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“Please.”

Shockingly, hearing this he did stop. He took his hands off me and put them flat on the tile either side of my head, and he waited. He didn’t sigh, push for more, or say a single word. The water ran, and he let me have as long as I wanted.

That was the trap. I understand that now. He was never going to hold me down. He had already proved he could do that in an infirmary, and it had gotten him a girl who fought him. But he wanted something else entirely, and he was perfectly willing to stand in a shower for as long as it took to get it.

I didn’t tell him to move.

I simply stood there with my top pushed up over my breasts and my back against the tile and I didn’t say a single word. I released a breath and then another one, relaxing like he wanted me to. I heard him make a low sound in his chest that I swear I felt through the wall.

“Good girl,” he praised as his hands came back down to my waist again, and then lower, before being flat against my belly.

And that is when he found them.

Found the evidence of what I was running from, and he knew it the second I closed my eyes tight, as if in pain. The reminder of it every time I looked in the fucking mirror, bringing that night back. The proof of my survival and why I ended up running from a hospital room, leaving my broken life behind. Leaving the woman who had taken it for far too long before saying, enough was enough.

I felt him stop dead the second he felt them.

He had been smoothing his palm over my stomach, unhurried and gentle when his hand caught on something. He went absolutely rigid, and everything in that stall stopped moving except the water.

Oh no.

No, no, no, no.

I had thought about this. About what he would do if he found them. If it would make his desire for me turn to disgust or if he would want to raise hell that someone had dared do that to me. Well, I was about to find out, as he ran the pads of his fingers across them.

Four raised white lines across the lower part of my belly. Thin and running slightly upward, left to right, the way a mark goes when the person making it is right-handed and standing right in front of you.

Not surgical.

Nothing about them was surgical. They were the wrong length, the wrong depth, and they didn’t go anywhere useful. And every nurse I have ever worked beside would know exactly what they were within two seconds of touching them.

An act of cruelty.

And so, apparently…

Would he.

He turned his hand over. He did it very carefully, and he ran the backs of his fingers across them this time, from one end to the other, so slowly that I felt each one catch. And I kept my eyes closed and didn’t breathe.

“Look at me, Anna.” The soft command in his voice made me bite my lip. Anna… the sound of my name coming from him nearly unraveled me. As if he knew the use of my name would help anchor me enough to come back to him. So, I did as he asked and I swear the blaze in those blue eyes only spoke of murder.

“Who hurt you, little one?” he asked and his voice had gone somewhere else entirely. Not soft exactly, but more dangerously quiet, and stripped of every trace of the amusement that had been in it since the moment he stepped out of the steam. In response, every hair on my body stood up.

“It was an accident,” I lied, and he knew it the second it came out of my mouth.

“Anna.” He said my name in warning this time, making me flinch.

“It was a long time ago,” I added, hoping this was enough. Oh God, did I hope it was enough. Because he couldn’t ever know the truth.

“Who?” he asked this time, and I flinched as one face flashed in my mind. My personal nightmare that didn’t come with a mask.

“Nobody. It’s…”

“Was it a knife?” he asked and again my flinch told him all he needed to know with that one. I had never told a living soul. Not one, not in three years, not to a doctor, not to a counselor, not to a room full of strangers with a box of tissues. Not even to the woman at the shelter in the second city who was kind to me and asked twice. There had never been a version of that sentence I could get out of my mouth. Because saying it out loud made it a thing that happened to me instead of a thing I got away from.

So, I didn’t say it then either.

But I didn’t say no.