Page 39 of Heal Me

“I’ll fix you.” The confident determination in his voice is almost shocking as it breaks through the silence. “I don’t know how, but I’ve done it before. I promise I will heal you this time too.”

25

LAVINIA

“It’s time for therapy,” Dorin says when he comes into my cell sometime after breakfast the next day.

I stare at him with blank eyes, thinking I didn’t hear right. But I did. His words were clear as day. “Therapy?” I finally manage.

“Therapy,” he confirms. “I promised to make you feel better. This will help.”

That’s what he said the first time. But this time, I know it’s not real therapy. I know how fucked up and wrong it is. I want to say that it won’t help, but those words would feel like a lie. Because Dorin’s fucked up brand of therapy has been all I’ve wanted since he stopped touching me—until someone else took me from my cell and touched me.

That guard who dragged me from my cell, caned me, and fucked my ass.

Suddenly, it’s all I see, those ghastly memories. The room draws back yet closes in all at once, my vision blurs, and breathing becomes like heaving underwater. Words assault me, vile and malicious.

You’re not so special now, are you? Just a dirty whore getting used the way she deserves—fucked in your dirty little ass like a useless…

Squeezing my eyes shut, I cover my ears, but it does nothing to shut out the cruel voice. And then Zoltan is there too.

Beg me, bitch! Cry for me! Come for me, fucking slut!

“No, no, no,” I pant, burrowing my head between my legs as the memories come rushing back with a vividness I haven’t experienced in months. The horrible pain—the knife across my ribs, the cane ripping into my skin. The gut-wrenching humiliation as some stranger forced himself into me in an alley, or in a sordid dungeon room, or when I willingly let my abuser slide inside me and fuck me, all just for a little hope that always was hopeless.

I can’t even remember who did what. It all blurs together. The faces, the voices, the pain, and the despair.

“Please, make it stop, just drug me again. Just kill me.”

“Look at me,” a voice demands, ripping into my despair.

“No.” I can’t face another man who wants to harm and humiliate me. I just can’t.

Hands carefully grab my wrists and pull them from my face. “Look at me, Lavinia,” the voice repeats. Noslut,whore,orbitch.

“Please,” I beg as I peel my eyes open and stare at another man who can easily force me into submission.

But as I watch him, it’s neither terror nor despair I feel. Blinking rapidly, I flicker my gaze across the cruel scar, the rough features, and the hard eyes—the man more scary than any of the others. But most of all, the man who found me at my lowest and saved me. The man who breathed new life into me.

“Dorin,” I whisper, my lips suddenly trembling. “I can’t—I don’t—” I drop my head, suddenly bone-tired.

He scoops me off the floor, into his arms, cradling me against his strong body. I burrow my head into his shoulder, and I keep it there as he carries me from the cell, down the halls, into a new room, and sets me down on some kind of table.

Carefully lifting my head, I look around. We’re in the medical room—the one where he administered “electrotherapy”—and I’m in the strange gynecologist’s chair. A shudder rolls through me, but I don’t try to protest as Dorin presses me into the chair and starts strapping me in.

“I’ll obey,” I say weakly as he pulls a long strap over my chest. “You don’t need to do that.”

He pauses and looks at me with a solemn expression. “No, but you need it.”

I give a slight shake of my head, not following.

“You need the helplessness to let go.”

“I don—” I swallow the negation. Because I think he’s right. No matter how much helplessness I’ve been subjected to, no matter how much it has destroyed me, it seems to be the only thing that will make me forget the pain. So I change my words. “I don’t understand this.”

“Neither do I.” He grabs my hand to strap it into the wrist cuff at the side. He’s silent as he goes about restraining my other wrist too and strapping my legs to the stirrups. Then he comes to stand at my side and looks into my eyes as he says, “Nothing has made sense since I found you in that tub.” He grabs the bite block off the side table and holds it before my mouth. “Open up.”

I stare at him as his words send a new wave of bewilderment through my mind, making me see things from Dorin’s perspective. If those pictures of the toothless girl the guard showed me really was Dorin’s doing, he is not a good man. If anything, he’s a monster. Yet somehow, he’s been protective and caring of me. I know he has felt this weird bond between us too.

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