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“I am not them, Juniper. Feeding does not make me evil.” She placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, and the girl flinched at the slight contact, her withered smock hardly disguising how emaciated she’d become. “Please know, I would never hurt you.”
She nodded and sniffed, the salty scent of her tears tinging the air. “I know. I mean, I believe that. And I know that guy was a prick. It’s just hard for me… I wasn’t prepared...”
“I’m sorry. Next time, I’ll warn you before it happens.”
Again, she nodded. “That’s fair.”
“Are we okay?”
Her hand closed over hers, the gentle squeeze a testament of trust and forgiveness. “We have to be. We’re all we’ve got.”
Adriel’s mouth formed a sad smile. “Then let’s be good to each other, just as friends should.”
“Deal.”
CHAPTER 10
Juniper stared at the mirror, hardly recognizing the reflection of her naked body. Fading bruises marked her wrists and jaw. Her concave stomach pulled her flesh tight against her ribs, making her breasts appear larger than she remembered them being.
She was a mixture of femininity and utter neglect. No longer the body of a teenager—nor the mind—but a woman who had seen far too much for a young adult.
She was breakable but not broken.
Not yet, anyway.
Recollections scraped through her mind, wearing her down like the grind of brittle bone over a raw nerve. She’d blindly endured every insufferable moment in that cell and could still feel her fear whenever she closed her eyes.
The fear was the worst of it. At least when it was happening, she knew what she was getting.When they tortured her, when he rutted into her and bit into her flesh, she at least knew it would soon be over. Those physical pains were somehow easier than the mental waiting game of wondering what horrible thing she’d suffer next.
She wanted her revenge. Not just on him. On all of them.
These emotional scars would never heal.
They were monsters.
The life she’d lived before vampires came into her life shimmered like a forgotten delusion in her mind, too thin to fully picture and too foreign to find. Her sanity started to crumble after only a few months in that dungeon, and once her mind started playing tricks on her, she lost track of what was real and what was not.
Weeks of darkness. Days on end of having her arms tied. During those silent hours with no end in sight, she existed only in her terrified mind, meeting parts of herself she didn’t know, parts that scared her. But she found comfort in the fury.
They forced her to face the truth.
She was no one special.
Nothing. Not his. Not anyone’s. And that awareness killed the fear until there was nothing left.
Just Juniper.
Who?
Her head twitched as she tried to recognize the girl in the mirror. This was who she was now.Nothing but a vessel of secrets, a cluster of riddles even she couldn’t fully understand.
She owned no part of herself in that hell. But she could reclaim herself now. She was finally free. Far, far away, and able to start over.
Was there enough left to somehow be reborn? Facing the actuality of all she’d survived made it harder to believe she possessed the strength to go on. She’d been a kid when they caught her, but now she was a woman. She knew firsthand all the horrors women didn’t say, the things they shoved down in polite society and cried about in private.
Those memories were only air. They could not break her, not as long as she forced them to serve her in some way. She would use that pain and anger to make herself whole again. She had to, because the only other option was giving up.
Her fingers traced her collarbone, where a bruise marred the skin. Shadows of a puncture wound lingered just above her pulse. One blink, and she could feel him on her. One blink was all she could afford.
