Chapter 16

Ophelia

Waking up the next morning meant I was still trapped in the nightmare I fell asleep in. What happened last night was...I couldn't even let myself get lost in that memory again. When I turned over and looked out the window, it was still dark outside. There was a moment of panic when I realized I was alone in the bed, but Alex's snores from the floor gave me a moment of comfort. I didn't remember very much after they pissed on me. I remembered things like the way Gunnir's jaw hung loose from the pleasure of what he was doing, or the way Alex hadn't wanted to participate. I hardly remembered the shower or Alex cleaning me up, but the familiar scent of cheap soap comforted me further.

My chain rattled and slid against his foot as I tried to climb out of bed.

"O?" he whispered, his voice heavy with sleep.

"It's me," I said as I scooted against the headboard.

I didn't expect him to clamber to his feet and rush to comfort me. I didn't want his comfort. He was one half of the two-part golden shower I received. Regardless of what I wanted, he came toward me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. "I'm so fucking sorry," he whispered. Even in the darkness, I knew there was hurt in his expression. I could hear it in his voice, which was fine, because he deserved to feel as terrible as I did. "I had to do it. He would have shocked you with that fucking prod if I hadn't."

"I'd have preferred that," I said.

"He would have prodded your..." Alex couldn't finish the sentence, as if locked in a violent memory. "Trust me, you wouldn't have preferred it," he finally said.

"Why don't you stand up to him? If not for me, at least do it for yourself." I leaned away from his touch.

"You wouldn't understand," he said with a small shake of his head.

I was surprised he couldn't feel the heat of my stare through the darkness. "Pathetic," I said with a scoff.

I shouldn't have said it, but the word leapt from my throat and landed on him before I knew what was happening. I saw how much he disliked his brother and fought against the way he ran things, but he did nothing to change it. He merely danced around Gunnir's sick desires to try to spare me the worst of it. I wasn't unappreciative, but he hadn't been kidding when he said he wasn't a white knight. He was a demon fighting the hold of the devil, steering his flames in other directions. He couldn't save me. No matter how hard he tried, the devil still found ways to set me alight.

Instead of making me pay for calling him pathetic, he spoke to me through gritted teeth, showing restraint that must have been difficult for him. "Don't talk to me like that."

"Or what? You'll kill me?" I said. Again, I knew I shouldn't have continued to goad him, but after what happened last night, I wasn't keen on continuing this life, day in and day out. I was already so fucking tired. If death was the only exit out of that place, so be it.

He didn't respond, so I kept pushing.

"You're stronger than him. You could take him out," I whispered. Physically, Alex didn't have much of a chance, but intellectually, he ran dizzying circles around him. Emotionally, he was more evolved. There were ways to beat the physical differences. We both knew it, even if he didn't want to admit it.

Instead of answering my plea, he wrapped his hand around the back of my head, fisted my hair, and brought his lips to mine in the dark. The wild heat of anger radiated from him, pulling the air from my lungs with a kiss so hard I couldn't even take a breath that wasn't one of his. There was no way to even utter the word no. He didn't want to talk anymore, but I needed to. My hands gripped his shirt as I tried to push him away, but he only ripped away the blanket I still clutched against my bare chest.

I whimpered as he laid me down and got between my legs. I didn't want him like this. I wanted to get inside his head.

No, I had gotten into his mind, but that wasn't enough. I had to get into his heart if I had any chance of surviving this. I had to take up more space and overpower the familial bond he shared with his brother.

I opened my mouth to speak, but he pressed his lips to mine again, silencing me. My voice was my only weapon against him, and his defenses were primed to keep me from breaking through.

I put my hands to his face and held him in my hot grasp. "Talk to me, Alex," I whispered.

"Not now, O," he said, lowering his mouth to my chest.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of Gunnir, if that's what you think," he snapped.

"I'm not talking about Gunnir."

Alex rolled off me and released a deep sigh. "For being as fucking pretty as you are, you sure can kill a moment."

I scoffed. "This kills the moment? Out of everything—"

"Ophelia."

"Well, tell me. What are you afraid of?"

* * *

Alexzander

What a fucking question.I didn't fear Gunnir, but he was a carbon-copy of the thing I feared most: The Man. He was dead, rendered to nothing but bones along with all the women that crossed this threshold and never left alive, but he still had such a hold on everyone in the home. Even the shadows that walked along the walls were chained to this place from the fear and pain he'd caused. The Man was the maestro, and we were the orchestra that made the music he wanted to hear. Instead of instruments, we played women. The screams, the whimpers, the cries—it was his symphony. Even now, if I tried to stop the solemn tune, my life would end. If Gunnir didn't take my life, he would rip apart the thing I cherished most in the world.

Ophelia.

That's when I realized The Man wasn't what I feared most. I feared love.

If I loved someone, they were ripped from me. They say it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but fuck that saying. Whoever came up with it didn't know the true meaning behind it. They didn't grasp the agonizing ache that came with loss. I knew what it meant to lose someone I loved, and it broke me. I vowed I'd never let anything or anyone into my heart again. Love wasn't something wonderful and powerful. It was more like a disease that plagued my body until I became too weak to live. Love killed the bright parts within me, and I was trying so goddamn hard to keep Ophelia out of the darkness that occupied my heart. I couldn't love her, because then she would be ripped away too.

"What are you afraid of?" I asked, because I had no answer for her.

"My father," she said without hesitation. "Even when he'd drift into an alcohol coma, I still couldn't shake the fear I felt with every breath I drew in that house."

I felt that. I really fucking felt that. "What'd he do?"

"Don't ask me that," she said, her voice so low I nearly didn't hear her.

"You can't ask about fears and then close up when asked about yours."

"You weren't exactly forthcoming yourself." She was silent for so long, with nothing but a ticking clock counting the time to interrupt the quiet. Finally, she drew a quivering breath. "He touches me in ways no father should. At first I thought he was too drunk to realize I wasn't my mother, but I later realized he was just sick."

What was left of my heart sank into my belly. "How old were you when it started?"

"I can't remember a time when it wasn't happening."

No wonder she was a fucking pro at disappearing in her mind. She'd had a lifetime of practice.

After another wavering breath, she continued. "Every conscious memory of my father was hell, and it wasn't just because of what he did to me. It was everything. It was his mere existence."

God, I felt that too. A tear forced its way from my eye and slid toward my ear. No wonder I saw so much of me within her.

She was me.

And I had been hellbent on destroying anything good left within her, just like The fucking Man. Just like her father.

I turned my face toward the wall as if she were a bright light that would blind me if I didn't look away. It was too close. She was too close. I was fighting to keep her out of my heart, but she was clawing her way inside as a reflection of me stared through the fucking cracks she'd created.

Guilt assaulted me, weighing me down like a monster on my chest, ripping through me to get at the soft parts inside. I was no better than the man she feared most. She was so dead to being forced because that was her home. And forcing myself on her had been mine. We had to move out of that place. We had to leave home, somehow, for good.

"Ophelia," I whispered. "I'm afraid of you."

She sat up on her elbows and even in the dark, I sensed the confused glare on her face. Even in the weak moonlight, even with my eyes closed, I could see the crease between her eyebrows. It would be difficult to explain. I wasn't afraid of her physically, but I feared what I could be beneath her. How could she drag me from the depths of hell without leaving herself with mortal wounds?

"I don't understand," she said. "What have I ever done to make you fear me?"

"You're shaking up everything I've ever known. Tearing apart decades of conditioning. It's fucking terrifying. Feeling things is worse than feeling nothing at all."

The mattress sank as she settled beside me again. She was quiet for a while and I began to think she'd grown tired of the conversation, but she'd only been considering what she said next. "I disagree. If we become numb to everything, we lose our humanity. We're reduced to something small and insignificant."

"What do you see me as, O? A predator? The devil? What?"

The bed creaked beneath her as she turned on her side to face me. "At first I saw you as a villain, but I've come to realize you're actually a victim of circumstance."

I scoffed. "Bullshit."

"Not bullshit. Would you do what you've done if you weren't in this house?"

Well, shit. It was hard to tell. I never thought anything was wrong until The Man brought me to the hardware store and I saw women walking around without chains attached to their necks or ankles. There were smiles on their faces. They seemed happy. When I asked him why the women at home needed chains, he told me it was to keep them from running off. My mother kept telling me to stop asking questions, but I couldn't stop, even when The Man beat me for it. Eventually he silenced me.

Even if he quieted my voice, my mind continued to obsess over the foreign ways other people lived. I was like one of those sad bears in the depressing cages at the zoo, never realizing my way of life was unnatural until I saw how bears lived in the wild. Never recognizing that everything around me was a lie. Yet just like a bear in a cage, I wasn't equipped to survive in a natural habitat. There was safety behind these bars. But would I have been able to survive had I not been caged to begin with?

I would never be Gunnir or The Man, that much I knew, but would my dick twitch when a woman fought my touch if I hadn't been trained by Satan himself? It felt so normal. It was how I imagined people felt when they heard someone scream for help, but instead of rushing to their rescue, I felt the urge to hurt them worse. What did that psych student teach me? Nature versus nurture? Could the way I was raised truly suffocate who I might have been?

I didn't know. I would never know.

"I can't answer that," I said.

Her fingers ran along my skin, finding my scars in the dark. "You wouldn't have all these marks on you if that's truly who you were. They wouldn't have had to beat you into this life."

I opened my mouth to argue, but she was right. Did she know what I'd endured? I grabbed her wrist and guided her hand to my knees. "The scars here are from the rice." I gripped her chain and gave it a rattle. "This was my chain before it was yours."

The clouds in the dark sky broke and sent a shaft of moonlight across her face, illuminating the pout of her lower lip and the tear sliding down her cheek.

"None of this excuses what I became," I said. "I'm sure I had a choice somewhere along the line, even if I can't remember one." I sat up at the edge of the bed, and her hand lingered a moment too long on my skin. I went back to the floor and wrapped myself in the blanket so I could try to go back to sleep.

Ophelia's chain rattled as she turned over. "Think what you want, Alex, but I don't believe you'd be holding women captive if it wasn't for Gunnir."

Even if she was right, we couldn't go back in time and rewrite the past. Like the stir-crazy bears in their tiny cages, we could only be what we were.