The edge of the panties is scalloped, little ruffles over my skin.
And underneath, mottled brown and dark red marks that spread over my ribs.
A hiss of something like pain escapes Damon. He stares with a kind of reluctant fascination, unable to look away from the contrast of white fabric on dark bruises.
“You fought him,” Damon says, his eyes meeting mine.
There isn’t a question in his voice.
Don’t fight them. It only makes it worse. I understand now why Jessica told me that. It makes everything harder. Sharper. Darker. I never wanted to fight, the same way I never wanted to drown. It happened, my body reacting to its environment, animal instinct beating out reason.
The question flickers at the edges of my mind. “Maybe that’s when I lost myself. When I really broke. When I lost the numbers in my head.”
For the first time since he came into the room he looks surprised. “You didn’t lose the numbers, Penny. No one can take them away from you.”
Then maybe I gave them up voluntarily. Maybe that’s the price I had to pay to survive.
My mind has been blessedly quiet ever since I woke in Damon’s arms. It’s kept me safe from feeling the horror, the pain, but it’s also blocked out the numbers.
Damon reaches to his back pocket. I tense, sure that he’s going to pull out something terrible. A knife, like he had as the wild boy. A rope. I don’t know where my mind conjures all of these ideas, except that my thoughts all follow a train of violence. He’s never hurt me, but he seems too enamored of the bruises to really trust.
In his hand is only a pen, something smooth and cylindrical, no doubt expensive.
He pulls the cap off with his straight white teeth, revealing the shining silver point beneath.
With only a veiled glance at me, he lowers his hand to a bare patch of skin on my left side. There’s no bruise here. It somehow escaped the struggle. The pen has been against his body, kept in his pocket, but it still feels cool when it touches my skin.
I try to make out what he could be writing based on feel, but there’s a dull throb of pain all over and a numbness from the medication. Noise that drowns out the feeling of his fountain pen.
He pulls down the T-shirt before I can see what he’s written. Then he straightens, his knee still pressed between mine, only eight hundred thread count sheets and fine wool slacks between us.
“Go with Avery. Be a good girl for her. She’ll take care of you.”
The word until pulses in the air, asking and asking until I can finally voice the question. “Until when?”
“Until I kill my father, of course.”
He’s all the way to the door before I ask the question that’s been haunting me since I swirled underneath that pool, since I saw exactly what his father had done to make him able to hold his breath so long. “Why haven’t you already?”
He stands in front of the dark walnut door, facing away from me. His body locked into position like a statue. His voice almost separate from him, an unknown force in the room.
“That’s what he wants. To turn me into a killer. To make me like him.”
Finally I understand that though he’s been abused and harmed and corrupted in infinite ways, there was one piece of him left untouched. One part of the wild boy that remained. And he was going to burn that part with iron, to brand it until only blackness remained, because of what happened to me.
My breath is trapped, held captive by the grief I feel for that small part.
I worried he didn’t exist anymore, but he did. He’s standing five feet away from me.
“Wait,” I tell him. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to—”
“I do,” he says softly, not turning to me again. That part is over.
Then he walks out the door, leaving me staring at the place where he stood.
The room is bathed in shadows, more dark than light. I step out of bed to the soft carpet, feeling it thick beneath my toes. I cross to the bathroom, blinking at the over-bright light. I face the wide mirror and lift my T-shirt by its hem.
I read what he’s written backwards. A proof.
A simple proof, from the trigonometry book. I shouldn’t even remember it. He definitely shouldn’t. Unless he looked up the book later. Unless he read it again and again. But why would he do that?
The answer filters into my mind like sunlight through dust motes, caught and held before shining again. Of course the numbers haven’t left me. There they are, as clear to me as the sun.
Damon must not have doubted that.
As I stare at the scrawled ink on my skin, my doubt fades away. It’s replaced by the confidence that let me challenge Damon Scott to a poker game. The confidence that’s let me survive the west side all these years.
And now Damon has gone to kill his own father. To become the monster he’s fought his whole life. Will he ever stop saving me? If he becomes a murderer, he might. If he kills Jonathan Scott, he’ll lose his last shred of humanity. I have to protect him the way he protected me.
Chapter Sixteen
Somehow I went for years without seeing Damon Scott.
He hovered low in my mind, the same quiet and insistent worry that I have knowing children in the city are hungry, knowing animals are in pain. He wasn’t my waking thought, my nighttime prayer. He didn’t take up every moment.
The next five days may as well be eternity. I stay locked up with Avery in Gabriel’s home, which may as well be a castle for how heavily guarded it is. It’s hard for me to eat, to sleep, because I know that Damon Scott is on the verge of something horrible.
Avery takes very good care of me, like he thought she would. She doesn’t question my worry or my lack of appetite, thinking I’m still recovering from the trauma.
My body heals more every day.
There’s something I want more than my strength, than my pale skin in its former smoothness. Only the guilty can understand this. I want redemption. There’s an emotional debt more pressing than money.
It was one thing to give Damon up when I was a child, alone in the trailer.
Another when I’m almost a grown woman.
I need to get out of this place, but I can’t do it alone, not with trained guards patrolling the perimeter. I watch them out the window when Avery thinks I’m mostly comatose, but that doesn’t reveal any answers. They seem to vary up their schedules, as if they know someone might try to enter.
As if they know someone might try to escape.
Avery doesn’t mean me any harm, that much I believe. But she’s as much a prisoner here as I am. Neither of us can leave. She’s the only one with any access to the outside world—a cell phone that she carries with her almost everywhere.
I know she texts her friend from college, because she tells me about some of them.
Other times her brow furrows, worry tinting her hazel eyes. She doesn’t tell me what she texts when she gets like this. I don’t know what she’s afraid of, but it’s something.
She looks up from her phone, her gaze beseeching.
“Come for a walk with me,” she says.
It’s something we’ve done before. Walks around the mansion. Through the garden. There’s even a maze made out of hedges. I swear, the things rich people think of to get rid of their money. It’s like they don’t know what to do with it all.