Page 42 of Nitro

“You’re so gone right now,” he murmurs.

“Oh!” I roll my head to the side to gaze into his eyes. I don’t know when he moved to lay beside me, but time has no meaning anymore. There’s nothing but him and me—us—together, and I want this to last forever.

“I love watching you come down,” he says.

“What. That. Okay.” I give up on trying to be coherent.

“Shh. Just relax.” He cuddles me against him. Using long, slow strokes, he caresses my back, bringing me back to reality. I nuzzle closer. Something desperate in my heart cries out for more, but he’s giving me everything he can. He’s still holding back some secret part of himself because he’s afraid to tell me everything that happened to him. I want to know more. I want to know everything.

“Nitro,” I whisper.

“Yeah, kitten?”

“Tell me more about the time before you were … at the mansion.” I intentionally don’t say Blackstone’s name because I’ve seen the way Nitro tenses up every time it’s mentioned. If I’m going to get him to open up to me, I can’t start with something that will shut him down instantly.

He pulls the blankets over us and holds me tightly. A tremor moves through his body. It’s fear. I can almost smell it. There’s only one thing he’s afraid of—talking about his secrets. He said that whatever happened before Blackstone’s was worse than I could imagine, but I’m ready to hear it. I want him to tell me the most terrible thing that ever happened to him so I can help him heal. Talking about it is the first step.

“It’s hard to explain a lot of it because my memories are so shaky. I can’t recall much of what happened before I was about six years old.”

“Most people can’t remember their earliest years.”

“A lot of what I know is stuff other people told me. I’m not sure how much of it is true. But there was evidence … medical records that Matrix found for me a few years ago.”

I will my body to stay loose and calm despite the tension in his tone. I’m trying to temper my reaction because I don’t want him to stop talking. If he’s going to tell me his darkest secrets, I have to be ready to listen without interrupting.

“It’s bad, Holly. All of it.”

“Tell me. I want to know you, the real you.”

“My parents were drug addicts. They’d do anything for their next fix, including pimping me out.”

“Oh, God.” I try like hell to keep my mouth shut, but the horror of his revelation is too much.

“I was a baby when it started.”

My stomach lurches, and part of me wants to tell him to stop. He was right. This is awful. I can’t imagine what he went through. Thank God he doesn’t remember that time in his life.

“When I was six, I was in a house that doubled as a meth lab. I can’t remember if my parents were there at the time. I’d been there before, but my memories were so spotty. Matrix told me trauma could do that. It can fuck your mind up and make you forget shit.”

“Probably to protect you,” I say.

“Probably.”

I sigh and slowly rub my hand across his shoulder and down his arm. He’s lying on his side, facing me, but he hasn’t met my gaze since he started talking.

“The crackheads running the lab fucked up and the whole place exploded.”

“Holy shit.”

“Boom!” He clenches his fist before opening it. “I was in one of the back bedrooms with a couple of guys. If we’d been any closer to the kitchen, we would have died. Everyone else died. We got out.”

“How?”

“Window. One of the guys wasn’t as doped up as the other. He punched a hole in the glass. They threw me through the window before getting out themselves. At least they cared about me a little bit.”

The pain in his voice breaks my heart.

“The police and fire department arrived right away. I didn’t even realize I was on fire until one of them ran toward me with an extinguisher. They took me to the hospital. I was there for weeks.”