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Gray eyes darkened, blinked slowly. “Wasn’t expecting that, but okay. Firstly, I’m gonna say I’m sorry, sunshine. No one should have to see that in their head when they think of sex. That’s just abominable from every fucking angle. Secondly,” he continued smoothly before she could babble a reply, “what you described? That’snotsex, Jenna. I swear it’s not. It’s rape, it’s abuse, and it’s abhorrent to any man with a sense of morality.”
“Sire doesn’t have morals.”
“Doesn’t sound like he does, no. In my opinion, any man who thinks and acts like Sire should be castrated and hung, drawn and quartered.” Cain rubbed a hand over his face, and she heard his palm scrape over the soft bristle. “Can I tell you what sex is like through my eyes, sunshine?”
She peered up at him from under her lashes. “If it hurts, I don’t want to know.”
He let out a heavy breath, inclined his head. “Sunshine, my brother would make himself a eunuch before he hurt you. Being as we’re born of the same blood, I can say that as honestly as I’d say it about myself. Sex is emotion. No matter which way you look at it, that’s all it is. Two people joining together. Sex can be fun, happy, exciting—hell, I’ve had sex that’s made me and my woman laugh from start to finish.
“There’s sad sex,” he said with a crease in his brow. “For me, that pulls you deep into the connection. Maybe there’s tears or just a sense of forlornness that sinks inside you, but sad sex is poignant. And now so are you,” he commented when her eyes filled again. “Sex can be kinky, but I’ll let Connor give you those details.” He tapped her under the chin with a fingertip. “Angry sex—that’s fun in itself, all fiery passion and dominant emotion released in a fast, hard fuck. Quite cathartic.”
Data overwhelmed her brain, but still she listened, enthralled by the rhythm of his speech, the rise and fall of his words. He spoke without regret, with no apologies for who he was or what he’d experienced.
“You, little one, should be made love to for your first time. Slow hands and careful fingers stroking, teasing this warrior’s body. So many scars and old hurts that need to be kissed, worshipped, because each one made you into the woman you are now.”
Jenna ducked her head so he wouldn’t see the heat in her cheeks. The concept of what he described was foreign to her—in her world, women were not worshipped by the hand that kept them, they were ruled. And under Sire’s rule, they bled, they wept, and they died.
“He tied us to trees,” she whispered, stopping Cain in his tracks. “He dragged us to his favorite place with collars around our necks. The one who’d served him and the one who would. Pulled us along on chains until we tripped and fell, kept going even when we couldn’t stand.
“There’s a tree with a chain eating into the trunk, a few rusty links dangling. The one he keeps is locked to those links by her collar, left to stand and watch, naked and silent. Left to learn and understand that one day, one day soon, she will be the one he throws into the dirt.”
Cain said nothing, just set his hand on her knee in silent comfort. She didn’t know why she was letting the words escape her, why she gave voice to the memories in her head she couldn’t forget regardless of what she did.
“He took me there three times. Once as the replacement, chained to the tree while he murdered a woman he’d taken from a good life and sentenced to hell. Twice as the one destined to die.” Her teeth began to chatter, recalling the fear etched into her bones as she waited to be tossed to the ground, only for the girls she’d tried to train to survive to be discarded instead. “Twenty-One was a kind woman. She helped me adjust to Sire’s routine as best she could. My voice was already broken the day Sire chose to kill her, so I couldn’t even cry out when he backhanded her where she sprawled on the ground.
“He straddled her chest, used his knees to pin her arms. Used his fists to split her lip, her cheek. Blackened her eyes and knocked out her front teeth. That was just the start. The horror of what he did to her…” Jenna choked, latched onto Cain’s hand. “There was nothing much left of her by the time he forced her legs apart. Broken and bloody and bruised. Still breathing, barely, and aware. Her eyes were hollow, haunted, when he shoved his pants to his knees and…and…”
“All right, Jenna,” Cain crooned, covering her hand so his sandwiched hers protectively. “That’s enough, sunshine, you’ve had enough.”
She shook her head furiously, trying to breathe around the knot strangling her throat. How could it be enough when she was the last person to see Twenty-One alive, aside from her killer? Number or woman, Twenty-One didn’t deserve to remain the nightmarish secret of a traumatized survivor trapped in the dark.
“When you can’t talk, you learn how to read. Faces, body language, the nuances,” she said, and wondered where the hell she’d pulled that word from, “of truth and lies. Eyes are the biggest books in the world. They containeverythingabout a person. Read it often enough and the author can’t conceal anything, however they might try.
“I didn’t see what Sire did to her. I read it in her eyes. Fear, despair, a kind of pain that reached down and touched both our souls, because in that moment I could feel her pain. He rutted her ruthlessly and pain became resignation, surrender. The life was gone from her eyes before Sire tightened his hands around her throat and crushed what was left of her. He growled,” she remembered as a whimper built in her chest, “and that sound grew deeper until it was almost a howl. He got up, cleaned himself, and kicked her dead body between the legs before he came for me.”
That had been the terrifying part. The monster of a man, elements of the beast still raging in his pale eyes, stalking toward her with blood on his pants, his hands, his face and malicious pleasure in that hooded gaze.
Nowhere to run to, no way of escaping the chain or the collar.
Jenna sensed her bladder initiate its panic response and willed it not to mortify her. “He detached the chain from the tree and yanked me forward. I was given a lecture on what behavior he expected from me as he tugged me back to the house and warned of the consequences disobedience would bring. I didn’t doubt him; I didn’t dare. After all, I’d just witnessed him rape and strangle a woman for no other reason than she bored him.”
Cain’s fingers tightened around hers. “And the other two times?”
“I’d done my best to teach the replacements he brought. Both good girls, too young to be in that predicament. There was only ever one new girl at a time, and communication is hard when one can no longer speak and the other is out of her mind with panic. They failed him, faster than anticipated. They were dispatched quickly, with a mute slave as their only witness to their imprisonment and death. He took me there both times, allowing me to believe it was my turn to die. Sometimes I wished it was, so the threat of it couldn’t hang over my head, day after day, night after night, while I rotted in my shed.”
Cain dropped his forehead against her crown as his arms pulled her tightly against him, a heavy blanket of safety in her broken panic. They weren’t Connor’s arms, didn’t hold her the same way he did, but they were welcome, nonetheless. “The first few weeks after you got here, Connor talked about you like you hung the moon. I didn’t come around much—I didn’t want to intrude when Connor was working so hard to make his home into a safe place for you—but we talked on the phone a lot. He told me how brave you were, this little slip of a woman, so brave despite everything you must have gone through. He couldn’t say often enough how he might not hear your voice, but you spoke to him in other ways, deeper ways. Connor’s always known how strong you are, Jenna. I didn’t believe him, not at first. But now? Now I understand what he meant in those first few weeks. There is no one else like you in this world, sunshine.”
“There are days I wish I’d stayed in that shed and waited for dawn to come,” she admitted quietly. More tears came, but there was no shame in them. Instead they washed away some of her pain, some of her misery and guilt. “Sometimes I don’t feel as though I deserve to be alive when they’re not.”
He gave her a little shake. “Survivor’s guilt, sunshine. Natural, but dangerous. Misplaced in your case—you survived because you used your head and you took a chance. They didn’t die because of you, Jenna. They died because of some jumped-up motherfucker who gets kicks out of destroying precious things.”
“Precious things have names,” she said dully, falling back into old habits, old thoughts. “Anything that is nothing has no name.”
“Bullshit. They’re people, Jenna. Women, just like you. They have names and families, and the FBI agent is going to track each one down. He’ll give them back their names, their identities, and they won’t be nothing ever again, sunshine. We won’t let them.”
She wanted them to be remembered. Sire had thrown them away, trash into the gutter, and she carried the weight of them all on her shoulders. Not just the ones she had met in person, but the ones whose ghosts haunted her in the shed, in the house. The ones who whispered in the trees surrounding the place where they died.
She bore the weight of them all.
