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3

Confession

The bathroom mirror didn’t lie. Three days of this twisted ritual had left its mark—not just on Jace’s increasingly scarred torso, but on me as well. Dark circles shadowed my eyes, making them seem larger, more haunted in my gaunt face. I barely recognized myself anymore.

Not pretty anymore. Not like he remembered.

I’d lost five pounds I couldn’t afford to lose, surviving on protein bars and bitter coffee while meticulously carving my violent history into Jace’s flesh. Sleep came in fitful bursts, plagued by memories that blurred the line between past traumas and present vengeance.

Six scars now decorated his body. Six of fifteen. Not even halfway done.

I splashed cold water on my face, the shock of it doing nothing to dull the image seared into my brain—his eyes watching me, always watching—calculating, patient, hungry . The way he’d responded yesterday to the fifth scar—arching into the pain, a low groan escaping his throat that wasn’t entirely agony—haunted me. My fingers trembled against the porcelain sink.

“This is what you wanted,” I reminded my reflection, the words hollow even to my own ears. “To break him.”

But the truth mocked me from behind my own eyes: Jace French wasn’t breaking. If anything, each new mark seemed to feed something in him, awakening a darkness that matched my own. Like calling to like.

I dried my face and reached for the small medical kit. Today would be different. Today’s scar—the seventh—had a story he wouldn’t enjoy quite so much. Couldn’t twist into some perverse pleasure.

When I entered the bedroom, Jace was already awake, watching the door with that predatory focus that never seemed to dim despite his captivity. Four days without a proper shower or change of clothes should have diminished him. Instead, he lounged against his restraints like a king on his throne, the zip ties mere accessories to his spectacle of controlled power. Blood dried in rusty trails across his bare chest, a roadmap of my vengeance that somehow made him look more dangerous, not less.

“Good morning, kitten,” he greeted, voice rough but steady. His use of the old endearment scraped against raw nerves. “Breakfast in bed again? You’re spoiling me.”

I set the tray down harder than necessary, coffee sloshing over the rim of the mug, scalding my fingers. The sharp pain centered me. “Shut up and eat.”

His eyes tracked me as I moved around the room, gathering my tools with practiced precision: knife (freshly sharpened), antiseptic, gauze, camera. Today I added something new—a small hammer and a metal nail. The weight of them in my palm felt right. This would break through his infuriating calm.

“Special equipment for today’s lesson?” he asked, a hint of genuine curiosity breaking through his usual cockiness. His gaze lingered on the hammer, something unreadable flickering across his features.

I ignored him, focusing instead on preparing his arm for feeding. The routine was established now—loosening one wrist restraint, keeping the knife pressed to his throat while he ate one-handed. The domesticity of it was jarring, a parody of intimacy that made my skin crawl with unwanted familiarity.

He ate slowly, eyes never leaving my face. “You look tired.”

“I said shut up.” The knife trembled against his pulse point, betraying me.

“You’re not sleeping,” he observed, undeterred. “The nightmares getting worse?”

My knife pressed harder against his pulse point, drawing a bead of blood that trailed down his neck. “What would you know about my nightmares?”

A shadow crossed his face, something ancient and pained. “I’ve had fifteen years of my own, kitten. Fifteen years of imagining what they were doing to you. What I couldn’t stop.”

“Don’t,” I hissed, bile rising in my throat. “Don’t you dare pretend you were the victim here.”

“I’m not claiming to be the victim.” Something shifted in his expression—not quite vulnerability, but a crack in the armor I’d been trying to pierce for days. “I’m claiming to understand what it’s like when sleep becomes the enemy.”

For a moment, I was disarmed by the raw truth in his voice. Then I remembered Spider’s words, whispered in my ear as he violated me: Your boy sent us. Said his sister needed to be taught a lesson. Said you were just a bonus.

My stomach twisted as the memory clawed its way to the surface. “Finish eating,” I ordered, withdrawing the knife slightly. “We have work to do.”

When he was done, I secured his wrist again, checking the zip tie was tight enough to bite into his flesh without cutting off circulation. The plastic had left purple-red welts that would become bruises. Good . I needed him aware for this. Fully present.

I pulled up his t-shirt, exposing the canvas of his torso where my previous marks were healing in various stages—angry red lines telling the story of my first six years in hell. My fingers traced the scars lightly, a twisted intimacy that made his muscles jump beneath my touch. Power surged through me at his reaction, at the goosebumps that followed my fingertips.

“The seventh,” I said, my voice taking on the clinical detachment I’d adopted for these sessions. “This one’s special.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, muscles tensing. “How so?”

I reached for the small hammer, weighing it in my palm. The metal was cold, impersonal. “They discovered I had a talent for singing. Said I had a pretty voice.”

Understanding dawned in his eyes, followed by something darker that made my heart stutter. “Naomi—”

“They’d make me perform,” I continued, cutting him off, needing to get the words out before they choked me. “Karaoke night at the asylum. The patients who behaved got special privileges.”

I positioned the sharp point of the nail just below his collarbone, over the strong muscle of his pectoral. Not directly over his heart, but close enough that he’d feel the echo of every impact. His skin was warm beneath my fingers, alive in a way I sometimes wondered if I still was.

“If I sang well, they rewarded me,” I explained, voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. “If I refused, or if they didn’t like my performance…”

I brought the hammer down suddenly, driving the nail a quarter-inch into his flesh. Jace’s body went rigid, tendons standing out in his neck, a harsh breath hissing between clenched teeth, but he made no sound. Break, damn you. Break.

“They’d nail my hands to the wooden stage,” I finished, my voice a whisper now. “Leave me there until morning. A lesson in audience appreciation.”

Blood welled around the metal, a perfect crimson circle on tanned skin. I watched his face, searching for the breaking point I’d been seeking all along. Instead, I found only controlled pain and something that looked disturbingly like understanding. Like recognition .

Something dangerous flashed in his eyes, a predator glimpsed through dense foliage. “Who? Give me names, Naomi.”

I brought the hammer down again, driving the nail deeper. This time he couldn’t suppress a grunt of pain, his body arching against the restraints, the zip ties cutting deeper into his wrists as he instinctively fought against them.

“You don’t get to play avenger,” I hissed, breath coming faster. “Not now. Not after everything.”

Blood pooled faster now, running down the curve of his chest in rivulets. I watched it, mesmerized by the way it followed the contours of his muscles, disappearing into the waistband of his jeans. The sight should have disgusted me. Instead, it fascinated me, this proof of life, of vulnerability.

“I hunted them,” he ground out, sweat beading on his forehead, veins standing out on his neck. “Every single one I could find. But there were always more. Always another link in the chain.”

“You’re lying.” I twisted the nail slightly, watching him flinch, feeling the tissue resist then give. “You never looked for me.”

“Fifteen years, Naomi.” His voice was ragged but insistent, eyes fever-bright with pain and something darker, something that recognized the darkness in me. “Fifteen years tracking the Jackals, the Dixie mafia, everyone connected to that warehouse. Fifteen years putting bullets in the heads of men who admitted to touching you.”

I shook my head, unwilling to believe his lies. “If that were true, you would have found me.”

“I did find you.” His eyes burned into mine with an intensity that made my skin prickle. “Three times, I tracked you to different facilities. Each time, they moved you before I could get to you. Each time, I left bodies behind.”

My hand faltered on the hammer. “What?”

“Jackson A. Lee Asylum. The loft in Biloxi. The hunting cabin outside Shreveport.” He named each location like marking graves, each word landing like its own hammer blow. “I was always one step behind.”

Ice flooded my veins, memories washing over me—sudden relocations in the middle of the night, whispered panic among the guards, the vague rumors of bodies found with their throats cut. I had been at those places. Had been moved suddenly, without explanation, each time amid whispers of security breaches.

“No,” I whispered, more to myself than to him, the hammer slipping from my suddenly numb fingers to the bed. “That’s not possible.”

“What’s impossible is you believing I would sanction my sister’s murder,” he challenged, blood still flowing freely from around the nail, staining the sheets beneath him crimson. “That I would sell you out for any price.”

I hesitated, caught between what I’d believed for fifteen years and what my instincts were screaming now. Some sick twisted little part of me wanted to believe his pretty words, wanted to believe he was always the Jace I knew, even now, after everything, and not the cruel bastard who traded me and his sister for a biker crown.

“The night before Honey died,” I said finally, the words scraping my throat raw, “what did I ask you for?”

A shadow crossed his face, pain that had nothing to do with the physical wound I’d inflicted. “You asked me to get clean. To stop using.” His voice softened, memory clouding his eyes. “You said we could leave together, start over somewhere new.”

My breath caught, the truth of it sinking into me like the nail in his chest. It was true—that last night, curled against him in his bed at the clubhouse, I’d offered him an ultimatum. The drugs or me. He’d promised to think about it, to talk after he’d taken care of something important the next day.

That something had been the armored truck robbery. The one that sent his father to prison. The one Honey had threatened to expose.

“What did I promise you?” he asked, his voice so quiet I had to lean closer to hear, drawn in despite myself.

“What?”

“That same night.” His eyes never left mine, blood still trickling from the wound in his chest. “What did I promise you?”

The memory surfaced unbidden: his fingers tracing my cheek in the darkness, his voice soft with rare vulnerability. I’m going to marry you someday, kitten. Get us a house by the water. Give you everything you deserve.

“You said—” My voice broke, the words lodging in my throat like glass. “You said we’d have a future. Together.”

“I meant it,” he said simply, the truth of it written in his eyes. “I still do.”

I recoiled as if struck, nearly falling off the edge of the bed. “You’re insane. Look at us. Look at what we’ve become.”

“I see exactly what we are.” His gaze was unflinching despite the nail still protruding from his chest, despite the blood soaking into the sheets beneath him. “We’re carved from the same darkness. Two halves of something terrible and beautiful.”

“There is no ‘we,’” I insisted, though the words rang hollow even to my own ears, empty of conviction. “Not anymore.”

“Then why am I still breathing?” he challenged softly, the words hanging between us like smoke. “Why bring me here if not because some part of you knows we belong to each other? That we always have?”

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t process the implications of what he was saying, what it meant if he was telling the truth. If he’d been hunting my captors all these years, if he’d come close to finding me, if everything I’d believed was wrong…

“Who sold me?” I demanded, needing to know, needing something to anchor me as my world tilted on its axis. “If it wasn’t you, who told them where to find us that night?”

Pain flashed across his features, raw and unfiltered. “I don’t know. I’ve spent fifteen years trying to find out.”

“Not good enough.” I gripped the nail, twisting it slightly, needing to see him hurt as I was hurting. “You must have suspects. Theories.”

He hissed through clenched teeth but didn’t look away, didn’t yield. “Edge… he knew you two sometimes went to that spot in the bayou. He might’ve seen something, might’ve had a reason to act.” Without missing a beat he shrugged it off, wincing as the movement drove the nail deeper. “But no, he loved my sister. I trust him. He wasn’t the one.”

“Or?” I pressed, sensing there was more, something he was holding back.

“Or Luke,” he admitted, voice tight with suppressed fury that made the hairs on my arms stand up. “My own father. He never wanted me with you, never approved of how close you and I had become.”

The possibility that Luke French—the man who’d been a stern but fair father figure after he moved us into the clubhouse—could have orchestrated everything was both shocking and sickeningly plausible. A piece clicking into place in a puzzle I’d been trying to solve for fifteen years.

“Luke’s in prison,” I pointed out, desperately trying to hold onto some version of reality that made sense. “Because of you.”

“Because he took the fall for me,” Jace corrected, his face grim. “The robbery was my idea, my plan. He claimed responsibility to protect me. Classic Luke French, sacrificing for family.”

“Except Honey,” I whispered, the name like ash on my tongue. “He didn’t protect her.”

Something broke in Jace’s expression then—raw grief that fifteen years hadn’t dulled, a wound deeper than any I’d carved into his flesh. “No. He didn’t.”

I sat back, suddenly exhausted, the weight of too many revelations crushing me. “There were others over the years… people who had motive, who could’ve had something to gain from setting us up. But they’re either dead or weren’t even in the area when it went down. I’ve spent a long time figuring this out, trust me. It’s always come back to these two. Edge—he knew you two were close, but I can’t see him turning on me. And then there’s my father, Luke. He hated what you were to me. Thought you were my distraction, a weakness.”

The nail still protruded from Jace’s chest, blood soaking into the sheets, but the righteous fury that had driven me since entering the room had drained away, leaving only confusion and a bone-deep weariness that seemed to settle in my very marrow.

“We should clean that,” I said finally, gesturing to the wound, unable to look at it anymore.

“Afraid I’ll bleed out before you finish your masterpiece?” There was no mockery in his tone now, only a tired resignation that mirrored my own, an acknowledgment of the twisted bond that still existed between us.

I reached for the antiseptic and gauze, a perverse tenderness overtaking me as I cleaned around the nail. I should pull it out, but something held me back—the knowledge that what he’d told me had shifted something between us, had changed the dynamics in ways I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.

“Why did you come back?” he asked as I worked, his skin hot beneath my fingers, feverish. “After all these years, why return to Louisiana at all?”

I paused, gauze pressed to his bleeding chest. The truth was simultaneously simple and impossibly complex.

To kill you.

“Because I needed to know,” I said finally, meeting his gaze. “I needed to look in your eyes and see if you were the monster they told me you were. The one who sold his sister and his girlfriend for a stash of dirty money, and a president patch.”

“And what do you see now?” His voice was quiet, almost gentle.

I met his gaze, searching those honey-colored eyes that had haunted my dreams and nightmares for fifteen years. What I saw there was neither innocence nor pure evil, but something far more complicated—darkness tempered with something that might once have been tenderness, might still be if I allowed it.

“A monster,” I answered honestly, my fingers ghosting over the wounds I’d inflicted. “But not the one I expected.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips, the same smile that had once made my teenage heart race. “We’re well-matched then.”

I couldn’t deny it. The knife, the nail, the calculated torment I’d inflicted—these weren’t the actions of an innocent seeking justice. They were the methods of someone who’d learned cruelty from masters, who’d absorbed their lessons too well. Who had been transformed in their image.

“You should rest,” I said, securing a bandage around the nail without removing it. A reminder. A promise that this wasn’t over, regardless of what truths had emerged.

He watched me work, eyes heavy-lidded with pain and something else—a dangerous patience that sent a shiver down my spine, a recognition that frightened me more than any violence.

“I’ve been resting for four days, kitten,” he replied, testing the zip ties with a subtle flex of his wrists that didn’t escape my notice. “Sooner or later, we both know how this ends.”

The threat hung between us—not that he would hurt me, but that this careful balance we’d established couldn’t last. That the danger I’d captured was merely biding its time. That perhaps Jace’d been playing his own game all along.

I gathered my tools, avoiding his gaze. “Tomorrow. The eighth scar.”

“I’ll be here,” he promised, the words carrying weight beyond their simple meaning. A covenant. A certainty that extended beyond our present circumstances.

I paused at the door, not looking back. “Don’t bleed out overnight.”

His soft laugh followed me into the hallway, wrapping around me like a familiar embrace. “Wouldn’t dream of it, kitten. We’re just getting started.”

I closed the door behind me, leaning against it, eyes closed against the realization that was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore: Jace wasn’t breaking under my calculated torture. If anything, each new mark, each shared trauma, was forging something between us—a connection born of matched darkness, of mirrored monstrosity.

Tomorrow would be different, I promised myself. Tomorrow I would find the wound that would finally break him.

But even as I thought it, doubt crept in, insidious and unwelcome. Because the truth, the terrible truth I’d been avoiding since bringing him to this cabin, was that I didn’t want him broken.

I wanted him whole. Damaged and dangerous and mine .

And that realization terrified me more than any torture I’d endured.