Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
I should feel something about that. Relief, maybe. Or triumph. The woman who controlled me, manipulated me, used me as her personal attack dog for a decade—she’s gone. I should be celebrating.
Yet, I just feel strangely hollow.
Julia was a monster. I know that. I know that so fucking well. She tortured Mia, ordered Cal’s death at my hands, treated me like property instead of a person. But she was also the only constant in my life since Emma died. She was there when I woke up confused and terrified after whatever they did to me. She talked me through the nightmares, the blackouts, the moments when I wasn’t sure what was real. She told me I was special. Important. Necessary.
She told me I was hers.
And now she’s dead on the floor of that facility, killed by the woman I chose over her.
I know Mia did the right thing and the only thing, that Julia would have never let either of us out of their alive, that she would have destroyed me in the end if she couldn’t have me the way she wanted. But it doesn’t make things any less complicated. In fact it only makes it more so.
“Nate?” Mia say quietly. “I think you can rinse now.”
I stare at my hands that have been working in that conditioner over and over again.
“Of course,” I say, snapping back to the present, shoving my mess of feelings aside. I get her under the spray, rinsing it out, then when she steps out of the shower, I go ahead and remove the rest of my suit. Mia modestly looks away from my nudity and covers herself in a towel and leaves the bathroom to give me privacy and the idea that we might be strangers to each other now feels like a stain that no amount of soap and hot water can scrub away.
The owners of this cottage have excellent taste in first aid supplies. After I get out of the shower and wrap a towel around my waist, I find a full kit under the bathroom sink—bandages, antiseptic, butterfly closures, even a few prescription painkillers that expired two years ago but will have to do.
Mia sits on the edge of the massive bed in the master bedroom, now wrapped in a bathrobe that’s too big for her, her wet hair dripping onto the collar. She looks ruined. In some ways it’s hard to reconcile that with the way she fought her way out of that facility. It’s not too hard for me to take down a bunch of trained guards, but she did it over and over again, through more pain than I can imagine.
“This is going to sting,” I warn her, dabbing antiseptic on the worst of the cuts.
She winces. “You don’t need to warn me.”
“Right. Sorry. Just—”
“Stop apologizing and fix me,” she says with a small smile.
So I fix her. Or I try to. I clean every wound I can find, close the ones that need closing, bandage the ones that need bandaging. Her wrists are the worst—raw and weeping where the restraints chewed through skin—and I wrap them carefully in clean gauze, trying not to think about how she got them.
Trying not to hear her screams in my imagination.
“How many times you’ve done this for me already,” she murmurs as I tape down the last bandage.
I pause, then continue, guilt pinching my heart because the last time I fixed her up was when I was keeping her captive in my penthouse. “Sorry.”
“Again, don’t apologize. It’s a good skill to have. I’m just glad I could help you practice.”
I shake my head at her. “I don’t need the practice. Some things you never forget. I did a lot in the war. Patched a lot of guys in the field, kind of like a medic. Felt good, you know, to help instead of…” I sit back, surveying my work. “You should eat something. And take these.” I shake two of the expired painkillers into her palm. She dry-swallows them with ease.
Then I pull back the covers of the bed, dust flying in the air from disuse, and make her get under them. Thankfully she’s taking my orders pretty well, though I think maybe she’s just too weak to be snarky about it.
My suit won’t take long to dry, it’s been designed that way, but in the interim I find another robe in the house and put it on, then head to the kitchen to try and find something for Mia to eat.
I find the kitchen well-stocked with non-perishables—canned soup, crackers, peanut butter, the kind of stuff that survives a winter in an empty house. I heat up the soup and bring it to her in bed, and she eats slowly, mechanically, like she’s forgotten how to taste.
“We can’t stay long,” she says between spoonfuls. “They’ll be looking for us.”