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“You don’t have to pretend that⁠—”

“Listen to me.”

“I realize this changes⁠—”

I shudder when he cups my face and looks me dead in the eye.

“Will. You. Stop,” he hisses. “Do you think any of that changes how I feel⁠—”

“DAME!” I yell as I stagger to my feet, shoving his coat off me and backing away from him. “This isn’t a phase! This isn’t a vibe I’m going for!! I am FUCKED UP, okay?!” I scream. “I mean profoundly, irreversibly fucked!! And I will never not be!! But every time I get the chance to make monsters like that bleed, I feel like I can claw back just a little bit more of what was taken from me. Like I can fix up, even just a little bit, what’s broken in me. Like for a second, I’m not this nightmare, PSYCHO fucking⁠—”

Damiano stands and erases the few feet between us, wrapping his big arms around me and cocooning me against his body as he holds me tight.

“What you are, Bella,” he rasps into the top of my head, “is perfect. Perfect, and mine, and strong, and powerful, and beautiful, and fucking extraordinary.”

I don’t know how it happens. But for the first time in eight years…

…I start to cry.

But I’m not crying about the past. I’m not crying for that girl in that room. I’m not crying because I’m sad or hurt or broken or unloved, or a monster at all.

I’m crying because it’s suddenly hit me how wrong I’ve been, all the times I’ve told myself that people “like me” don’t get to feel this. That we aren’t allowed to feel what I feel for this man.

I’m crying because in this moment, in his arms at my most cut open and laid bare, I feel at home.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel free.

36

DAMIANO

I watch her in the late morning light as she sleeps, her head on my bare chest and her dark hair fanning across my skin.

I fucking hate that I know now what happened to her all those years ago.

Not because it changes anything about how I feel for her, or how I view her.

I hate knowing that I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t there to save her from the scars she still bears from that ordeal.

I hate knowing that the motherfucker who locked a child in a room and murdered her soul is still out there. The monster who tore something from her he had no fucking right to take.

I hate that she’s had to carry all of this for so many years. That she might still think that having told me is going to change the way I see her.

And I really hate that I didn’t know what I know now before I led her to that fucking basement and locked her in there, throwing her right back into her trauma, caging her in with her memories of the worst time in her life, and leaving her there to drown in them.

I lie there for another ten minutes, letting my mind go blank as she sleeps against my chest. Then my need for caffeine wins out. Carefully, I transfer Bella’s sleeping cheek to a pillow before I slip naked from the bed and head downstairs.

Bella’s the one who insisted on sleeping nude last night. Not because we were going to get up to anything after all that she told me. But she said she “needed to feel my skin against hers”.

I, unsurprisingly, had zero issues with that idea. I needed her against me, too.

Downstairs, I get the coffee started and then stand at the kitchen counter, staring out the window. Movement catches my eye, and I lean forward a little.

Yikes.

Kyle and Kylie are outside in their backyard…dancing.

In matching pajamas. Well, almost. The front of Kyle’s goofy-ass plaid button up top says “You hang up first!” Kylie’s, meanwhile, says “No, you hang up first!”