As Roarke pushed him aside, Summerset grabbed his arm. ‘Roarke, you should have told me what had been done to her.’
Roarke merely shook his head and kept going. ‘I’ll take care of her.’
He found her curled up tight, trembling. Emotions warred through him, anger, relief, sorrow, and guilt. He battled them back and lifted her gently. ‘It’s all right now, Eve.’
‘Roarke.’ She shuddered once convulsively, then curved into him as he settled back in the chair with her on his lap. ‘The dreams.’
‘I know.’ He pressed a kiss to her damp temple. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘They come all the time now, all the time. Nothing stops them.’
‘Eve, why didn’t you tell me?’ He tipped her head back to look at her face. ‘You don’t have to go through this alone.’
‘Nothing stops them,’ she repeated. ‘I couldn’t not remember anymore. And now I remember all of it.’ She rubbed the heels of her hands over her face. ‘I killed him, Roarke. I killed my father.’
Chapter Thirteen
He looked into her eyes, felt the tremors that still shook her. ‘Darling, you had a nightmare.’
‘I had a flashback.’
She had to be calm, had to be to get it all out. To be calm and rational, she had to think like a cop, not like a woman. Not like a terrorized child.
‘It was so clear, Roarke, that I can still feel it on me. Still feel him on me. The room in Dallas where he’d lock me. He’d always lock me in wherever he took me. Once I tried to get away, to run away, and he caught me. After that, he always got rooms high up, and locked the door from the outside. I never got to go out. I don’t think anyone even knew I was there.’ She tried to clear her raw throat. ‘I need some water.’
‘Here. Drink this.’ He picked up the glass Summerset had left beside the chair.
‘No, it’s a tranq. I don’t want a tranq.’ She let air in and out of her lungs. ‘I don’t need one.’
‘All right. No, I’ll get it.’ He shifted her, rose, caught the doubt in her eyes. ‘Just water, Eve. I promise.’
Accepting his word, she took the glass he brought back and drank gratefully. When he sat on the arm of the chair, she stared straight ahead and continued.
‘I remember the room. I’ve been having part of this dream for the past couple of weeks. Details were beginning to stick. I even went to see Dr. Mira.’ She glanced over. ‘No, I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t.’
‘All right.’ He tried to accept that. ‘But you’re going to tell me now.’
‘I have to tell you now.’ She took a breath, brought it all into her mind as she would any crime scene. ‘I was awake in that room, hoping he’d be too drunk to touch me when he came back. It was late.’
She didn’t have to close her eyes to see it: the filthy room, the blink of the red light through the dirty windows.
‘Cold,’ she murmured. ‘He’d broken the temperature control, and it was cold. I could see my breath.’ She shivered in reaction. ‘But I was hungry, too. I got something to eat. He never kept much around. I was hungry all the time. I was cutting the mold off some cheese when he came in.’
The door opening, the fear, the clatter of the knife. She wanted to get up, pace off the nerves, but wasn’t sure her legs were ready to support her.
‘I could see right away that he wasn’t drunk enough. I could see. I remember what he looked like now. He had dark brown hair and a face gone soft from drinking. He might have been handsome once, but that was gone. Broken capillaries in his face, in his eyes. He had big hands. Maybe it was just because I was small, but they seemed awfully big.’
Roarke lifted his hands to her shoulders, began to massage the tension. ‘They can’t hurt you now. Can’t touch you now.’
&
nbsp; ‘No.’ Except in the dreams, she thought. There was pain in dreams. ‘He got mad because I’d been eating. I wasn’t supposed to take anything without asking.’
‘Christ.’ He tucked the blanket more securely around her because she was still shivering. And found he wanted to feed her, anything, everything, so she would never think about hunger again.
‘He started hitting me, and hitting me.’ She heard her voice hitch, made the effort to level it. It’s just a report now, she told herself. Nothing more. ‘Knocked me down and hit me. My face, my body. I was crying and screaming, begging him to stop. He tore my clothes and rammed his fingers in me. It hurt, horribly, because he’d raped me the night before and I was still hurting from that. Then he was raping me again. Panting in my face, telling me to be a good girl and raping me. It felt like everything inside me was tearing. The pain was so bad I couldn’t take it anymore. I clawed at him. I must have drawn blood. That’s when he broke my arm.’
Roarke stood abruptly, paced away, jabbed the mechanism to open the windows. He needed air.