back, my fractured mind had cried. It was still crying. I didn’t want him to see me, not like this, not ever again.

He was here though. The scent of him wafted toward me and I couldn’t stop myself from breathing him in. He was close. So close.

“Open your eyes, Scar,” his deep, sure voice spoke, and my eyelids fluttered open, mindlessly obeying him.

My eyes drank him in greedily, roaming over every inch of his face. I’d thought he was dead, but he was so very alive, so very like the image of him I’d clung to. All of him the same…except for his eyes. They were red-rimmed like he’d been crying, and they seemed to lack the confident light that usually glowed in them. He was hurting. He was hurting because of me, and it made my heart ache because he obviously didn’t realize I wasn’t worth the trouble. If he knew…

I looked away. I couldn’t look at him anymore. There was too much emotion there. Emotion I didn’t deserve.

“Scar, you need pain medicine.”

I glanced back but focused my attention on the glass of water and the pills in his hands. He held the pills to my lips and I opened my mouth, and then I swallowed the water he gave me. And then I did what I knew needed to be done. There was no point in putting it off. I rolled onto my side, facing away from him, “You should go now,” I said in a voice so hoarse it had long ago stopped sounding like my own.

“No fucking way.”

And when he stood up and came around to the other side of the bed, it was impossible to hide the tears streaming down my temple. He sat down on the bed, his back against the headboard and his long legs stretched out in front of him. He didn’t touch me. Of course, he didn’t. How could he possibly want to? I would have escaped my own skin if I’d been able.

“I can’t undo what…happened, but I’m here now Scar. Whatever you need, I’m here.”

He took my hand in his and just held it, his warmth surrounding it. It was the first kind touch I could remember since waking up in hell, so it caught me completely off-guard when deep, wrenching sobs rose up from my chest and wracked my whole body.

He dragged me onto his lap with a strangled noise in his throat, and wrapped me in strong arms I’d thought I would never feel again. He held me as my body spasmed through its grief. He held me so close it was as if he was clinging to me too.

By the time I’d managed to rein it in, his chest was saturated with my tears and the pills he’d given me must have been taking effect. My limbs felt heavier, weights pressing against wounds and dulling the ache. Even my thoughts felt heavy and tangled in my head. I think I fell asleep, but Derek was still holding me when I awoke sometime later.

It was easier to pull myself up as if subconsciously I knew there were no new horrors awaiting me at the surface. It was easier like this, opening my eyes to see the muscular curve of his shoulder and the sinewy muscles of his arm. From this position, I didn’t have to look in his eyes and wonder what it was he saw when he looked at me now. A used slave? A broken girl? He knew what had been done to me.

The time since he’d appeared outside my cell had come back to me in better clarity, and I could see him in that examination room, seeing the proof on every part of me. He didn’t know everything though. How could he possibly guess how my vile body had turned against me? He could never know. It would be better to return to that hell than for him to see the whore I’d become.

“You’re due for more pills,” he said.

I’d slept for four hours? He’d sat here and let me sleep all that time? I moved to slide off his lap, but his arms tightened to hold me here. I didn’t fight.

He uncurled my fingers on one, fisted hand and dropped two pills into my palm. I popped them into my mouth and chased them down with water. I liked these pills. They made escaping into sleep easily, and kept it dark there. No dreams, no nightmares. Only darkness. Layers and layers of black between me and the reality my life had become.

But when I woke up next, still wrapped in his arms, he must have realized what I was doing and it didn’t appear that he was going to let me do it anymore.

“I know you’re hurting, but you can’t just retreat. You have to talk to me Scar, not pull away.”

He’d tilted me back to see his face, and his fingers were brushing the hair back from my brow. Then he slid me off his lap and fluffed up the pillows behind me so I could lean back against the headboard too. He took my hand back in his and stared straight ahead of him at the wall across the room.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened right now, but I need to know what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking you should go,” I whispered to the wall.

“No.” Simple, but the determination in his tone was powerful. Of course, there was no making Derek do anything he didn’t want to do. There would have been no way my tormentor would have been able to wrench from Derek’s body what he’d taken from mine.

I stared at the wall, trying not to focus on the strong hand holding mine, but every time I succeeded, my mind thrust me back to the place I’d been. Vile hands and teeth, the fire of his whip, the pain of him tearing me apart and the even sharper, knife-twisting agony that accompanied every release he ripped from my body. I wanted to curl back up in Derek’s arms, but I didn’t.

“But I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Scar. I’m thinking you’re in pain. Every kind of pain. And you feel like you’re never going to recover.” He spoke as if he could somehow relate innately to what he was saying. “I think you feel like what happened ripped chunks of your soul clean out of you, and you’ll never get them back.”

Is this what the foster home he’d been sent to had done to him? Is that how he could relate? My heart broke a little more, thinking of the vibrant boy he’d been, subjected to horrors that changed him, irrevocably in some ways. But it wasn’t the same, not entirely.

“I have no soul left,” I told him honestly, and then I closed my eyes, letting the pile of plush pillows support my weight and the blessed drugs in my bloodstream pull me under.

It felt like not long after I’d drifted off, I was being pulled from my dark hiding place. When I opened my eyes, Derek was all around me. He’d gathered me up in his arms and we were no longer on the bed.

“What are you doing?” I tried to struggle to get free, but he held me tighter as he strode from the bedroom and into the connecting ensuite. The determined look in his eyes concerned me more than the sudden departure from the bed.

Without putting me down, he turned on the shower faucet, then stepped in, still half-dressed. The warm water cascaded over my body, igniting dozens of cuts and scrapes along its way. I writhed in his arms and whined pathetically, but his hold remained firm. He slid to the floor beneath the spray and gathered me on his lap. I tried to sit up, but even with my veins teeming with narcotics, the shooting pain through my ribs stopped me.

“What the hell are you doing?” I croaked.

“The only thing I know how to do, Scar,” he replied, his voice raw. “I fucked up, and you paid the price for it. You’ll never know how sorry I am, but I won’t let you do this. You will not blame yourself.” His voice was carefully restrained, but I had a feeling he’d be shouting at me if I didn’t look so pitiful at the moment. “And you will not delude yourself into thinking those sick fucks could get anywhere close to your soul. Got it?”

“He didn’t get close to it. I fucking threw it down at his feet!” I screamed. It was a mistake. I knew it the moment the words were out.

I struggled to get free despite the pain in my ribs. Pain was something I’d grown well-accustomed to over the past couple of months. He didn’t stop me this time, but I almost wished he had when I surged to my feet and the room spun wildly around me. I reached for the wall to stay upright. He was on his feet in a flash, but I swerved out of his reach when he stretched his arms toward me.

“Don’t touch me. You can’t want to touch me,” I croaked.

Pain flashed through his eyes, and it tore through my heart. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him. But that’s why he had to stop this. I wasn’t the girl he cared about. That girl had died in hell, and a depraved whore had taken her place.

So, I took a deep breath and told the biggest lie of my life, “I want you to leave.”

He jolted as if I’d struck him, god damn it.

“No.”

Why did everyone else get to say no? Why was I the only one who had absolutely no fucking say? “No? What I want doesn’t matter? Should I get down on my knees like a good, little slave now? Is that what my master wants?”

He paled, but he didn’t budge. “If I thought me leaving is what you really wanted, Scar, I’d be gone. Maybe it’s even what you should want, but you don’t. You’re hurting and you’re confused.”

He’d known me so well, right from the very beginning, but he was wrong this time. I wasn’t confused. I knew what I was, what I’d become in that dungeon, and I knew he deserved better. But it looked like the only way to convince him of that was to lay it out for him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see the disgusted look on his face when he knew the truth. It was all I had left—his belief that I was inherently good, but life was going to take that from me too.

I crumpled to the ground. It suddenly took too much effort to stand. At least down here on the shower floor, I wouldn’t have to see his face.

“I’m a whore, Derek. That’s why I want you to leave.”

“You’re not a whore, Scar,” he said, crouching down in front of me.

“Sometimes he hurt me, but other times, he’d touch me and my body would respond. I couldn’t stop it. God knows I tried, but it didn’t matter. Do you understand now? Are you satisfied?”

“He made you orgasm, and you think it’s your fault,” he said matter-of-factly, though I could see the way his hands were clenched so tight his knuckles had turned white.

“Of course it’s my fault! What respectable woman would have…”

“Every one of them, Scar,” he cut me off with vehemence. He ran a hand through his wet hair. “To turn your body against you, it’s the most powerful tool in a trainer’s arsenal. It wasn’t your fault, and there’s nothing wrong with you.”

He spoke with so much conviction, I wanted to believe him. He knew what he was talking about. How many girls had he…oh god, I couldn’t think about that. Yet, I couldn’t not. “How many times…”

“It wasn’t the same. The girls I…trained, most of them had chosen it or been talked into it. To provide for their families, to escape poverty. You were the first girl I’d ever taken completely against her will. I’m sorry, Scar. If I’d never done that, none of this would ever have happened to you. This is my fault. Not yours.”

I didn’t struggle out of his embrace this time when he wrapped his arms around me. He may have been the one holding me, but it seemed he needed it, maybe as much as I did.

But now I was even more confused than I’d been before, and the pain medicine was making it impossible to sort through my fuzzy head. Was he right? Would any woman’s body betray them like mine had? Would Derek say anything to overcome my resistance or was it the truth? Maybe he was repulsed by me even now but felt guilty and needed to see me recovered before he made a beeline for the exit. Oh hell, there were no answers in my cotton-filled head.

He lifted me up onto my feet and shut off the water. When he reached for the buttons on my soaked shirt I had on, I saw another set of hands—evil hands—reaching for me, and a whimper escaped my lips. His fingers paused.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to wrap a dry towel around you. OK?” He held my gaze, not looking at my body as he unfastened the buttons. When the shirt slipped to the floor, he reached for a towel from the shelf, but my eyes followed him and I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror.

My jaw dropped open, and the reflection in the mirror mimicked me. It was hideous. I was hideous. It was the first time I’d seen myself. There’d been no mirrors in hell, though that surprised me now. The bastard could have struck just as deep with a mirror as his whip. I was revolting.

My face was a swollen mixture of greens, blues, and yellows from old and new bruises, and the wound on my cheek had never healed. He’d forced me face down on the ground so many times, and each time had ripped it open again.

Bruises and bite marks marred my torso and peeked out from the bandage wrapped around my ribs.

I hadn’t realized I’d started to cry until a tear dripped off my chin and landed on my bruised breast. In sick curiosity, I started to turn to see my back in the mirror when the glass smashed into hundreds of pieces that clattered on the ground.

I blinked. It took my drug-addled mind a full minute to realize Derek had thrown something and smashed the mirror. That was a relief. At first, I’d worried I was so hideous-looking I’d broken the mirror.

“It doesn’t matter, Scar. You’ll heal, and all of it will fade,” he said through gritted teeth as he wrapped the towel around me and tucked the end under my arm instead of between my breasts.

He took my hand this time and guided me back to the bedroom. I hadn’t noticed the serving tray covered on the table by the bed. Had he ordered it while I’d been sleeping? Had he let someone in the room? Had they seen the hideous figure asleep on the bed?

“I had it sent up shortly after we arrived in case you were hungry. And I had them leave it outside the door,” he answered the frantic questions whirling in my head.

I eyed the tray for a moment. I should be hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the previous day. Two energy bars. That was what he’d fed me every day, just to give me enough energy to stay on my feet—that’s what he’d said. When I’d tried to reject the food, he’d spent a day and a half feeding me his penis and making me swallow so much ejaculate that it sloshed nauseatingly in my stomach.

No, I wasn’t hungry.

Ignoring the food, I sat down on the edge of the bed, using my core muscles as little as possible to avoid setting off my ribs. He didn’t stop me when I laid down and closed my eyes. Good—I didn’t think I could stand being awake another minute. Just before I drifted off though, I felt him there. He’d laid down behind me, and though he didn’t put his arms around me, I could feel the heat of his body radiating against my cold flesh. I didn’t resist the comfort his nearness offered. I let it wash over me and follow me down into oblivion.

* * *

The days that followed fell into a mundane routine that must have bordered on mind-numbing boredom for Derek. Maybe I was silent in hopes of pushing him away. Maybe I just had no idea what to say to him. He kept trying to talk to me or trying to get me to talk to him. He said I’d feel better if I talked about my time in hell. I didn’t believe him.

I slept—a lot. It took too much effort to stay awake for long. He woke me every four hours though, for pain medicine. And once a day, he helped me into the shower, changed my bandages and helped me back to bed.

When I couldn’t sleep, I just laid there, remembering. And when I could sleep, I did. Unfortunately, the memories had begun to follow me there. Derek had reduced my pain medication from two pills every four hours, to one, and my dark, dreamless refuge of sleep had vanished without the muddled cloudiness from the pills. And he’d started pushing me to eat more, staring me down with his intense, unwavering gaze until I capitulated and ate another bite, or took another spoonful.

He was staring at me with that gaze now, his arms crossed, standing over me while I sat in bed with a tray across my lap. For the first time, something pleasant flashed through my mind. I was kneeling between his thighs outside his car, and he was feeding me fast food. I’d chosen to be there, on my knees in front of him. I’d asked him for it. Despite the subservient position, I’d felt stronger. Grounded in a world that had been spinning wildly out of control.

The thought stayed with me, but it took an entire week for me to figure out what to do with it. The answer came to me, lying here with a head full of vile images. All the things that had been done to me, all the things I’d been forced to do. Never a choice. I never had a choice. Even Derek rescuing me had been against my will. I’d protested, and he’d ignored me.

He’d chosen to kidnap me, to make me a slave, to sell me, and then not to sell me. He’d chosen where we ran to, and then chosen to track me down when his choices had landed me in hell. I didn’t blame him for that. He’d done everything he could to protect me, to keep me safe, and I wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did if I’d been on my own then. I knew that.

But when did I get to decide? I could be forced to my knees, but I couldn’t go there willingly?

No. It was my turn to decide. I knew what I needed, what would help me heal and become whole again. It made absolutely no sense, and yet it made perfect sense to my fractured mind. I needed to replace old images with new ones, so similar in many ways but with one glaring difference—choice. I was choosing this.

Now, all I had to do was figure out how to explain it to Derek without risking him having me committed.

He’d said he would do whatever was necessary to help me heal, and I knew exactly what was necessary.

This is what was necessary.

This is what I needed.

And the man lying next to me was equipped with the unique skill set to give me exactly that.

To be continued…

Preorder the LAST book in the Beauty and the Captor series: