Page 10 of Heal Me

It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t think further about it as Dorin carries me out of the room.

8

LAVINIA

I must have fallen asleep because when I wake up, I’m on the mattress in my cell, and someone is washing me with a warm cloth. The calm motions are soothing, and I keep my eyes closed for a while. My body doesn’t seem to want to wake up anyway. My limbs are sluggish in a calm sort of way, and my brain seems to have turned off. Post-orgasmic bliss.

Warm, big hands lift my arms and legs, turn me onto my stomach and back again as they wash me. They seem strong and capable. Protective even.

As I slowly come to and memories rush in—the zaps, the helplessness, and the violations—I force my eyes open and pull away from the big hands.

“Uh-uh,” someone scolds. My savior and tormentor. The man who took me from my pathetic existence and saved me from myself. But also the man who violated my body.

And made me feel this deep-seated peace.

No, what he did was wrong.

Pushing up to sit, I lean against the wall and direct my sleepy eyes at him. “Why did you do that?”

“What?” he asks, dipping the terry cloth in a bucket of water.

I lift my shoulders. “Everything.” Shame clogs my throat as I try to put voice to the things he did.

“The electrotherapy?” he asks, taking my arm from where I’m hugging my waist. When I try to pull it back, he simply tightens his grip. It’s not punishing, but firm enough to let me know I have no say.

“Everything,” I repeat. “Touching me like that. Making me—” I gulp against the thick knot in my throat. “Making me come.”

“It’s the way we do things around here.”

Tears well in my eyes—they seem to be doing that a lot since he found me and I wept in his arms. I bite my lips to hide the tremor that threatens to pull me under. I watch my arm as he moves the gray cloth over my pale skin. The bandages are gone, and the vision that remains is a disturbing but familiar one. Angry red cuts slash across my milky skin, and a new well of shame crashes over me and makes me huddle in the corner.I did that.

I try to close my eyes, but my mind refuses to let me forget. It assaults me with memories of the blood spilling into the clear water, tainting it and surrounding me in the kind of violence I badly wanted to escape. So I open my eyes again and try to focus on something else. His hands. They are big and strong with prominent veins that bulge beneath olive-toned skin. Moving my eyes up, I watch his arm, the thick layer of hair covering his skin, and the strong muscles that bulge as he dips the cloth in the bucket and wrings it. As I watch closely, I notice marks beneath the layer of hairs. Scars. Scars that are very similar to mine. Thin cuts and round blotches.

I don’t realize what I’m doing before my fingers graze his skin and he jerks his arm away.

“I’m sorry,” I say, drawing my hand back.

He watches me warily for a moment, the faint lines on his forehead deepening and his whole stance tightening. But as our eyes interlock, something changes in his expression. His eyesroam down my body, the many scars and burns marring my skin the same way it does his.

His taut expression slowly softens, and he moves his arm back to grab the cloth he dropped in the bucket. He stares down at the dripping water as he wrings the cloth anew. “It’s okay. You can touch them.”

My breath shudders past my lips as I reach out and graze one of the scars. He stiffens for a second, and I pause, hovering right above the old cut, just barely touching him.

“What happened?” I whisper.

“A knife,” he simply says, taking my other arm to continue washing even though he’s already cleaned that one.

“Whose knife?”

He sighs and closes his eyes, opens them back up, and faces me with a look that seems to hold a world of hurt. “My dad’s.”

Words fail me as I imagine a little boy getting cut and burned by the person they should trust the most in the world. When I finally do speak, the words seem ridiculous, but it’s all my brain can think to say. “Did he smoke?” I ask as I move my fingers to one of the round protrusions on his skin.

He nods as he watches the mark I’m hovering at.

Looking down at my stomach and the round scars there, I say in a low voice, “So did Zoltan.”

An angry growl startles me, making me look up and see a flicker of something feral pass over Dorin’s features just before he grabs my jaw and leans so close I can’t see anything but his eyes. In a deep, firm voice, he says, as if it’s a promise more important than the very air he breathes, “I’ll kill him.”

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