Ignoring the way my blood had begun to boil, I kept reading. And then I wished I hadn’t. There was apparently one thing she did miss from her foster care, according to her younger self—me.
“I miss Derek,” she’d written bluntly as nine-year-olds were apt to do. “I liked him.”
Reading it sent a jolt of something acutely painful through my chest. I could vaguely remember the times the little redhead had bugged to sleep in my room, and I’d told her no, thinking it was the right thing to do. My parents wouldn’t have approved, no matter how innocent it was. How many times had I sent her back to her room…to my father?
I felt nauseous and angry, but it was directed inward this time, and I had no idea what to do with it. I should have known, or asked, or done…something. Rage coursed through my veins, and I wanted to hurt the man who’d hurt her, but there wasn’t a god damned thing I could do about it. My father was dead and had been for a very long time.
And it was for that death, and for the death of my mother, that I’d been hell-bent on seeking revenge since I was thirteen years old. What the hell was I supposed to do now? Donovan had broken into my home, shot my father point-blank in the forehead, then my mother, and then he’d run out of the house with his daughter beneath his arm.
With no other family, I had been sent to hell, to the care of the vilest people I’ve ever known. If it hadn’t been for Marcos, I would have spent many more years there, locked in a dirty basement, a half-starved punching bag for the asshole and a whore for the bitch.
Was I just supposed to forget about it all because of what my father may or may not have done? Let bygones be bygones? It just wasn’t in the repertoire of things I could do.
But for the first time since that horrid night, I hesitated. Maybe Donovan still deserved to die, but his daughter? Did she deserve the fate I’d set out for her? But what choice did I have? Marcos already had a buyer—he was in the process of arranging the deal. I couldn’t back out. It just wasn’t done.
He might not kill me if I set the girl free, but he’d make sure she wasn’t free for long. And while he wouldn’t kill her, he’d make her wish she was dead. The only thing I could do was make sure she was trained. Make sure she was equipped with what a slave would need to survive her new master. And then perhaps, when her buyer tired of her, I could buy her back, though freedom might mean very little to her by then.
Fuck!
Against my better judgment, I turned my attention back to the journal and flipped through the pages. The entries were sporadic, usually several months between them. She talked about me less and less until about halfway through when I stopped seeing my name altogether. But halfway—for years after she’d been taken, she’d thought about me. Damn.
The last few entries were late in her high school years. What she wrote about most was a dream she’d been having recurrently, one that obviously made her uncomfortable, though she provided no details until the second to last entry. And then I understood why it had bothered her. Taken, punished, forced to submit, to perform, over and over again. She couldn’t understand why the dream kept coming. And worse, she couldn’t understand why she responded the way she did, why she couldn’t get it out of her mind or why it set her body on fire.
Fuck me.
No wonder she’d been unable to stop her body from responding to the things I’d done to her—they were what she’d fantasized about for years!
Reluctantly, but unable to stop myself, I turned to the last entry, and it was the same, elaborating on the same fantasy that played in her mind night after night, but there was one more thing. One little detail that had me rock hard in three seconds flat.
“I never know who it is,” the entry read, “but the eyes; they’re always the same, and there’s something so familiar about them, comforting. Unique. Vivid blue. Vivid blue. Blue…blue…blue,” she wrote over and over again down the length of the page as if she’d been racking her brain for an answer, for the owner of those eyes.
It was cocky to presume, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t really paid attention to how much time she’d spent looking at me—at my eyes, specifically—but it fits now. Some part of her recognized me, and she’d been trying desperately to figure out how.
But that also meant she’d been having naughty fantasies about me? For years? What the hell?