memories of things I shouldn’t be thinking about again.
Watching Hale fuck her. Watching him put his hands where I told him to, touch her the way I wanted to but couldn’t. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than Grace on all fours, her back arched and her head thrown back, pure ecstasy bleeding across her features as she came.
My cock strains in my pants, and I grit my teeth at the desperate ache in my balls. I need to be the one who fucks her, not Hale. I need to be the one to touch her, the one to taste her, to bring her to the brink, to hear those noises she makes—those little moans and cries that haunt me.
I’ll never fucking forget those sounds.
My gaze sweeps up her body, her stomach, her breasts. Her neck and shoulders, the dip of her throat. Her chin. Her mouth—
Shit.
I jerk back, startled to find her hazel eyes open and glinting in the dim light that streams through the window. They’re a little glassy from sleep, but they’re clear and alert as she holds my gaze. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I can fucking imagine.
“I’m fucked up,” I mutter under my breath. “Goddammit, Grace. I’m sorry, I’m fucked up, I shouldn’t—”
A rush of shame and self-loathing consumes me as I turn around, desperate to leave. She wasn’t supposed to see me here. She wasn’t supposed to know I still want her. How much I still need her.
I was supposed to keep a distance. Leave her the fuck alone.
“Wait.” Her quiet words cut through the darkness. “Don’t leave.”
My body betrays me. It obeys her, a slave for her just like my fucking heart is. Stuck between the door and the bed, I can’t move.
“Ciro,” she says slowly, “please come back.”
There’s something in her voice that makes me turn around and glance over at her on the bed.
“I know you’ve been avoiding me,” she says quietly. “And I wish you wouldn’t.”
I grit my teeth, hating the note of pain I can hear in her words.
“You don’t want to avoid me though.” She presses up onto her elbows, still looking at me. “I know you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“I shouldn’t have—” I start again, but she cuts me off.
“Yes, you should. I don’t like when there’s distance between us, Ciro. It hurts me to see you holding yourself back from what I think you want. What I know I want. I’m not afraid of you, and I never will be.”
“That’s a mistake.”
“Why? Because you might hurt me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to hurt me?”
I swallow, my throat dry. “No.”
“Then why don’t you trust yourself around me?”
“Because I…”
I trail off, my gaze flicking down to my hands. Hands that once wrapped around her throat, squeezing her windpipe as my fucked-up mind screamed at me that she was the enemy.
“I don’t understand it all,” she says quietly when I don’t finish my sentence. “But I understand better than I once did about how that loss of power and control can fuck you up in the head.” She grimaces. “Honestly, I’m still reeling from the rug being yanked out from under me. I don’t know who or what I can believe in. What aspects of my life are real, and which parts are lies.”
Hurt flashes across her face. Drawn by the impulse to comfort her, I take a few steps forward, closing the distance between us a little. She doesn’t flinch away from me. She doesn’t pull me closer. She stays where she is, not moving.
“You once told me something I’ll never forget,” she continues in her soft whisper. “You told me that I was a survivor. That I had survived.”
The reminder brings a fresh wave of awareness through my body, remembering the circumstances of what she’s referring to—the shower. Her wet, naked body against my clothes, sticking to my own skin. Hardly knowing what to do, but for once, letting the instinct that trauma had buried take over me.
“I think you forget that you’re a survivor too, Ciro.”
My eyes snap to hers, surprised when they glisten in the light. Her voice is so steady it hardly betrays any emotion, but I can see pain in her expression.
It’s not pain for herself though, I don’t think.
It’s for me.
“And if your captivity fucked you up in the head?” She shrugs, her golden hair shifting around her shoulders. “If that trauma stayed with you? That doesn’t make you any less of a survivor.”
My knees are weak, my