Page 25 of Wreck and Ruin

“Oh, yeah, how so?” I challenge, raising an eyebrow. I’m not sure what she sees in me that I can’t, but she clearly isn’t looking hard enough.

“Because you aren’t. You could’ve hurt me, and yet, you haven’t.”

“Yet,” I counter.

“You won’t,” she snaps back. An order.“You're not like them.” I know bythem, she means those mother fuckers who hurt her that night.

My jaw tightens, and an uncontrollable rage begins to simmer in my chest, surging through my entire body with the memory of her screams as they tortured and raped her echoes through my mind.

They will regret ever laying a fucking hand on her. I silently make a vow that I will remove their fucking arms with my teeth and feed them to the sharks the minute she lets me go.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Airlie. Iamjust like them. The question is, does that bother you?” While I may not be as callous about the sick and twisted things that I’ve done in my life, I am still guilty of them.

When she doesn’t answer, I decide it’s my turn to ask questions. Locking my anger somewhere deep down.

“Do you know where you are? This place. Do you know what it means to be here?” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, unanswering, staring into the darkness behind me.

“Those men said that this was Atlantar— something, but no, I don’t know what that means,” she says, not meeting my gaze.

“That's right. Atlantara. The place where the Devil lives. It’s a palace of skin and bones built with the blood of people like you and me,” her eyes shoot to mine, confusion etching her pretty features.

“Father says that the devil isn’t real.”

Father?

“Who is your Father?” I all but snap at her. My mind is racing a million miles per minute, but I say nothing more.

Waiting.

Regret pinches the corners of her eyes, and if I didn’t know better, I'd say that mentioning him at all was a mistake.

A long moment passes between us as she continues to stare into the shadows, lost to her thoughts.

“Father Grimsby. He isn’t really my father. He’s a priest.” My head is screaming, my heart on the brink of fucking failure while I conjure as much strength as I can not let her see my inner turmoil.

A fucking priest.

The church.

I want to beg her to let me go right the fuck now, but I remember her reluctance to hear me out the last time I begged for her to free me. Resulting in her not acknowledging me at all in the weeks that followed. I knew she had visited me by the water bottles and clams she left for me to eat, not to mention the housekeeping was always taken care of. I can’t say I’m over the moon about her doingthat.

Still, she has only just started trusting me enough to speak to me, and I don’t want to ruin it. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go back to staring at a cold stone wall all fucking day. Trapped in my head, fully aware of where I am, who is around me, and how completely fucking useless I am, not able to do a damn thing about any of it.

“There will come a time when you’ll have to let me go, Airlie,” I say, and her grip on my hands grows tighter.

She is scared, but not of me.

For me.

Everything I suspected about why she chained me up here has turned out to be true. She’s scared that she’ll lose me.

She won’t.

We may not have known each other for long, and the circumstances are not even remotely romantic or normal, but we don’t exactly havenormallives. Time is either always insignificant or the only thing that matters, and I wish I could assure her that we have all the time in the world.

The truth is, I’m not sure what tomorrow holds for us. By now, The Royal would be aware that Charles Jensen and co are well and truly dead, and they’d most likely be on high alert, suspecting it was a takedown. It was, but they won’t be sure.

The last thing we want is for them to start evacuating because they won’t bother to take any victims with them. They’d burn this place down, along with every innocent person locked inside, and the thought of anything happening to Airlie is enough to send me fucking mad.

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