Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40012 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40012 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
I didn’t want to talk to Michael. I still wanted him to leave, especially since this man who knew too much about me wasn’t going to help me. But I couldn’t make myself get up and leave the room. He knew about my family—family I had never met. He knew my mother had taken ballet classes when she was six years old and that she’d fallen out of a tree when she was nine and broken her arm—things I’d never known. Things nobody else in the world could tell me. I shouldn’t care. What difference did it make? My mother was dead, and so was the aunt who I’d never met. But I was hungry for it anyways.
Two hours through though, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. After hours of Derek’s torture device, it was a wonder I’d stayed awake this long. Apparently, though, I did end up drifting off because the next thing I knew, I was in Derek’s arms and he was laying me down on the bed. He stripped off my sweater, t-shirt and pants, then tucked the covers up over my bra-clad breasts. I felt his heat beside me, and then his arms around me, but I was going under fast.
“I love you,” I whispered. I don’t know why I said it. We didn’t say things like that often because it was unnecessary. It was intrinsic in everything we were, everything we said and everything we did. But it seemed important now. It was the reason I was going to defy him, and he needed to know that. I could only hope he’d understand that when it came time to dole out my punishment for it.
I had no choice, and in this, that didn’t bother me one bit.
12
Scarlett
The moment I opened my eyes, I was off the bed and across the room. I wasn’t going to make it. Ten more steps, but it seemed like a mile. My stomach roiled violently and the back of my throat burned.
I lunged for the toilet just as my stomach heaved its contents, convulsing my body and making sweat bead on my brow and trickle down the back of my neck.
Seconds later, Derek’s fingers were there, sweeping my hair off my neck and holding it back. I could do nothing but kneel there, gripping the toilet seat as my body expelled everything.
When the worst of it had subsided, I took a deep breath. And then I gasped as it hit me—the truth, the reason I’d made a mad dash for the toilet two mornings in a row. Why for mornings before that I’d woken to nausea brewing in my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a period—not since before those two men had grabbed me and changed the course of my life irrevocably. But Derek and I only had sex a few times before I was taken. A few times before I was raped over and over again.
I was pregnant. Pregnant, with no idea who the baby belonged to. Except, I knew, didn’t I? What were the chances the baby was Derek’s?—that fate hadn’t found another way to make me suffer? I was gasping and sobbing, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
Derek drew me back against him. Even when I tried to wriggle out of his arms, he held me there. “Shh, it’s OK, Scar. It’s going to be OK,” he whispered, holding me firm with one arm while he stroked my hair back with his other hand.
The sob rising in my throat got stuck. It was the way he’d said it like he knew why I was freaking out. Oh god, he knew. He knew, and he hadn’t said a word. That wasn’t the worst part though. If he knew I was pregnant, then he also knew the baby inside me could belong to another man—man who’d tortured me, used me.
The sob worked itself free and several more rose behind it, wracking my body. If the baby was Derek’s, I’d be rejoicing. I’d find some way to make sure he survived and we’d live happily ever after. But now, when we walked away from Mateo Lopez, what would happen? How would Derek look at me when my belly grew big with another man’s—a monster’s—baby? And once he was born, how would Derek be able to look at him with anything other than hatred? A baby, half me, and the other half, not him.
“It’s not fair,” I sobbed.
“No, it isn’t fair, but you’ll get through this.”
Not “we’ll” get through this. He’d said I would get through this. Was he saying that because he didn’t think he was going to be alive, or because this was too much?
I cried. Misery, fear and anger, all mingled in my tears. They drained me dry, but when they finally dissipated, a strange calmness settled over me. It wasn’t acceptance. It wasn’t numbness.