he moved closer, he saw a scarred side table and a lamp jammed in behind the bed. “Daralyn.”
She started, but not in a way that suggested she hadn’t known he was here with her. It was as if his voice amid the other ones happening in her head had been unexpected.
He reached out, touched her rigid hand. Nothing about her said she was ready to be coddled. She gazed at him, then pivoted and walked toward the kitchen. He followed.
There was a mudroom. It was in that room he recalled there was one other door in the house that had been left intact, other than the ones to her father and uncle’s bedrooms.
They punished me for misbehaving by putting me in the cellar without food or light, usually for a few hours or overnight… Three days, I think. I lost track.
As she stared at the trap door, her hands half curled, horror spiked in his gut.
“Daralyn. Don’t go down there.”
“I need to get something.” She lifted her head, gazed at him steadily. “It’s just a cellar.”
But he could see the paleness of her features, the pulse jumping in her throat. He took her hand. “I’m here,” he said. “Nothing here is going to hurt you.”
She blinked. Swallowed. She tightened her grip on his before it slipped away so she could pull up the cellar door, revealing a narrow wooden ladder that descended into darkness.
She’d seemed so calm, he wasn’t ready for it. As the stale, trapped air wafted up from a room that hadn’t been disturbed in years, she lost all color, as well as whatever resolve had driven her to open the door. Her knees gave out.
His heart leaped as she swayed precariously over that opening. Fortunately, she was reaching for him at the same moment he grabbed for her, so she mostly collapsed into his arms, one of her bent knees against his wheel as the other rested on the floor. Her forehead and face were pressed to his biceps.
“Can’t…”
She was clinging to him as if she thought she was on the edge of a cliff, prepared to fight off the pull of gravity with teeth and nails.
He tipped up her chin and forced down fear at the naked wildness in her face. In a blink, all that detached calm had given way to the look of someone lost in a tornado, no sense of how to find her way out. It made him speak sharply.
“Daralyn, pay attention to me. Right now.”
That helped, after he repeated it several times. He watched her come back to him, her hazel eyes showing her struggle. “This is too much,” he told her. “You’ve already handled enough today. We can come back.”
Her gaze was glassy. “But I really need what’s down there. I can’t explain why…”
“You’re not going down there. We’ll call someone to go down there for you. Tell me what we’re looking for.”
She shook her head. She was pulling herself together by millimeters, but since he could track the subtlest changes in her expression, he saw it. “I have to do it,” she said. “Please. Please help me do it.”
He wanted to tell her hell no, but the request was so plaintive, so desperate, he couldn’t deny her. “Okay.” He gave it some thought. While he did, he shifted her so she was fully in his arms, on his lap. “Hold onto me a minute first.”
She did, clinging to him like she was about to be torn away from him by that tornado. Fuck this. When it mattered, he tried never to overrule her, but she was asking too much of herself. Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He shoved the Master to the side, every protective instinct that came from the man he was, who loved her so much he couldn’t tolerate anything that caused her distress. He re-channeled it in what he hoped was the right direction.
“You can do anything,” he said roughly into her hair, stroking it. “You’re right. It’s just a goddamn cellar. I am right here. Say it.”
“I can do anything. You’re right here. It’s just a goddamn cellar.”
She rarely cursed, so the parroting gave him an unexpected smile. She saw it, and amusement flitted through her gaze. It was like a moth buffeted by a storm, but it was there.
He tugged her hair. “You belong to me,” he reminded her. “Right?”
That steadied her even more, which steadied them both. She lifted her chin. “I belong to you.”
“Okay.” Since he didn’t see anything resembling a light below, he twisted