Chapter 32

Chapter 32

A sconce flickers with light,and I lift my head, noticing the empty pile of blankets. It’s hard to tell night from day in the dark cavern, and I’m left wondering if I awakened too soon. I push to a sitting position, noticing the freedom of movement, and turn to find the chains have been removed.

Rhys strides into the room with a bottle of liquor clutched in his hand, closing the door behind him, and the sensation that blooms in my chest is the first of its kind in well over eight years.

It’s the same feeling that brought a smile to my face at seventeen years old, whenever I heard Six sneak into my window.

Instead of wearing the excitement humming through my body, I drop my gaze from his, my mind racing for something to say. Something that will erase the awkward twist in my gut.

An object lands in front of me—Papa’s journal. I lift it from the mat, holding it close to me.

“Grab something to eat, and we’ll head out. I’ve spoken with the others. They know you’re leaving.” He tips back the bottle, guzzling the amber fluid.

Still keeping my gaze cast away from him, I nod. “I … heard you last night. You had nightmares in your sleep.”

Silence fills the pause.

“What did you dream?”

“I don’t remember my dreams.”

With a second nod, I push myself to my feet, sliding up the wall. “That’s too bad. It seems you know my name, after all.”

Lifting my gaze to his, I take in the severe pinch of his brows, as I step past him and exit the room toward the main cavern.

But the momentary pleasant feelings give way to the ache in my heart, as I catch sight of the other survivors. It tells me he’s become a bad man. That whatever I knew of him is no longer there, and in his place is a bastard who snatches women, keeping them imprisoned as if they’re his property, and killing whatever gets in his way. The thrill of having found him is trampled by sadness, and the cold reality that I mayhave lost him, after all, that night by the Juniper tree.

The skulls themselves don’t frighten me, but his fascination with the aftermath does. Because the boy I remember possessed the ability to control his demons.

This man clearly does not. The sweetness of his youth has twisted into some sadistic perversion.

Sun filters through the gap onto a bigger crowd than yesterday’s. Some sit eating fruit and water. Others prepare the food, handing it out to those who wait. I catch the blonde girl from the day before, dressed in a new set of clothes, her face free of the dirt and blood she wore on her arrival to this place. She sits along the wall, snapping her fruit into small bites, eyes scanning the others.

When something hits my chest, I glance down to a plate of food, offered by the old woman from yesterday. Her eyes are upturned today. Sad. And they don’t seem to want to meet mine, as I accept the meal, and she walks off. Weaving through the crowd, I take a seat beside the blonde, who smiles back at me.

“Hi,” she says, and goes back to eating her food.

“Hi.” Out of the corner of my eye, I examine the bruises on her skin, the cuts that have been cleaned. “You came yesterday, right?”

She nods, not bothering to look up.

“Are you okay?”

That single question seems to set off some kind of trigger. Her lip trembles, and she sucks in a sharp inhale, covering her mouth with her hand.

I catch the glisten of a tear slipping down her cheek and set a hand to her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay.” Leaning into her, I glance around the room. “I’m getting out of here. I’ll send help. I promise.”

With tears in her eyes, she studies me with a look of confusion. “Help?”

Nodding, I give a light squeeze to her shoulder. “These assholes are going to pay for what they did to you.”

Puzzlement plasters across her face, as she tips her head. “Who?”

Now I’m the one confused. “The … bikers?”

Brows knitted, she shakes her head. “They didn’t do anything to me.”

“But you … yesterday, you … had blood. And your dress was torn.”

She lowers her gaze again, and more tears slide down her cheek. “Our hive was raided. By Legion soldiers. My mother and sister were killed.” Dropping the plate of food, she pulls her knees into her body and buries her face in her palms. All I can hear are the sniffles that tell me she’s sobbing behind her hands. “One of the … soldiers. He dragged me into … the hallway.”

A cold sensation moves through my bones, knowing what comes next.

“He … wouldn’t stop. It hurt, and I kept screaming for him to stop.” Her throat bobs with a swallow, and when her hands fall away from her face, her eyes seem locked in a trance.

Immediately, I regret asking this girl anything. Subjecting her to the cruel memories.

“I’m sorr—”

“Then it stopped.” An air of wonderment clings to her voice, and she stares off, her eyes softening with relief. “He pulled him off of me. All I saw was the soldier’s body. Fell to the ground next to me. I was lifted up and carried out of that place, just clutching to him. I couldn’t let him go. I didn’t want to, I was so scared.”

“Who?”

“Rhys.”

“The bikers … I thought … I thought they hurt you. They stole your food and supplies.”

Casting her gaze from mine, she shakes her head. “We had no food. We were starving.”

Once again, my eyes are peeled back to a cold reality I failed to see. I look around the cavern, to all of the people serving food, eating it, laughing. My gaze lifts to Red, standing off to the side, her hand stroking the spongy red curls of a little girl beside her.

Suddenly, its clear.

The rebels were saving them. Rescuing them from Legion soldiers.

Of course.

I’m an idiot.

A blind and ignorant fool who fell prey to the propaganda—the same lies I accused others of blindly accepting—that had me believing the rebels were an unruly band of misfits out to raise hell and steal from the innocent.

“Did they raid your hive?” The girl’s question draws my attention back to her, as she wipes the fallen tears from her cheeks. “The Legion soldiers. Did they raid your hive, too?”

Lips tight, I nod.

“We’re gonna be okay now. We’re safe. Rhys says he knows a place. With a wall, so no one can hurt us again.” Her smile lights up her sad eyes that brim with so much hope.

Licking my lips, I drop my gaze to the plate in my lap. “I know that place.”

“He says it’s the only place where you can sleep beneath the stars all night.”

Squeezing my eyes shut hardly keeps the tears from welling, and I give a nod. “That’s what I’ve heard, too.”

I hand her my plate of fruit. “Take mine.”

She accepts the food with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”

How could I be so stupid?

Rhys strides past us, through the crowd, toward the entrance of the cavern with the bottle still dangling from his fist, and I jump to my feet to follow after him.

When I reach the guard, I wait for him to deny me passage, but he doesn’t. Instead, he steps aside, allowing me to chase after Rhys.

Once outside, I shield my eyes from the blinding sun, and catch sight of him making his way toward the warehouse.

“Rhys!”

He stops in his tracks, and I scuttle across the hot desert sand to meet him. Slipping on his gloves, he doesn’t bother to look at me, his body tense, shoulders bunched with annoyance.

“You’re …” A nervous tickle hits my throat, and I swallow past the lump. “Your name is Rhys.”

He glances back at me and nods. “My birth name, yes. But you called me Six.”

The world around me stills to a deafening silence. I can’t move at first. Can scarcely breathe.

Six.

The sound of his name crashes over me, filling my eyes with tears, and I want to hear him say it again and again. I want more of that sound, one I yearned for at seventeen, when he was the mute boy from the other side of the wall. I feel trapped in a dream, and the dread that settles in my stomach is a threat that I’m going to wake any moment.

“Tell me something only Six would know.”

His eye twitches with his contemplation, while the flexing and rubbing of his hands seems to hold his attention. “You used to sing to me. At night. Didn’t know for sure it was you, until I read some of that journal.”

I reach out to touch his face, but recoil, closing my hand to a tight fist before allowing my fingers to skate across his scarred cheek.

His body stills, stiffens. A sharp exhale passes his lips. His eyes flinch, but bloom with familiarity, and suddenly every detail, every hard edge of his face sends a phantom tingle across my fingertips, as the memories trickle in.

Six.

How could I have forgotten this face? How could I not see him behind those eyes? A gasp of nervous laughter sits trapped inside my chest, trodden on by the disbelief that I’m staring at the man I believed dead.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice breaks on the question, and lowering my hand away, I clear my throat to choke back the sob itching to escape.

A pregnant pause lingers between us, his gaze directed downward, as he tucks the bottle beneath his arm and smooths his gloves over his hands. “I’ve been dead inside. And when you’re that dead, you don’t do the things you need to do, to make things right again.” He sniffs, clenching his hands into fists with his fidgeting. “You weren’t supposed to come back.” His lips curl to a snarl, as he shakes his head. “Not to me.”

“What do you mean?”

He rolls his shoulders and looks off somewhere toward the vast desert in front of him. “The night I took off, I ran to the Juniper tree, like you said. Legion found me there.” In his profile, I catch the furrow of his brow. “They told me you were dead. That you’d been shot trying to fight a guard. So I …” He shakes his head, lips downturned. “I gave up right then. Handed myself over. Didn’t give a shit what happened to me. They could take me back to that place. Torture me. Kill me. Didn’t matter. I had nothin’ left.”

“I came for you. Saw what was left.” My mind traces back to the moment I lifted his shirt from the sand and clutched the only piece of him I had left. “I buried myself by that tree. Everything I was. And I couldn’t go back again.”

“I’m not the boy you remember, Wren.” There’s hardness to both his voice and his expression, an impenetrable shield meant to shut me out. “You were right last night, when you said I’ve become heartless. I’ve killed men in your name. In ways that no god would ever forgive.” He glides his arm across his nose and sniffs, letting his gaze fall away from mine again.

“I did this to you?”

“I did this to myself.” His jaw shifts, flexing as he grinds his teeth. “Every night I lost myself to hallucinations of your face. Every girl I save is you. Every time I go out there, I hear your voice on the wind. Your laughter. Your scent. It’s all up here,” he says, jabbing a fist to his temple. “Can’t get you out of my head. Tried to carve you out of me, but I can’t, and the blood I spill isn’t enough. It’s never enough.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“And then you come back? Why? Why are you here?”

“I’m only here because I was brought to you.”

“Brought to me. Like I deserve that. Like I ain’t on God’s shit-list for everything I’ve done.” He paces in front of me, rubbing his nape, then stops and shakes his head. “You weren’t supposed to come back to me. To this.” He throws the bottle at the brick wall beside him, shattering the glass on impact, and I flinch. “Not to me!” The anger in his voice thunders along my spine, and a watery shield covers my eyes.

“Well, I’m here. And finding out about you wasn’t exactly easy to swallow at first, either. The girls, I get it now. You save them from Legion. But I was sold. Rigs bought me. He didn’t save me.”

“If you knew the sick fucks some of those girls’ve been sold to.” His eyes sweep over me and back toward the mountains. “Rigs spared you, too. We’re no saints, Wren. Nobody saves anyone out here. And nothing’s free. Can’t all shack up with us. And they won’t survive alone out there.” He jerks his chin toward the open desert. “So we trade when we have to.”

“Then maybe it’s better if I go. Because the boy I used to know wouldn’t have traded me for anything. I know that for a fact. He’d never let anything hurt me.”

His chest rises and falls, his lips press to a hard line, and what seems like an eternity passes in the silence between us.

His eyes find me again. “I didn’t plan to let you go. And I’d never let anything hurt you. Not anything, or anyone.” Brows drawn tight, he shakes his head. “Not even me.”

“The tattoo. Can I see it? The one they put there?”

With neither a word, nor hesitation, he turns around, pushing the bunched skull mask down, as he runs his thumb over the short crop of his hairline. There above the glisten of sweat across his neck, hardly discernible beneath the cover of his hair, is the number I memorized. The one I whispered every night for years, praying to God he didn’t die in pain.

He twists back around to face me, a vulnerable tormented expression claiming his face, and my heart feels as if it’s going to explode in my chest.

When I lurch toward him, I move on instinct, colliding into his hard body. My arms wrap around his neck as I crash my lips to his. He’s stiff at first, muscles rigid, hardly moving, but vibrating with raw power, like a mountain lion poised to strike.

I kiss him harder, running my fingers across his nape, until he relents just enough, his body relaxing just a little.

He kisses me back, and his arms wrap around me. Tighter. Tighter.

The taste of him is heaven against my tongue, and his fervent kisses send me into a dizzy haze. He lifts me from the ground, as we stumble backward until his back hits the wall. He spins around, and the warm bricks of the building press into my spine.

His kiss is familiar, both a comfort and a thrill that winds my stomach as he pins me to the wall. Our breaths mingle, teeth clash, tongues dueling in a desperate bid for more. More.

He growls as he devours my lips, and I flinch at the sting of pain when he bites them.

My head tips back at the tug of my hair, as he licks my hammering pulse and carves his name into my flesh with his teeth.

“Take me somewhere, Six. Take me away before I wake up.”

When he pulls his face from my neck, his pupils are dilated, eyes riveted on my mouth, and he shakes his head.

“I’ve waited too long for you. Too long, little bird.”