Page 49 of Dark Knight

"Tilt your head back." Hudson's voice was the only thing that I could seem to hold on to and had been since the moment I first heard it in the locker room.

I did as he asked and felt warm water sluicing through my hair. He'd already cleaned off my face, removing whatever makeup I had been wearing along with blood that had come from the locker. His touch with the washcloth was gentle.

A vague sense of awareness told me he'd taken me from the club and that we had driven home. I'd even been somewhat aware that he had talked to Dylan, but everything felt like I was watching it from an outside perspective. It seemed like it was all happening to somebody else, not me.

Considering everything I had been through, it was almost funny that seeing some blood and a heart sent me over the edge. Still, as Hud worked to gently and thoroughly clean me as I'd come back to myself, reality crashed into me like a ton of bricks.

I knew that until whoever was behind this was caught and stopped, I wouldn't be able to leave the mansion again. If I was right and they were in the mansion, I was probably as good as dead. It felt inevitable, unlessI had Dylan or Hudson by my side at all times. Or Theo, though I didn't think he would be on board with that.

"You were at school before you were taken, right?"

The question surprised me. "Yeah."

"What were you studying?"

"Sociology." I wasn't trying to be terse, but a lot of shit had just gone down, and now he was asking me about school? It just seemed kind of random.

"Huh. What were you going to do with it?”

“I hadn't figured that out yet. I'm still just a freshman."

His hands stilled against my head for a moment. "You're only 18?"

"No, I'm 21." This was starting to head into the territory of things I didn't want to explain or talk about, especially not right now.

"Did you take some time off between high school and college?"

"No...I attended high school late." I knew as soon as I paused that he was going to ask about it, and I didn't really want to spill my entire life story to him. But if anybody had earned it, it was him and Dylan.

"Are you going to expand on that, or is that all I'm getting?" His tone was light, a little bit joking, but I could hear the genuine curiosity behind it.

At first, as I thought about the questions he was asking, I wondered if he was genuinely interested in me. Was he really trying to figure out who I was and what I had been through? I wasn’t sure since that seemed unlike him. After all, he'd made it clear from the beginning that he thought of me as an outsider, so why care now? Finally, I said, "I grew up in a unique situation. When I escaped from it, I had already aged out of what you would consider normal high school years, so I took some classes, got my GED, and applied for college. But when you haven't ever really been to school before, it takes a while to learn all that stuff, you know?"

"You hadn't been to school before? What was this unique situation?" His fingers rubbed over my scalp, making me feel more relaxed than ever. I think it was only because of that that the truth slipped from my mouth. "I grew up in a cult–the Children of Radiance. I ran away because I didn't like what they were doing. When I was found, I was taken to what essentially is a rehab program for people who have escaped cults. The problem is that it's more targeted to older individuals who went to the cult of their own accord. Not so much for young people who were forced to grow up in it without a choice."

"So this rehab program didn't really help?" Hud asked as his fingers moved from massaging my scalp to my neck and shoulders.

"No, they did, but the people who ran the program also took advantage of me in some ways. They did their best, though." I didn't want to tell him that they had also scarred me, that it felt like I had gone from one fire to another. I didn’t want him to know that there were other people I ran into in the program, ones who had left the same cult in recent years, who knew who I was and hated me. I couldn't tell him any of that without getting into other things that I wasn't prepared to talk about, so I kept my mouth shut.

He seemed to sense my reluctance and moved on to soaping a new washcloth before he began to wash my body. "So what were the beliefs that drove your cult?"

"Oh, you know, the typical stuff. Male superiority. Women are inferior–they’re supposed to help around the house and bear children and nothing else, that kind of thing." He grunted, and I wasn't sure if it was acknowledgement, agreement, or what it meant. Water rushed over my body as he rinsed me.

His hands gently pushed me down in the bathtub, making sure all of the soap was rinsed from my body. If I didn’t trust him so much, I might have thought he was about to drown me. For some reason, he had never really scared me. Hud and Dylan made me a little nervous, sure, but fear was never a part of the equation with them.

We fell quiet as he continued to soap different areas of my body before rinsing me off. He worked diligently, and even when I might have expected things to turn sexual, they didn't. This was a kind of intimacy I'd never experienced before. It was a type that I had no clue even existed.

I had never felt so cared for, or so precious, which was saying something since Hud hadn't known me all that long. This was the opposite of how my parents made me feel. The staff at Long Way Home, the rehab center, never came close to making me feel cared for like this.

Hud made sure every inch of me was taken care of before he said, "Come on, let's get you out of the tub before you turn into a goldfish." He moved around to the side of the tub and reached for a big, fluffy towel from the shelf before opening it and standing in front of the bathmat. "Do you need help getting up?" he asked.

I shook my head and pushed to my feet, standing there a moment while the water dripped from my body before I stepped out. His eyes never dipped to my body. I knew that because as soon as I stood from the water, his gaze seemed to be fixed on my face.

He wrapped the towel around me like a hug, leaving me feeling like I was being wrapped in a cloud. A cloud with very strong arms. He pulled me close and squeezed, giving me a gentle, but firm, hug. "I'll never let anybody hurt you," he whispered against my ear.

I smiled ruefully into his shoulder. "Don't make promises you're not in control of keeping."

"I'm the only one who’s allowed to mark that beautiful skin. Do you understand?" He pulled away and lifted my chin with his hand so I had to look him in the face.

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