Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Shiloh

Iwasn’t thinking when I walked into the bathroom without a change of clothes. I can only blame Monroe’s presence on my sheer lack of brain cells and planning. I never let anyone see my legs for this very reason. It creates questions that dredge up stuff I’d rather not think about. For the nearly eight years I’ve been with the Paine brothers, I’ve learned valuable lessons.

The first being that trauma doesn’t make you special. Everyone has some flavor of it. Mine was horrific, but it’s nothing compared to what Broderick has experienced, let alone some of the others who joined up over the years.

More, I don’t want to be pitied.

I sure as hell don’t want to take a walk down memory lane to the first eighteen years of my life. I’ve worked hard to move past that time, to forget as much as I’m able. I knew coming to Sabine Valley would be difficult for a number of reasons, but I never expected this.

An Amazon demanding to know what happened to me.

The irony would make me laugh if I could find breath in my lungs. Monroe’s sitting on that bed, looking sexy as hell in that ridiculous shirt, and ready to commit murder. If only she knew the truth.

She crosses her legs and studies me. “Tell me.” After the briefest hesitation. “Please, Shiloh.”

I’ve never felt so naked, and this towel covers me from mid-chest to nearly my knees. Monroe can be conniving and manipulative, but I haven’t found her to be overly cruel. At least not to me. I don’t understand why she’s so insistent on this. “Why?”

“So I can kill them, preferably rather slowly, but I’m willing to do it quickly if you’d rather they not suffer overmuch.”

I blink. Wait for the punchline. But Monroe is still staring at me with that intent expression, not a single smile in sight. “You’re serious.”

“Of course. I never joke about murder. People might not take me seriously when I need to threaten them.”

But… That doesn’t make any sense. As far as she’s aware, I’m not one of her people. She has absolutely no reason to go to battle for me. If anything, as a newly minted Raider, she should be happy for whatever harm I experience. I’m the enemy, after all. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll use small words.” She smiles a little as she says it, but her green eyes stay icy. “Someone tortured you when you were a child.”

“You say that like children aren’t harmed every day in this country—in this city, even.”

“Not in the Amazon faction.”

I roll my eyes. I can’t help it. There is the Amazon superiority complex I get hints of from her on occasion. The deep belief that Amazons are somehow better than anyone else, that they aren’t capable of being just as monstrous as the rest of the world. She doesn’t know how wrong she is. “Amazons are no different than other people at their core. That means you have predators just like the rest of the population, and sometimes predators harm children.” Sometimes those predators torture their own children for eighteen long years before that child escapes and runs for their life.

Sometimes.

“You’re right.” She nods slowly. “It’s not unheard of. But we value our children highly. As such, the punishment is…” Monroe trails off, her gaze going distant for a moment. She blinks and she’s back, and angrier than ever. “Child predators don’t stay in our faction for long. Not alive, at least. The punishment isn’t worth the risk. My family has made sure of that.”

My mouth goes dry. She says it so simply. As if that’s really the truth and not some fantasy she’s spun because true harm has never come from inside her household. She’s never hidden and held her breath, hoping her parents don’t come looking. “I never thought you’d be that naive.”

“It’s not naivety. It’s fact.” She tucks her blond hair behind her ears, staring intently at me. “It does happen from time to time. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t, but we don’t bother with the song and dance of a public trial or jail time when it comes to someone who harms a child. The investigation is handled quietly to avoid the child being ostracized. Once the facts are assured, someone from the royal family handles it.”

She’s serious. She really is naive. No matter what she thinks, Amazons truly aren’t different from other communities when it comes to monsters in their midst. I’m more than proof of that. And the royal family taking care of it the moment they know? Don’t make me laugh. “Child abuse is prevalent, and most victims never come forward.”

“In the rest of the world, yes.” She shrugs. “I don’t blame them. The justice system leaves a lot to be desired. Predators rarely see the consequences they should.”

She truly believes that. That it’s as simple as a victim coming forward and removing the predator, as if there aren’t people conditioned to silence by the time they learn how to speak. I open my mouth to keep arguing, but I don’t have the heart for it right now. More, I can’t say anything that won’t reveal far too much about me and my past. Finally, I settle on, “I’m not an Amazon, so I don’t see why it matters.”

“Aren’t you?” Before I can react to that statement, she continues. “Do you know where we get our name from?”

“The all-women Greek warriors.”

“You’re a warrior, Shiloh.” She grins suddenly. “Even if you’re technically a Raider. If you ever feel like flipping sides, we’d take you in a heartbeat.”

Been there, done that, never want to go back. “Pass.”

She nods. “I figured you’d say that. Now, stop trying to change the subject and tell me.”

Better to get it out and be done with it. Malone is like a cat. If I try to dodge this subject indefinitely, it will activate all her predator instincts, and she’ll latch on to it. Better to give her just enough truth to satisfy her. “Give me a minute.”

“Take your time.” She says it almost gently, as if she recognizes I need more armor than just a towel to have this conversation. To have any conversation. I go to the small dresser that I shoved my stuff in earlier before Monroe and Broderick got back and pull on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. It’s late enough that I doubt even Monroe will get up to no good before she passes out.

Back in the bedroom, I find her exactly where I left her, cross-legged on the bed. As tempting as it is to start pacing, I refuse to give even that much energy to the memories weighing me down. I sink onto the edge of the mattress and stare at the door. “My story sucks, but it could be worse. Poor little rich girl with her religious zealot parents who wanted to burn the sin right out of her.” Parents who held prestige by proximity to the Amazon throne, by being distantly related to some past Herald. I’m still not sure why they latched on to sin as the thing I contained. For all that Sabine Valley harkens back to ancient practices, the only faction that’s truly religious is the Mystic.

Most everyone else gives some kind of nod to the various gods but doesn’t dive deep. Unfortunately, my parents were the exception. Best I can tell, they picked a god at random and devoted themselves entirely to her. Astrea. Goddess of many things, but among them…purity.

A purity I never had when they looked at me.

I take a deep breath, hating that it shudders a little. “For all that, they didn’t have much in the way of creativity, so they used a curling iron.” Sometimes, in my nightmares, I can still smell the scent of my skin burning.

They did so much worse than that, but I’m not about to get into that now. Or ever.

I can’t help glancing at Monroe. She’s got her expression locked down, but the fury in her green eyes makes them almost glow. Rage. Not pity. That’s something, at least. There is more than one reason I don’t like talking about my past, and it’s not simply to avoid being pigeonholed by the location I happened to be born into. I don’t want anyone’s pity. I survived. I’ve done more than survive.

Monroe finally says, “No one helped you.”

That gives me the strength to answer. “No. No one helped me.” Not even the Amazon queen who at least had some hint of what I was experiencing. I was hardly the picture of childhood health the one time she laid eyes on me. “I got myself out when I turned eighteen.”

“How old are you, Shiloh?”

My throat feels too tight. “Thirty.”

“How long have you been with the Paines?”

I can see where she’s going with this, but there’s no point in trying to detour. “Seven years, give or take.”

Monroe narrows her eyes. “Four years between leaving your parents and finding the Paines.”

The sensation of choking gets stronger. I swallow hard. Finding the Paine brothers was sheer luck on my part, and them taking me in was even more luck. That situation could have gone so much worse for me.

They had more than their fair share of trauma, too. Even without asking too many questions, I felt a kinship with Broderick and his brothers and the people they’d gathered around them. I…fit. In a way that I had never experienced before in my life.

I didn’t want to come back to this city, but these people are the family I chose. I figured it wouldn’t be the same, that I could navigate my way through whatever challenges that arose from the ghosts of my past.

I never bargained on Broderick being paired with the Amazon heir. Or on my being assigned as her permanent guard. Or for her to take such a pointed interest in me.

In short, I never bargained on Monroe.

“It was closer to five before I found them.” She opens her mouth to continue questioning me, but I cut in before she gets the words out. “I survived. End of story.” I wouldn’t talk about what I had to do to survive. I had little life experience when I landed in Chicago. I didn’t know how to deal with people, didn’t know how to control the rage that bubbled up in me after too many years kept locked down. After I smashed a glass over the head of a customer who grabbed my ass at the restaurant I where I worked, I realized customer service wasn’t going to get me anything but arrested.

“Yes. You did.”

“Violence is easy.” My voice is barely above a whisper. I want to stop talking, to cut this off before I bare my still-beating heart for this woman, but the only other person I’ve talked to about this is Broderick. And even then, I filtered so much, even more than I’m doing now. If he pitied me, I might just die. I exhale slowly. “It came naturally to me—it still does.” I guess I really am an Amazon down to my core. The thought might make me laugh if I could work up the energy for it. “I ended up as an enforcer for one of the local groups. They taught me everything I needed to know.”

“And the Paines?”

At that, I smile a little. “I tried to rob Broderick. He kicked my ass a little and then hauled me back to their sad excuse for a base. Within a couple days, I was taking orders from Abel. I haven’t looked back since.”

“Quick turnaround.”

I look at her. “You’ve been the heir to the Amazon throne your whole life. You don’t know what it’s like out there. The Paine brothers actually care about their people. They ask a lot of us, yes, but they value our lives and our safety. That kind of thing isn’t common.”

“I suppose not.” She combs her fingers through her hair, expression still contemplative. “Where did you say you were from, again?”

That surprises a laugh out of me. Does she really think she can trick me into telling her? Absolutely not. “You didn’t seriously mean it when you said you wanted to kill my parents.”

“When did they start burning you?”

Frustration bubbles up inside me, bringing the truth with it. “I was six. I had been playing with one of the neighborhood boys. Those silly kid games. He kissed me.”

She narrows her eyes. “Normal childhood stuff.”

“My parents didn’t think so.” I refuse to revisit that memory; their hateful words, my screams and sobbing.

Monroe nods slowly. “Twelve years is a long time, love. Someone has to balance the scales.”

“Stop calling me love.”

“Do you really want me to stop?” she fires back.

I’m speechless for a moment. Of course, I want her to stop. It’s… Damn it. “No.”

“Again, stop trying to change the subject. I would like the town name.”

I stare. “You’re serious.”

“I already told you I don’t bluff.”

She had. I just… “But I’m not one of your people.” Not anymore. Not ever as far as she knows. “You don’t have to play avenging Valkyrie for me.”

“You’re mixing up your mythologies.” She examines her nails. She’s painted them a matte beige color that looks professional and sleek. Monroe seems to change her nails a lot. That surprised me the first week, but now I suspect that doing so calms her and gives her some control when she’s feeling out of sorts.

She’s been feeling out of sorts a lot lately.

Or maybe I’m just projecting and the reason she changes her nails a lot is because she is a fickle woman who likes pretty things.

“Shiloh.”

“But why?”

She focuses entirely on me. After a pause where I find myself holding my breath, she crawls across the bed to kneel at my side and take my hand. “Because all children deserve to be protected. I can’t go back and save the child you were, but I can rain down hellfire and damnation on those responsible.” She gets a faraway look in her eyes. “Though, truly, there’s no way at least some people in that town didn’t know. They might have lied to themselves about the warning signs or looked away because it’s easier than fighting on behalf of someone being victimized, but they at least suspected.”

She’s right, of course. Someone did know. Her mother. Oh, I can’t be sure Aisling was aware of the extent of the abuse, but when she caught sight of me that single time, I was a borderline malnourished child. Obviously something was wrong, and she turned away instead of enacting that famous Amazonian justice.

What would Monroe think if she knew that?

It might drive a wedge between her and her mother. Or she might call me a liar and that would be the end of us, right here and now.

“Maybe I should burn the whole fucking town down,” she muses. “That would certainly send a message.”

I don’t mean to take her face in my hands. I really don’t. But my body moves without permission, and her skin is so fucking soft, completely at odds with the fierce violence in her voice. “Monroe,” I say, soft and slow. “You cannot burn down a town for me.” You cannot start a conflict with your own mother for me.

“I most certainly can.” She refocuses on me. “Whether or not I do it is still up for debate. My mother wouldn’t like it, but she wouldn’t stand in my way.”

Saying her mother wouldn’t like it is a giant understatement. Monroe takes my breath away. Rationally, I know she’s the enemy. No matter what I yelled at Broderick earlier, I recognize that Monroe would feed us all to literal wolves if it meant keeping her people safe. Her people that I don’t number among, haven’t for well over ten years. That is admirable from where I’m sitting, but since we’re on opposite sides of the line, it means she’s a threat.

But not even Broderick reacted this strongly to my story.

I don’t want my parents dead…I don’t think. I won’t lie and say that revenge fantasies didn’t get me through my teens and early twenties. But things changed when I joined the Paine brothers. For the first time in my life, I was able to focus on the future instead of the past.

Still…

It’s a heady thing to have all of Monroe’s not-insignificant fury and violence focused on people who hurt me. Focused on them because they hurt me. It’s enough to make me wonder what would have happened if she was the queen who noticed the child being harmed by someone in her inner circle. Maybe it’s naïve to think she would have placed that child’s safety above the petty politics that are demanded of the one who holds the throne.

Maybe… But I can’t shake the feeling that she would have reigned down the same fire and brimstone that she’s threatening to right now.

I don’t have a good response for her. I don’t even know what I want. “I won’t tell you.”

“That’s okay.” I barely have a chance to relax when she says, “I’ll ask Broderick instead.”

That’s a dead end. Broderick doesn’t know where I’m from, either. I never told him, and he respected me enough not to ask. Funny how he understood how to respect boundaries for so long, only to lose that skill the second we arrived back in Sabine Valley. I sigh. “You are something else.”

“You’re not the first one to say it. Though most of the time when people do, it sounds less like a compliment.”

I kiss her. Another mistake, but not one I’ll take back. I can count on one hand how many people I’ve told that story to, and while everyone was sympathetic to my experiences, the sheer ferocity of Monroe’s leaves me breathless.

What would it be like to be loved by this woman?

Never boring, that’s for sure.

She goes still for one long moment, and then she’s kissing me back with all the energy she put into plotting my parents’ demise. Like she has a thousand things to tell me that she knows I don’t want to hear, so she’ll convey them with her tongue and lips and teeth instead.

I prefer it this way.

There’s no time to worry about this being a mistake or what happens next. I can’t even blame tequila or anger. There’s just me and Monroe and this kiss.

She laughs against my mouth and pulls away a little bit. “I should offer to kill people on your behalf more often if this is the response I get.”

“Monroe?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.” I dig my hands into her hair and kiss her again, toppling her back to the bed. She goes willingly. We land in a tangle of limbs, and I’ve never regretted putting on clothing so much. I want to be skin to skin. There’s nothing to hide any longer. She’s seen the scars, she’s heard the story, and she still desires me. I don’t have to worry about making sure the lights are off before we go farther because there’s nothing to hide.

The realization leaves me giddy and a bit drunk off the knowledge.

I sit back on my heels between her spread thighs and look at her. She’s rumpled, and her oversized shirt is bunched up around her waist, leaving her lacy white panties on display. They’re sexy, but I suspect Monroe could be wearing a paper bag and covered in a weeks’ worth of dirt and still be sexy. It’s just her.

I slide my hands up her toned thighs and hook the sides of her panties. “I’m taking these off.”

“Please do.”

The urge to rush nearly overwhelms me, but I force myself to go slow, tugging the fabric down an inch at a time, easing it over her hips. She has to move her legs for me to get them down farther, and she does without hesitation, pressing them together. I take advantage, pushing her legs up toward her chest. I leave her panties midway up her thighs, my attention on her bared pussy. She’s perfect here, too. Of course she is. She’s Monroe.

“Shiloh.” She sounds out of breath. “Let me take them off.”

“In a moment.” I wrap my fist around the fabric, forcing her legs tighter together and using the hold to press them up until she’s basically bent in half. Then I drag a single finger down her slit. She’s soaked, but then I knew she would be. She just came while I was in the shower, after all.

I ease a single finger into her and then two, enjoying the way her breath hisses out and she clamps around me. For the first time since we met, she’s letting me take the lead. It’s not submission, not really; more that she’s letting me set the pace. I appreciate it. It’s been a long time for me, and never like this. Never with all the lights on.

I intend to enjoy every moment of it.

Monroe lets out a breathless laugh. “Gods, you really are a gift, love. You little sadist.”

“Hush, I’m enjoying myself.” I spread her pussy a little and rub her clit with my thumb. “I’m going to taste you now.”

She moans a little. “Do it.”

I’m in the process of leaning down to do just that when the door slams open…and Broderick stalks into the room.