Instinctively, I try to spit them out, but she’s lightning-quick, swinging her knee over my lap and straddling me, one hand pinching my nostrils, the other pushing my mouth shut. I thrash in her grasp, but it’s no use. I hold my breath until I’m passing out, because I’m nothing if not stubborn. Just as the edges of blackness are starting to close in over me, my body takes over, convulsing for breath violently enough that the pills make their way down my throat. I pass out, anyway, my arms stretched out crucifix-style against the bed frame, my chin slamming into my chest.
CHAPTER FOUR
ROME
I don’t want to wake up.
A searing pain in my shoulder snaps me out of my dream state, back into reality. I blink heavily, and all of a sudden, I’m back in the room upstairs, high as fuck from whatever those pills were. The psychotic bitch who drugged me is twisting her fingers into my partially healed bullet wound to wake me up. It works, too. I roar at the sharp agony she’s inflicting with her gloved fingers, as she tugs and twists and prods. She stops after a few seconds. My howls must be enough to satisfy her that I’m awake.
It takes me a few seconds to understand what I’m seeing - a multicolored wig, bobbing up and down in my lap, a wet mouth sucking at my cock like it’s a goddamn lollipop. I’m hard, and that confirms my suspicions about the pills she shoved in my mouth and forced me to swallow. I can’t move, though, my limbs heavy, my head fuzzy. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s given me a cocktail of Viagra and muscle relaxants. Great. Just fucking great. My shoulder is on fire, and I feel the first warmth of fresh blood as it seeps from my wound. Fucking bitch.
“What are you doing?” I ask her. The light in here is too dim to make out her face, now that she’s removed the face bandanna. She’s kept the sunglasses on, unfortunately, and if I make it out of here alive, I’ll forever be haunted by the image of my own drugged-out expression I see in the mirrored reflection.
I fade in and out of consciousness. The next time I open my eyes, her face bandanna is back on, obscuring her features, and she’s rolling a condom down my painfully erect penis. I black out again, and the final time I come to, it’s to her lowering herself down onto my dick. The double-edged sword of Viagra is that it’s great for guys who need a little help in the boner department - but for me, at my age and level of fitness, it hurts. I can’t come, which seems to be her endgame. She bounces in my lap for what seems like hours, and when I finally reach climax, it doesn’t feel satisfying. It feels numb. The drugs pull me under again, and this time, I don’t wake up for what feels like a long time.
It’s completely dark outside when the guy kicks me awake. I’m not restrained to the bed frame anymore; my wrists are cuffed in front of me, now, and somebody has gone to the trouble of dressing me, pants and all.
So that happened, I think to myself, knowing how much worse Avery had it. The guy pulls me back downstairs, unlocking the heavy door, shoving me back into the basement. I land face-first on the mattress, the clicking of the heavy locks back into place the last thing I hear before it goes dark again.
CHAPTER FIVE
AVERY
Rome is back with me. And he’s hurting, I can tell. But when I ask him what happened while he was gone, he tells me nothing. Perhaps he thinks that if he sacrifices himself, if he bears the pain, that I will be spared.
Rome Montague might know about how the world works, but he doesn't understand how the mind of a killer works. I mean, neither do I, not really. But I do know that this depraved man calling the shots behind the one-way glass divider thinks in a far more cunning way than either Rome or I could ever begin to fathom.
Rome’s body is a testament to pain. His tattoos span the length of his body. There’s barely a spot that isn’t engraved with some kind of ink. He chose to sit for countless hours while somebody carved a needle through his flesh until blood and ink settled into the spaces left raw. He paid for that pain. He wears it like armor.
So, to a man who chose pain so many times, giving himself up to protect another might not seem like such a stretch. Even if that person he’s protecting is me, the girl who betrayed him. The girl who sent him to prison.
The girl who ruined his life.
The thing about pain, though, is that it has so many different degrees. The pain you choose to ink over your skin is a pain you control. A pain you ask for. The pain that Rome wants to take on my behalf in this hellhole is not a pain that anybody would ever ask for. It is savage and vicious and violent.
And I don’t deserve his protection after the things I’ve put him through.
All of these thoughts turn in my head as I watch Rome affix a butterfly clip to the clean bandage he’s just wound around my arm, from wrist to elbow. He smells like antiseptic and earth, like fresh-cut grass and rain. And he’s still weak. The bullet might have been surgically removed from his shoulder, but the wound is still deep and raw and terrifying. It’s bleeding again, which means he’s injured it somehow. It hasn’t bled for days. It makes me wonder if somebody reopened his wound on purpose.
The fact that the wound is from a bullet he took for me makes it even worse. I’m guilt-ridden on top of everything else. I want to know where he went when I was alone down here. But I can see that whatever happened, it was bad. Bad enough that his bullet wound is bleeding again.
I think they hurt him terribly.
But I’m too much of a coward to ask for specifics.
“What?” Rome asks, readjusting the butterfly clip against my wrist. He feels my stare, even when he’s 100% focused on bandaging me up.
“Nothing,” I whisper. Rome stops what he’s doing to raise his eyes to mine. Damn. Even in this dark room, they’re the coldest blue I’ve ever seen. Something about the hardness behind them makes me flinch. Rome must see the pain in my eyes, because his hard stare turns to concern. In this moment, it’s as if the way he treated me just hours ago was a dream. The way he calmed me when I was having a panic attack, the familiar distractions he employed to settle me down. It was like looking through a window to the boy I used to love, and now that window has been slammed shut.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks quietly, carefully moving the butterfly clip higher along the bandage. “No,” I say quickly. “It’s fine. Thank you.”
Truthfully, the cut on my arm was the least painful of all the injuries I’ve sustained since being down here. There are many things that hurt a great deal more. A sharp blade across my wrist, inflicted by the man I used to love, pales in comparison to anything else our captor has done to me.
It hurts most for Rome, though, because he was the one who helped the blade along. I know this, even without discussing it with him. Maiming me hurts him more than any bullet, deeper than any electrical current, harder than any blow.
It’s awkward, now. Without thinking, I reach for the edge of the square bandage affixed to the bullet wound on Rome’s chest. It’s so close to his heart, I was convinced he was going to die on the floor in front of me when it first happened. Rome pulls away before my fingers can make contact.
I search his eyes again and find nothing but hard walls.