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I sink into him, my resistance slipping away like a boat being carried by a strong current. This is the best feeling I’ve had since that guard came in here and shattered my world and the blissful illusion I was living. I’ve been miserable ever since, and I know I will be again, but right now, I’m not. I need to hold on to that for as long as I can, because this might be my last chance to get it. It doesn’t matter whether Dorin still intends to sell me, or if the punishment shifted something within him the same way it did me. I need this—his safe stability and freeing brutality—as long as I can get it.
“Why?” Dorin asks, breaking the silence with a soft whisper.
“Why what?” I croak, my voice hoarse from all the screaming and crying.
“Why did you thank me?”
Did I thank him?For a moment, I don’t even remember. I search through the mental images of the punishment before I recall it.
The overwhelming gratitude comes rushing back with a clarity that has my chest shaking with a long inhale. I’m not sure why it’s there. It doesn’t make sense that I thanked him for the pain and brutality or the way he stripped down my self-control, but somehow, that’s what stirs the gratitude. Because that pain broke me out of my shell. It was like a knife through the stiff barriers, tearing through my flesh but allowing the searing despair a way to escape. It created an entryway for his comfort to seep in and fill the barren emptiness on the inside. I don’t know what it is about Dorin, but the way he delivers the pain and humiliation builds me up rather than tearing me down, unlike all the other pain I’ve suffered throughout my life.
“I don’t know,” I say, having no idea how to put those emotions into words. “For… hurting me.”
Pressing a hand to my cheek, he turns my head to face him. The dim ceiling light casts a careful glow into our corner, lighting up the unmarred side of his face and leaving the scar in the shadows. He looks almost confused, maybe even vulnerable, as he searches my face for some kind of explanation.
“You shouldn’t thank me,” he finally says. “I destroy everything I touch. I don’t want to do that to you.” Something about the way he says it makes it feel like it’s the most honest, personal thing he’s ever told me.
I just stare back at him for a while—his rough features, the hard look in his eyes, and the thick scar camouflaged by the shadows. He’s evil and brutality incarnate. I believe it when he says he destroys everything. But not me. Somehow, he mends me. It’s like when a negative times a negative equals a positive—his brokenness and mine, tangled together, somehow heal instead of harm.
“You’re not destroying me,” I say. “You’re healing me.”
His thick brows draw together in confusion. “I’m not. You want to die. So badly. I think you’d actually do it this time if I let you.”
“That’s not because of you.” I swallow hard, wanting to throw all the blame on him. That would be the easiest thing to do and more than justified. But the way I got here stopped mattering long ago, before I even knew I was kidnapped. What truly broke me was that guard, the way he crushed the illusion and shattered my slowly mending hope. If Dorin had eased me into the truth, I might have coped somehow. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Dorin wasn’t the one to truly break me.
He goes quiet for a while, deep in thought as his gaze goes distant.
“Do you still want me to kill you?” A scary shadow descends over his face as he focuses on me again. “To beat you to death with my baton?”
It’s my turn to watch him with confusion. But then realization strikes as I remember what he said when he dragged me off to be punished. “I didn’t want you to beat me to death,” I say in a weak voice.
He lifts his brows in disbelief.
“I didn’t. I wanted to take the punishment so you wouldn’t beat her.The girl with the mask.” It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have wanted to die, but that wasn’t my motive in that very situation. The sweet escape of death didn’t even cross my mind when I saw my only friend cowering and scared to death.
He gives a stuttered shake of his head. “You actually wanted to take the punishment for her? To spare her?”
I nod.
He roams his eyes over my face as if searching for a lie. “Why?”
That single word seems to say everything I’ve subconsciously suspected about Dorin but couldn’t quite grasp. No one’s everloved him. Not truly. He doesn’t know how to love. His comfort has been staggered and detached from the first time he held me. It’s always felt sincere, but far from natural.
I shrug. “She’s my friend. The only person who cares about me.”
His jaw tightens at those last words, and I realize something else. It’s yet another thing that doesn’t add up, but it’s evident in every comforting action and sweet caress: Dorin cares about me. On some warped level, he has found it in his cold, cruel heart to care for me. I don’t know if it changes anything in the long run, but right now, it changes everything.
“I’m sorry,” I say, biting my lower lip as guilt washes through my fogged-over brain.
“For what?”
“For wanting to die on you.”
A quick contraction makes him blink as an almost terrified expression flashes across his face. “Do you still want to die?”
“I don’t know.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. He absently strokes me as quietness descends and wraps us in a calm bubble. I’m about to drift off when he speaks again.