Page 38 of The King (Masterpiece Duet 1)
“Because I’m tainted now,” I say, my voice wavery.
“Because you’re mine. I told you it would happen. This changed the timetable. Changed the methods. But it could not change that one fact.”
It’s impossible to argue with that when he’s braced above me, when the musk and man scent of him surrounds me, when the same sheets that rubbed over his naked body now embrace me.
“There are marks,” I say.
On my body. My soul. He gouged me deep enough that I haven’t stopped reeling for hours, for days. I will still feel him in years, if I live that long. On my deathbed there will be Jonathan Scott’s teeth marks aching on my skin. With my final breath I’ll remember how it felt to drown.
Damon nods, his expression grave. “Let me see.”
They’re in the secret places in my body, the ones I’m too young to show him.
He doesn’t wait for me to obey. Instead he grasps the hem of the extra-large T-shirt, yanking it up until cool air flashes over my stomach. The back of his hand touches my pale skin—an accidental touch, fleeting. I suck in a breath, whether from humiliation or something else I don’t know. I’m wearing the panties Avery gave me, white with little pink flowers on them.
The edge of the panties is scalloped, little ruffles over my skin.
And underneath, mottled brown and dark red marks that spread over my ribs.
A hiss of something like pain escapes Damon. He stares with a kind of reluctant fascination, unable to look away from the contrast of white fabric on dark bruises.
“You fought him,” Damon says, his eyes meeting mine.
There isn’t a question in his voice.
Don’t fight them. It only makes it worse. I understand now why Jessica told me that. It makes everything harder. Sharper. Darker. I never wanted to fight, the same way I never wanted to drown. It happened, my body reacting to its environment, animal instinct beating out reason.
The question flickers at the edges of my mind. “Maybe that’s when I lost myself. When I really broke. When I lost the numbers in my head.”
For the first time since he came into the room he looks surprised. “You didn’t lose the numbers, Penny. No one can take them away from you.”
Then maybe I gave them up voluntarily. Maybe that’s the price I had to pay to survive.
My mind has been blessedly quiet ever since I woke in Damon’s arms. It’s kept me safe from feeling the horror, the pain, but it’s also blocked out the numbers.
Damon reaches to his back pocket. I tense, sure that he’s going to pull out something terrible. A knife, like he had as the wild boy. A rope. I don’t know where my mind conjures all of these ideas, except that my thoughts all follow a train of violence. He’s never hurt me, but he seems too enamored of the bruises to really trust.
In his hand is only a pen, something smooth and cylindrical, no doubt expensive.
He pulls the cap off with his straight white teeth, revealing the shining silver point beneath.
With only a veiled glance at me, he lowers his hand to a bare patch of skin on my left side. There’s no bruise here. It somehow escaped the struggle. The pen has been against his body, kept in his pocket, but it still feels cool when it touches my skin.
I try to make out what he could be writing based on feel, but there’s a dull throb of pain all over and a numbness from the medication. Noise that drowns out the feeling of his fountain pen.
He pulls down the T-shirt before I can see what he’s written. Then he straightens, his knee still pressed between mine, only eight hundred thread count sheets and fine wool slacks between us.
“Go with Avery. Be a good girl for her. She’ll take care of you.”
The word until pulses in the air, asking and asking until I can finally voice the question. “Until when?”
“Until I kill my father, of course.”
He’s all the way to the door before I ask the question that’s been haunting me since I swirled underneath that pool, since I saw exactly what his father had done to make him able to hold his breath so long. “Why haven’t you already?”
He stands in front of the dark walnut door, facing away from me. His body locked into position like a statue. His voice almost separate from him, an unknown force in the room.
“That’s what he wants. To turn me into a killer. To make me like him.”
Finally I understand that though he’s been abused and harmed and corrupted in infinite ways, there was one piece of him left untouched. One part of the wild boy that remained. And he was going to burn that part with iron, to brand it until only blackness remained, because of what happened to me.
