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Warmth seeps into my cheeks. “Mason?”

Fear and apprehension infuse my name, and I battle to pull myself back from the edge. I blink and focus on her. Her beauty is compelling enough to ground me a little. Her hands on my face reel me in just that little bit more. Enough to formulate a single thought.

I place my hands over hers and shift one palm to kiss it, before I ask, “What happened after that?”

Anguish and despair contort her face and her shoulders slump.

“I don’t know,” she whispers raggedly. “I’ve never been able to remember. I woke up in the hospital three days later. According to the police, I was pumped full of sedatives and dumped somewhere on Mulholland Drive. A couple on a morning run found me and called the ambulance?—”

“Stop.” The black roar in my head makes saying the word difficult, but I need a break from the influx of rage eating me alive.

She purses her lips and nods, before her head drops to my shoulder. A tiny wounded sound pipes from her throat and slays me.

I surge to my feet with her in my arms. Her hands grip my nape and her breath washes my face as I stride with her to the bedroom. Silently, I undress her and carry her to the bathroom. She doesn’t need a shower and neither do I. In fact, I like smelling myself on her to the point where I wouldn’t care if she never showered after I fucked her.

But I need action, and while my preferred mode would be to fuck, I don’t trust myself not to visit a sliver of my rage on her. Memories of what I did to Cassie in the year after I lost Toby filter through my mind and for the first time in forever, I experience a tinge of shame and regret.

I turn on the shower and guide Keely beneath the spray. She hasn’t said a word since I stopped her from speaking, and I feel slight panic that I may have shut a door I didn’t intend to shut.

I smear gel over her body and wash her silky skin beneath the water. When she reaches out to brace her hands on my chest, I cage the flames leaping through my blood and force myself to continue.

“What’s his full name? The guy who invited you to the party.” My voice is a shiny scalpel, intent on honing the new rage inside me. To achieve that, I need names. Faces. Histories and vulnerabilities. Because I don’t intend to stop until I’ve achieved the same results I did five years ago, right before I exiled myself to Roraima. “Tell me his real name,” I urge calmly when I sense her reluctance.

Keely’s beautiful green eyes flicker and her cheeks, already pale from recounting her ordeal, whiten a little bit more. I gentle my fingers, let them slide over her skin, when all I want to do is rip out throats and piss on severed heads.

“His name was Leo Brummer.”

My fingers tense against her spine. “Was?”

She nods. “He was found in his apartment, overdosed on coke six months after that weekend.”

The scalpel freezes midair. “He’sdead?” The thought brings me no satisfaction whatsoever. In fact, I feel intensely aggrieved at the loss of prey.

She nods. “The detective who was handling my case called and told me.” She laughs, but it’s a bleak shadow of a sound that makes me want to bare my teeth. “I think he was convinced it’d bring me some sort of closure.”

There is no closure. Not when something this precious is ripped from you.

I turn her away from me so she doesn’t see my regret over what she has to live with for the rest of her life. “Besides Brummer, was there anyone else there that you knew?”

A new tension tightens her spine. When she remains silent, I glide my hand to her nape and massage until she sighs. She knows without me having to insist that I’m waiting for an answer.

“My psychology professor was there that night.”

I sense something more. “And?”

“And in relation to what happened to me, I can’t say whether he was involved or not. Leo is the only one I can state with any accuracy who meant me any harm that night.”

“Everyone in that godforsaken place meant you harm. You were taken there for the sole purpose of being taken against your will,” I snap.

She flinches and I tug her into my arms. “Dammit. I’m sorry, kitten.”

She rests her head against me for a minute, then she steps back and reaches for the soap. “My turn.”

I allow her the mundane task of washing my body, and we leave the bathroom a few minutes later, clean but still tarnished with our dark pasts.

My arms open to her the moment we’re in bed, and her readiness to crawl onto me helps me contain the rattling cages.

I slide my hands up and down her soft body, unable to get anywhere near enough to touching her. The distance I sensed in her earlier today is gone, for now. I bury my face in her hair and breathe deep.