Attraction pulsed between us despite her tears, and I knew there would come a day and time when those same tears turned me on. When I licked them from her skin after watching her choke on my cock.
In the meantime, I watched her shutter her expression and hide her sadness from me. “He didn’t rape me,” she admitted, something in me dropping into the pit of my stomach.
I’d seen the damage to her body. Seen the way the doctor had to stitch her back up after the way Darragh had violated her.
There was no doubt that she’d been abused, no doubt that she’d been raped.
“Of course he did, Butterfly. What are you talking about?” I whispered, studying her face.
She shut her eyes, closing me out like she couldn’t stand to see my reaction to what came next. “I volunteered,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. Everything in me turned rigid with the memory of all my years on the street when I’d willingly allowed myself to be used if it meant shelter for a night or food in Cesca’s body. “I let him fuck me. I lay there and let him make me dirty.”
We did what we had to do to survive, but I understood the self-hatred Irina felt.
I’d lived with it for two decades.
“He was going to rape Madison,” Irina finally admitted. “She’s so young, I just—I couldn’t let him. So I told him to take me instead.” More tears fell freely from her closed eyes.
I ran a thumb through the moisture on her cheeks, wiping it away and cupping her face in my hands as I released her hair, finally.
“Listen to me,” I said, applying enough pressure to her cheeks that she opened her eyes. That vivid stare landed on mine, waiting for the condemnation she was so certain would follow. “You are not dirty. What you did was beautiful, Butterfly. You saved a stranger at the expense of yourself. Take it from someone who has seen a lot of ugly in this world; most people would sacrifice their mother to save themselves. What you did is the kind of sacrifice that most people can never relate to.”
“You don’t think—”
“No,” I said, cutting her off and leaning forward to touch my forehead to hers. “I think you’re the strongest person I know.”
“I tried to kill myself,” she said, a sob hitching her breath—as if the suicide meant she couldn’t be strong and there was no coming back from something like that.
“You did,” I agreed, running my thumb over her bottom lip as she stared up at me and hung on my every word. Something heady floated between us, which neither of us was ready to acknowledge. “But you’re still here. You survived that, too, and I know you well enough to know that you’re going to take all of this and burn Murphy’s world to the ground. You’re going to rise from the ashes, because you were willing to set your life on fire to be reborn into something even better.”
From the hint of a gleam in her eyes, Irina knew it was true as much as I did.
The world wasn’t ready for her vengeance.
50
IRINA
Two more weeks passed.
Anyone who thought love healed all wounds had never experienced real pain. They’d never lived through the soul-shattering kind of torment that obliterated everything they thought they were before it.
I’d never been perfect. My life had been a constant whirlwind of emotions that I fought to control and questioned at every turn.
Am I overreacting had become my mantra. It circled in my head every time something made rage simmer in my veins or whenever I’d dropped into an extreme low that I just couldn’t force myself out of.
But in the nearly two months since being taken, my rage was absent. I got angry, but it drifted away before it could ever really take root inside me, in the same way it once had. Maybe that would be a good thing to some, but for people like me that anger was a respite from the pain, and from the numbness that often followed.
I glanced up at Scar where he sat at his desk on the other side of the room. He typed away on his keyboard, his fingers flying and his eyes focused on whatever he was working on. The two computer monitors seemed to scroll endlessly, shifting and changing faster than I could track.
I watched him for a moment, shifting to sit on my hands and resist the urge to pick at my nails. He was busy.
I couldn’t blame him. He still had a job and responsibilities, even if I hadn’t yet been brave enough to tell him I wanted to go back to work—I needed something to focus my energy on.
Without it, the need for release pulsed inside me, twisting and turning until it became something menacing and insidious. I’d tried to shove it down for days, resisting the urge to find a knife and sink the tip into the flesh at the top of my thigh.
I could picture the way the blood would well at the small incision, the way it would trickle over my flesh as the tension trapped within me escaped along with it.
Pain was an escape, and I needed one before I lost myself again. Because my anger was finally rising inside me, along with my need for vengeance that I couldn’t have yet. It was an entity all its own, something I could never hope to control.
The need for blood terrified me. The call for revenge was something I’d never known, manipulating everything I’d thought I knew about myself into something…twisted.
Scar’s metaphor of the phoenix—the woman who rose from the ashes in the wake of her trauma, burning her own life to become something more—seemed fitting. I couldn’t burn Fresh Start to the ground, but everything else I’d known was gone.
My apartment.
My friends outside the Bellandis.
Almost my life itself.
None of my old friends would understand the woman I’d become. None of them would understand that I’d been reborn from pain and necessity, crawling from the fires of my life, filled with the determination to eradicate those who’d wronged me.
“What’s wrong, Butterfly?” Scar asked, swiveling his chair to look at me. He raised a brow, his gaze knowing as it landed on my face. He always seemed to sense when I was hesitating to ask for something, anticipating my needs before I was even ready to communicate them.
I unfolded my legs from the sofa, walking toward him with relief that I could finally move freely. My leg still felt the phantom shadow of the brace every now and then, as if the memory of it being part of me would linger long after it was gone.
I stood in front of him, swallowing back my nerves as I caught one of his hands in mine. I shifted it forward, dragging it toward me until his palm touched my thigh. I waited for the moment when he would recoil, always expecting it to reappear now that I wasn’t so broken that I posed no threat to him. But he held my gaze, his brow hitching as his lips parted.
“Irina,” he murmured, a warning in that voice that I understood. He thought I meant to push things before I was ready, but I had something else in mind.
I’d just give myself a little shove to communicate what I needed, because sometimes words weren’t enough.
I raised his hand, gliding it up the skin of my thigh until his fingers brushed against the scars at the top. My breath hitched, the panic that infused me almost immediate when his thumb brushed against my underwear.
I closed my eyes, pushing down that terror long enough to shift his hand further toward my hip. “I need to hurt.”