“How are you doing, Maggie?”
She shrugged again. “I’m okay. I’ve been sleeping.”
“Have the pills helped?”
“Yeah. They…keep the dreams away.”
“Do you take them every night?” When she hesitated, he looked up from his notepad, arching one thin, white eyebrow at her. “Please tell me the truth, princess.”
She wondered if he gave all his clients nicknames. That was what she got for buying a hoodie with an image of a princess in a pink dress standing over a bloody dragon’s corpse that read “I Can Save Myself” on it for her first appointment with him.
Well. Her first appointment with him outside the hospital.
She still couldn’t remember a whole lot of those weeks she spent strapped to a cot, plugged full of drugs. “I don’t like how they make me feel the next day. Like I’m stuck in a fog. I only take them when I really need to sleep.”
“Is that the only reason you don’t take them?”
She couldn’t hold his silver gaze. She glanced back down and tucked a strand of her long dark hair behind her ear. She had just finished dying the tips neon orange, and she was having fun twisting the dyed portions around her fingers. It made her smile. And she loved anything that made her smile. “No. Not the only reason.”
“Why, then?”
“I…don’t want to be like this. I want to remember. And if the dreams are part of it—if they’re a clue—then I need to dream.”
“Are you always afraid when you dream?”
A hand pressed to the back of her neck and pushed her against the wall. The flaking paint crumbled from the impact, chips of it falling to the floor. This place had been abandoned for many, many years.
But in the same moment, it was brand new.
The paint was shining and clean. It was flaking and abandoned. The floors were swept and scrubbed. They were littered with scraps of paper and detritus from the crumbling ceiling tiles.
New. Old.
Abandoned. Inhabited.
But one thing remained the same. Him.
He pinned her there. Hot breath washed over her skin as he ghosted his lips over her throat. She had run for her life from the monster in the shadows that was always snapping at her heels. Possessive. Needy. He had caught her.
He ground his hips against her, pressing her body firmly against the wall. Breathlessly, she gasped, pressing her hands to the wall that was both decrepit and immaculate.
Then and now.
The monster had caught her in its jaws. She had crept in a shattered window. Or had she picked the lock on the room and tried to sneak away? Was she breaking in, or breaking out?
Both.
He pressed against her again, and she shut her eyes. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was him.
She had run.
And he had caught her.
And now she was his.
“Maggie?”
She lowered her head, letting her hair fall over her cheeks. Maybe it would hide her blush. Maybe. But she doubted it. “No, I’m not always afraid.”