He shook his head, rubbed his arms as if he could remove the blood from where they’d taken his skin. “They nearly killed Reaper. Broke Czar’s arm, a couple of ribs, they beat him so bad. The girls were a mess. Really bad shape. All of us were. I don’t think I had any skin left. Reaper and I couldn’t get down to the dungeon. We couldn’t walk. We were crawling. The girls …” He broke off, shaking his head. “Alena. So little. Lana. What the fuck is wrong with people, Seychelle?”
“Come here, honey,” she whispered. She had moved to the wide couch, and she sat the way she did in her bed, her back to the arm so he could lie facedown, his head in her lap, arms around her hips, his body beside her.
He didn’t hesitate to unbutton her jeans and give himself the comfort of her bare skin. He needed it. She didn’t stop him. She never did. Seychelle always seemed to know when he needed her strength. He breathed in her scent, that faint fragrance of wild strawberries and honey that somehow always transferred to his tongue. Her fingers right away were on his scalp, massaging, taking away the demons that were in his head, allowing him to breathe when his lungs had been raw and burning.
Her belly was wet, all that silky skin. He hadn’t known his face was wet—but she had. She’d seen. She simply had moved to the couch and used her soft voice to beckon him, like the angel she was. She never made a big deal out of anything. His woman. He rubbed the scruffy bristles along his jaw over her belly and took her in with another deep breath.
“You’re my fuckin’ world, you know that, woman?”
She didn’t respond, she just continued to massage his head with those firm strokes. He felt love in every single one. Caring. She took care of him. He mattered to her. There was an intimate feel to the way she touched him. It wasn’t sexual, although there was a kind of sensuality to their connection. It was more the intimacy of intense caring. She shook him every time she touched him the way she did. She had from the very first time he ever met her.
“I just knew I didn’t ever want to be like them. I didn’t want anything about me to be like them. Everything about them was wrong. I vowed I wasn’t going to cooperate with them ever again, no matter how many times they took the skin off my back. I was used to pain. I was used to rape. They couldn’t break me. I knew they couldn’t.”
He rubbed his face over her belly again, mostly to get rid of the moisture leaking down his face. Fuck that. Fuck them. He had sworn he would never give them the satisfaction of seeing him broken.
“They aren’t here, Savage,” Seychelle reminded him gently, her fingers whispering over his temple and then his scalp in that way of hers that told him far more than words ever could. A declaration. “I’m here. It’s just the two of us. We can both break into a million pieces, remember? That was our promise to one another. We’ll find every piece and put us back together. I’ll do that for you, and you do that for me. We’re safe with each other. I give you my tears. You can give me yours.”
He rubbed his jaw along her soft belly once more. The bristles left faint red marks, his marks, along with those wet trails in the silk of her skin, but she never once stopped him. He kissed the marks and dipped his tongue in her belly button, closing his eyes, savoring the taste and texture of his woman. The closeness of her.
Safety was relative. He didn’t want her to know that even surrounded by his brothers and sisters, even as they grew, toughened by the thousands of drills they’d done down in the dungeon to strengthen their bodies and build muscle—push-ups, sit-ups, running in place or around the room, all with one of them on shoulders or back—that still hadn’t saved them. They’d practiced martial arts, every kind of hand-to-hand combat skill they were taught, day in and day out. They still weren’t safe.
“When they wanted my cooperation to train, they would take Reaper to another room and torture him until I did what they said. I became the Whip Master, and they burned that into my skin. Permanently. They knew it would shame me when I faced the others. I was a teen by that time. Absinthe and Demyan—he was Absinthe’s older brother—would whisper to me that I was the best at what I did. That I liked doing it. That no one could be better, ever. It was the only way I could get by. It sickened me to train those girls. At the same time …”