Page 46 of Crushed
CHAPTER 14
Cormac
Scarlett’s body trembled against me, her chin lowered to her chest. She was dripping wet, droplets from her hair and face running down her naked body and soaking my clothes. I held her tight in a locking embrace, to remind her that she had survived. It was over.
“You’re safe,” I repeated. “Breathe for me.”
The words choked in her chest and she let out a small wail, then trembled in my arms. I grabbed a blanket from underneath the couch, wrapping her inside of it. It was humbling to hold her like that. The woman I had always known as strong and fierce, broken down into an object that I could hold, that I could tend to, an object made tiny and frail. I made her like that, and yet she still wanted my touch. Even craved it. She leaned into me and I kissed her forehead. She burrowed into my chest deeper, careful to keep her nose and mouth always open. I didn’t blame her.
What kind of sick fuck does this to someone and gets off on it? Fighting my fingers into Scarlett’s cunt had been rich, feeling her squirm around me, tightening her grip, and yet she had been fighting the whole time, begging to get away. I hadn’t stopped. I had forced her to keep going. Because I wanted to see how far she would go. How far I could force her. I had even gone so far as to shove my dick in her mouth before she could get a full breath of air.
But now,nowshe lay still in my arms, a helpless little thing. Her breathing mellowed. Steadier, and steadier now. I stroked her arms, her neck, her shoulders, squeezed her calves, massaged her body, urging my physical touch to remind her that she had conquered the worst of it. She was stronger than she ever realized. I had faith in her, but I never thought she would last that long. She surprised me yet again.
She sat up on the long velvet couch, but still leaned against me. Though it may not have hit her yet, the resistance was a strain on her body. The fight or flight response and a body pumped full of adrenaline would leave her drained of energy. Tomorrow, she would be sore, as if she had completed a strenuous workout. Tonight, she would fall asleep almost instantly.
“I used to have these nightmares,” she said quietly. “Nightmares about drowning. Sinking to the bottom of a lake. Never being able to get to the surface.” I ran a hand down her back. “I know, I know. Bodies float. But sometimes, I’d be tied to a giant boulder. Or trapped inside of a car. In a cage.” She forced shaky laughter, then looked up at me. “It always happens when I get nervous about something. Something I’m dreading.”
“Did you dread meeting me here today?” I asked.
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “The last time the nightmares started, I had just started working at the Dahlia District.” She shrugged. “I think it has to do with failure. Or rather, fear of failure.”
“Were you afraid that you would fail me tonight?”
She shook her head again. “I knew it wouldn’t be like that.” I turned my chin. She had been a blubbering mess, yet she had always had confidence in herself to face her fear? “I trusted you. I still do.”
Trust was the prize I always wanted, but never truly had. The closest I ever came was control, the ability to command the soul into the darkest realm in order to see the light. And the truth was that it never got this far with any other partner I had. Be it an entertainment server at the Dahlia District or a woman I had met through other means, each partner dropped out before they reached this, where I questionedmylimits. What was I willing to put another person through?
“I’m afraid of you,” Scarlett said. Those red lips, faded now, were supple and inviting, lighting me on fire. She was teasing me with those words, knowing how it would get to me. “You’re scary as hell. When you said ‘Any last words?’ I didn’t know what the hell to say. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t going to die. That you wouldn’t let me. But I also knew I couldn’t let you down.”
I studied her. Her dark brown eyes turned to a radiant copper, but when I touched her cheek, she was cold. I pulled another blanket from a hidden compartment under the couch and threw it over her shoulders, tucking her safely inside.
“What about you?” she asked, nodding at my wet outfit. I had forgotten about it.
“I’ll change later,” I said. “So if not fear of failure, what was it about?”
She wrapped the arms of the blanket around her tighter. I unbuttoned my shirt and set it to the side of us. She glanced at my muscular physique, distracted by my body. I grinned, and she closed her eyes for a moment.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” she said, “But I couldn’t back out. Couldn’t let myself call out those words to signal the guards.” She sucked in a breath. “It was hard though.”
Yet she made it sound simple. Her only task, then, was to avoid triggering the security. And she had done that singular task well.
It didn’t matter if she fought me, because she knew that that’s what I wanted. A clever girl wrapped in red lipstick.
“My parents drowned when I was younger,” she said. I turned towards her and she lifted her shoulders. “The coroner said that they lost consciousness on impact. But the seatbelts did their jobs, you know? For the most part, anyway.” She slumped down. “I always wondered about that. How it would feel to wake up. When you know you’re too late.”
A lump grew in my throat. I stayed silent. Had I made it worse for her? She was strong; there was no doubt in my mind about that. But part of the appeal of what I did was the gravity of its impact. Knowing that she would truly be affected by it,ifshe let herself go there.
Yet thinking of how much she had already suffered when it came to her parents and their passing, I didn’t understand. Why hadn’t she called the guards?
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Ten.”
With so many bodies of water near the coast, it wasn’t uncommon for people to die from drowning in Sage City. Had I read about her parents once? She wasn’t the same child whose parents had died tragically; she was an adult now, a young woman that had so much strength to give. She still had much to learn, years to conquer what came towards her. To change and to grow. But I admired her.
“I saw pictures of their bodies once,” she said. “Puffy. Purple skin. Yellow eyes. Their skin wrinkled in sheets.” She shook the image away. “They didn’t even look like my parents. More like stuffed dolls that had the same hair color and shreds of the same clothes.”
When she thought of her parents, did she imagine those pictures of them, and those alone? How could she not? I was grateful, so fucking grateful, that Rose had never seen her mother like that. My late wife had passed in a hospital bed, hooked up to so many IVs that it was impossible to see where she lay underneath them. The hospital room was dark to prevent further seizures, but that didn’t stop the stroke. Rose had been crying in the corner while the neonatal nurse attended to her. I had held my wife’s hand until the doctors and nurses shoved me away.
