Trey - Shandi Boyes Page 0,30

into myself. “You were choking that girl. What the fuck were you thinking? Nikolai will kill you if he finds out.”

After a final shove to my chest and a glare that reveals I royally fucked up, he stands to his feet and paces back toward the bed.

“Don’t touch her,” I growl out when he moves his hand near K’s neck.

His words are spat out of his mouth as quickly as vomit races up my throat from his reply. “I’m checking she has a pulse, dipshit.”

I’m pissed at myself, but I don’t back down when I’m worked up. “I said don’t fucking touch her! For all we know, she’d rather be dead than be touched again without permission.”

Hearing the threat in my tone that I’m five seconds from killing him, Nero steps back from my bed with his hands held in the air like he’s being arrested. Since his eyes aren’t anywhere near K’s frozen and naked form, the torment tearing me in two fails to augment my worded threat to an all-out violent one.

Sensing my lowering temperament, Nero mutters, “Mercy killing isn’t what we do here, Trey.” He slants his head to lock his brown eyes with my blue ones. “If that girl wants to end her life, that shit is on her shoulders, not yours. I thought you knew that better than anyone. Silly me.”

After a final shake of his head, revealing his disappointment in me, Nero exits the room as quickly as he entered it, leaving me defenseless to a woman I thought I could save from the darkness by taking her place, having no clue I’m already there.

I should have known better.

I don’t live in the darkness.

Darkness lives inside me.

Nine

Sales Docket Number 12574

I wake up gasping like I can’t breathe. It feels like I’m suffocating, like more than fear is stopping my lungs from filling with air.

As my hands shoot up to loosen the tightness squeezing my windpipe, my blurry eyes dart around the masculine, yet homey space. It is empty, which isn’t surprising. It’s rare to wake up to an audience. Once the men get what they want, they leave. It’s the fact I fell asleep that has me gasping.

I emerge into the blackness in my head because it’s the lesser of two evils. I feel their beatings for days after they leave, and my muscles ache for almost a week, but not knowing exactly what they do to me offers some weird sense of comfort. I feel safe even when I should feel anything but.

However, I’m not supposed to fall asleep.

That’s dangerous.

It should have gotten me killed.

Mercifully, my heart is still pumping.

Most days, I’d relish the victory. Today, I’m not sure I won. I’m alive, but I can no longer see the light at the end of the tunnel I’ve been crawling toward for years. It has vanished, up and left. I’ve just got to work out if it’s a good departure or a bad one. I’m leaning toward the negative. If I don’t have goals to aspire to, I may as well be dead.

Incapable of ignoring the uneased churns of my stomach for a second longer, I race into the bathroom attached to the lavish room I awoke in. The heaves of my stomach are so violent, they bring up the meal I ate last night with only two big churns.

Once I’m confident my stomach is empty, I rest my backside on my feet before removing a square of toilet paper to clear away the mess on my lips. It’s funny how the simplest things can make a deranged woman even more unhinged. The softness of the toilet paper as it scrapes my lips is one of those things. The paper—if you were lucky to get any—in my cell was as rough as sandpaper. It added to the pain I experienced every weekend—a pain I’m not noticing this time around.

Confused as to why the lower half of my body isn’t aching, I stand and pace backward until the mirror perched above a double vanity exposes me in all my hideous form. The lifelessness of my eyes is still apparent, and the red welts on my neck are standard, however, there are no grab marks on my breasts, and my vagina isn’t bruised and bleeding. Just from looking at me, you wouldn’t think I had been assaulted tonight. I look untouched.

Well, as untouched as a sex slave can look.

Certain my head is playing tricks on me, I use the facilities, slip a shirt four sizes