I was dying,” I told him in a monotone voice. “After my escape attempt, I was never really in my right mind for more than a few minutes. I lost a lot of my reasoning ability, and I started to hallucinate. I wasn’t always sure exactly what was going on. But during those brief moments of clarity, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, and every time I felt the darkness coming for me, I wondered if it was the last time. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to save myself, and I really hated that.”
Hudson moved and sat on the end of the bed, close but not too close, like he was worried that he’d scare me. “I’m not going to even try to tell you that I know how you felt,” he said grimly. “I don’t. I’ve been in a lot of life and death situations, but I’ve always had the means to defend myself.” He paused before he asked tentatively, “Did they injure you before you tried to escape in any way? Harlow mentioned that the rebel leader came to get you every night. Did he hurt you?”
Holy shit!
Hudson knew the truth.
I wasn’t sure how I’d come to that conclusion, but I knew that he knew, no matter how mildly he’d asked the question. I could hear it in his voice, and sense it by the tension in the air around us. “You can never tell Harlow the truth. Promise me that first, and then I’ll tell you,” I insisted.
Our gazes locked, and my breath caught when I saw the bleakness in the depths of his gorgeous eyes as he shook his head. “I’ll never tell her. You’ve agreed to keep our secrets. Everything you say right now will never be shared with anyone. You made some kind of deal with him, didn’t you?”
“I did.” The two words that came out of my mouth were barely a whisper. “My willing body in exchange for no one touching Harlow. It made sense. He was going to rape me anyway. The guy had some kind of weird fascination with my red hair. By subduing me, I think he thought he was conquering some kind of demon or devil. So I decided to get something out of all that weirdness. What would be the point of fighting? All that would have gotten me was the horror of watching my friend and mentor go through the same thing I did. And it was horrible, because everything in me wanted to fight and try to scratch his eyes out, but once it was over, at least I got to go back to our prison and see Harlow untouched. She was already frantic over Mark, weak from no food or water, and I didn’t know what would happen if she had to go through a sexual assault every damn night. I knew the asshole couldn’t break me. I wouldn’t let him. Every night, I had to let him use my physical body, but I let my mind go somewhere else, if that makes any sense.”
“Yeah, I get it. You try to detach,” Hudson answered hoarsely. “But I still wish I would have killed the bastard for you anyway while Jax and I were in that camp. Had I known then what I know now, I definitely would have.”
I could honestly say I hadn’t had anyone who’d wanted to defend me in a very long time, so his words made my heart ache. “You got me out of there,” I said softly. “That was more than enough. I feel like it’s a miracle that I’m actually sitting here talking to you. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up in Lania again and realize this is all one huge hallucination incident.”
“It’s real, Taylor.” He grimaced. “And I think it’s a goddamn miracle that you’re still relatively sane.”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure I completely have my head together. I think that I was so focused on survival that I couldn’t allow myself to think about anything else. Now that I have way too much time to think, I might be starting to crumble,” I answered with a tremor in my voice.
He shot me a concerned look. “Still scared?”
“A little,” I confessed.
Okay, maybe more than just a little. I couldn’t seem to stop the images or the brief flashbacks of some of the really bad things that had happened to me.
Maybe talking about it hadn’t been such a great idea, but I knew that