Page 43 of Thorns That Bloom (Venusverse #3)

He can’t be here. This has to be a nightmare.

Darting my eyes all over, I try to find…something. Some way, an inconsistency, anything to tell me this is just a horrible dream and that will help me snap out of it.

“Hey. I’m trying to talk to him. What’s your fucking problem?” he mutters.

Another voice comes in. Theo’s, I think. I can’t seem to focus on it properly. There’s this loud buzzing inside my head, and all I can hear is the voice of that monster. Of that disgusting, abhorrent fucking monster that…that found me.

A monster that is here. Right now. With me.

“Oh god,” I blurt out, my chest seizing with hyperventilating breaths as the reality dawns on me with full force. My lips become completely unusable, just trembling, formless blobs of flesh.

“Sam, I just want to talk! Please, let me talk to you. Hey, fuck off, man!”

There’s some sort of scuffle. Pushing. People shout over each other around me.

I can’t bring myself to look up. I don’t want to. I don’t want to see him. My stomach threatens to flip again. I can taste vomit and bile on my tongue, acidic and sharp as it burns my throat.

“You have to listen to me, Sam. I know the child is mine. I know it and…I’m sorry, okay? I was wrong. Everything was wrong. I realize that now! I want to be in the child’s life, alright? I can fix this! Fix everything. Make it how it’s supposed to be. Sam. Are you listening to me?”

Black. That’s all I see. There’s nothing.

With a rasping breath, I draw in air, and the world comes back to me when I blink. I’m still here, still in the nightmare. What he just said plays out inside my head on repeat, echoing and overlapping until it turns into a maddening, torturous noise.

His child. He’s talking about… No!

No, no, no…

I grab onto my stomach, head shooting up. He’s there, looking back at me while Theo stands between us, his shoulders arched high and rising with short, sharp movements.

“I know it, Sam. You can’t just—” His hand reaches out, aiming for me. A dizzying wave of brutal images flashes in front of my eyes. Images with sounds and feelings and the most horrendous, rattling sensations still imprinted somewhere deep within my soul.

“If you don’t step away right now and get out, I swear you’ll be leaving in an ambulance,” Theo threatens, his voice so deep and dark and so full of brewing anger it barely even sounds like him.

Sinking even further into someone’s warm touch—that woman’s, maybe—I suddenly feel faint and have to close my eyes. There’s more commotion, pushing, shoes squeaking against the floor from friction, and shouting from a distance.

Did more people join in? I don’t know. His voice becomes distant, but it still booms through my bones, penetrating all the way to the marrow. “You can’t— Get your fucking hands off me! You can’t keep me away, goddammit!”

When I blink again and glance around, I realize I’m on my knees. Someone’s holding me around the shoulders as I tremble and sway with every hysteric, shivering breath.

“Should we call the police?”

“I don’t— I don’t know. I don’t know what’s that right thing to… Fuck. I need to get him somewhere safe. I’ll take him home. Sam?”

Gasping, I look up when someone else’s hand touches me.

It’s not the monster as I’ve feared, but Theo.

Warm, loving, tender Theo, and his beautiful eyes.

I can barely see them over my burning tears.

“Shh, it’s… Can I touch you to help you up?

Can you show me to your car? I’ll drive you home, okay? It’s alright. It’s alright.”

My mind’s all frizzy. I nod, only half sure what I’m even agreeing to.

I just want to get away. Away from him. From the possibility of seeing him again. From all of this.

Theo helps me stand. Wrapping his steady arm around my shoulders, he twists the other with my elbow and leads us outside. Somehow, my trembling hand finds the car key in my pocket, and I hand it to him.

I’m scared. I’m so fucking scared.

“It’s okay. He’s gone,” Theo whispers while shielding us from the pouring rain with his jacket, almost like he can read my thoughts. “This one, yeah?” he asks, and before I manage to say anything, he clicks the fob and the car unlocks.

He sits me in the passenger seat, putting the seat belt carefully over my belly.

When he goes around and gets behind the wheel, a sliver of rationality makes it past the thick fog of fear and panic in my mind. “You c-can’t…”

“Don’t worry,” he says with a soothing expression. “I know how to drive, I just don’t have a car…or a driving license. But I promise I won’t crash. I’ll be really careful, alright? And if we get stopped, I’ll just say I made you do this. You won’t get in trouble, I swear.”

The steady stream of his words lulls me into silence.

Staring blankly at the dashboard and rubbing my hand over my belly, I spend the next however long it takes for us to get home motionless.

My address is in the car’s navigation system, so I don’t have to worry about telling Theo where to go.

I don’t even think I could manage that. I’m numb and tired, and my thoughts are like fog, slipping through my fingers.

The longer I sit there, the more exhausted I feel. Like what just happened has completely drained all the strength and will to do anything out of me. Each time I want to go back and remember, my body locks up, so I close my eyes sharply and shake my head, trying to protect myself, to build a wall.

Deep down, I know I need to panic and cry and freak out to release this nagging tension, but not now. Not yet. Not until I’m safe.

Somehow, we make it. Theo leads me up the stairs, and I open the door into my apartment.

But the moment I step in, all my inhibitions melt away in an instant. The floodgates burst wide open, and I start sobbing uncontrollably before the door’s even closed behind us.

“It’s alright. You can let it out. You’re safe, lovely.

I promise,” Theo whispers, patting me on the back and cradling my shoulders.

Shaking my head, I fight the desperate urge to just fall down on my knees, but Theo’s presence somehow keeps me standing.

He holds me, pulls my coat off, and leads me to the living room where I collapse on the couch, once again reduced to a trembling, crying bundle of nothing but pain.

The wall I’ve built is gone, and all I see when I close my eyes now is his face.

Brandon McCarthy.

“Fuck. Oh, fuck!” I mumble, digging my fingers into my hair. “This can’t be…this can’t be happening. He found me. He found us. How did he—”

“Shhh… Sam, look at me,” Theo says. I blink away the tears pouring out of my eyes and see him kneeling on the ground between my legs, holding my hand. His face is twisted into a pained, uneasy expression.

He has no idea what’s going on. Who that man was. What he’s done.

“It’s okay now.”

“N-no, it’s not!” I bark at him. I can tell he’s doing what he can to appear collected and to soothe me, but he’s wrong.

“He said he thought he was the father. He…he wants to take her away from me,” I say, my teeth chattering, while wrapping my arms around myself.

“He’s one of them. He is— Theo, he’s one of the…

” My mind splinters again and my vision goes all blurry so I shut my eyes tightly, leaning over.

I feel him rest his forehead against mine, almost holding me up. “I know… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” I whimper, trembling more and more, my body cold and on fire and numb, all at once. “They did things to me. Things I didn’t want.”

Theo squeezes my hand sharply, as if my words just caused him physical pain. “I know. You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to talk or think, let’s just… Breathe, okay? Do you want some water? What can I do to help you, Sam?”

That velvety voice of his does little to ease the storm inside me, but little is more than nothing.

I know I don’t have to talk about it. And yet there’s no stopping those memories, and the only people I’ve ever told were the police and my attorney.

Both instances were cold and impersonal, no matter how hard they all tried to show me that they cared, that they understood. It was always just a job to them.

I was a nobody. Just another victim providing a statement. Another client to practice on before bigger, more profitable cases. That’s it.

At the end of the day, I couldn’t even share with anyone what happened. Not that I wanted to share or to relive it, but it made the memory feel like a prison. It still is. A prison only for me, endlessly alone and tortured.

“There were five of them.” I let out a raspy mutter, moving away from Theo enough to meet his eyes. “I was… I was in heat. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the t-toilets. It was almost the end of m-my shift. Hardly anyone in the office. I… They… They’d been leering at me all day.”

I shiver at the memory. The five bright, young, strong alphas.

Always walking together like a group of popular high school kids, chatting and judging and calculating.

That’s what they’d always been. Calculating, heartless monsters.

It was good for the business deals, of course, so who would complain?

“One of them, Nick, we…. We had a…thing, before,” I say, the shame making my throat go tight.

I can’t believe I ever found that pig appealing.

His charming face and alluring pheromones were all there was to him.

And that stupid smirk of his. Constantly biting and teasing.

I liked that. On some basic level, we connected.

At least that’s what I thought.

“It was just sex. When I heard he was getting serious with his partner, I ended it. He w-was annoyed by that, but never did anything. The others, they… We only worked in the same office. They never… I’ve never—”