27
IRINA
Fingers stroked through my hair, the soft murmur of a girl hovering just beyond the fog in my brain.
Sweet, gentle.
Everything that seemed a world away from where I was.
Pain wasn’t a strong enough word to describe what I felt. There weren’t words for the agony inside my body. From the swelling on my face that made it even harder to see, to the rattling in my lungs. From the broken bones to the blood coating my thighs.
To my stomach, where blood seeped out of the hours-old wounds there.
I just wanted it to stop.
“Why did you have to go and do that?” Madison whispered, those fingers continuing to stroke through my hair that was matted with blood.
Blood from the hands that had carved through my flesh.
Naked like the rest of the women, I pressed my head farther into Madison’s lap. The women around us had spread out, sacrificing what little personal space they had to give me room to lie down.
All around me they murmured, whispering things they thought I couldn’t hear. But I did. I heard the sympathy in their voices even if I couldn’t see their faces.
In Darragh’s mind, I’d earned his brutality. I’d earned the way he’d mutilated me. Earned the obsession that had made him keep going, endlessly, until I’d hoped he would slit my throat and put me out of my misery.
“We’ve got to move!” a male voice said. The door to the basement shoved open, flooding the dark room with light. “Everybody up. Now.”
The women around me stood, moving to follow and leaving Madison and me alone on the floor. “Go,” I whispered, the words getting caught in my throat that had been scraped raw by my screams.
By the sounds he’d stolen from me when I tried to stay silent.
“You have to get up, Irina,” Madison said, slipping out from underneath my head. She was as careful as she could be, but my head dropped to the concrete floor with a thud, regardless, when I couldn’t muster the energy to support it.
There just wasn’t anything left for me to give.
She wedged her hands underneath me, lifting with all her strength and causing more pain to course through my body. I whimpered, shrinking back from the touch that I couldn’t tolerate.
“Please get up,” she begged, dropping to her knees at my side as the men ushered the last of the straggling women out of the room.
“Let’s fucking go,” Darragh snapped as he stepped up behind me. The rest of the men whispered harshly, their voices panicked.
“She can’t move,” Madison explained, cowering away when he moved to strike her.
“Get your fucking ass on the truck,” Darragh snapped at her, his hands sliding beneath my body to lift me into the air. He draped me over his shoulder, drawing another scream from me as it crushed whatever he’d broken inside me. Madison fled to follow the other women, running from the vehemence in Darragh’s voice.
“You gonna make it, Princess?” he asked as he took the stairs two at a time, jostling my body as much as he possibly could. His tone was mocking. My suffering entertained him. “Bet you’ve never been fucked that good before.”
I winced, screwing my eyes shut as the light of day assaulted them when we stepped outside the back doors. He hoisted me onto the back of the truck, letting the other women reach out to grab me when I couldn’t stop myself from rolling right back off again.
Darragh held my gaze for a moment until it drifted down to the wounds on my stomach. He touched a gentle finger to the scabbing at the edges, sliding it over the cuts until he found the fresh, fleshy part of me that hadn’t stopped bleeding.
Those fingers dug into me, pressing through my wound until I screamed in agony. When he drew his fingers away, he slid them into his mouth and sucked them clean.
Just like he had the knife.
“I like having you inside of me as much as I like being inside of you, Pet. I’ll see you soon,” he promised, grabbing one of the doors of the truck and swinging it shut. The eighteen-wheeler groaned as they closed, plunging us back into darkness.
I liked it better in the dark, where I couldn’t see people staring at me like I was damaged.
Even if I was—completely and beyond repair—I didn’t want to know it.
I didn’t want to know anything at all.