Chapter 7

Chapter

Seven

April 15 th

12:29 P.M.

All the color drained from her face.

Even before Beth's knees began to buckle, Axe was closing the distance between them and wrapping an arm around her waist, yanking her up against his body when she would have collapsed.

"Beth?"

There was no answer to his panicked call, the woman in his arms may as well be a rag doll. Her eyes were open, but it was more than obvious they were staring at nothing, the blank, glassy look was utterly terrifying. Her mouth was moving but no sound came out, and fine tremors rippled through her otherwise limp and pliant body.

What was going on?

The change in her had been instantaneous.

One moment she had been bantering with him, asking more questions about herself and their lives together. There had been a second there when he thought all her memories had returned because she'd said words they always used to say to one another .

My man.

My woman.

My heart.

My life.

How many times had they whispered those same words? Every night when he was home, every morning he was lucky enough to wake up with her body draped across his. Any time he left on an op because they both knew there was a chance he wouldn't be coming home to her.

Those words were locked inside her head, Beth knew them even if she didn't know she knew them.

But then he'd admitted he was afraid of her memories returning, afraid of how he would deal with watching her being forced to relive all the horrors she'd been through. She hadn't heard what he'd said to her after asking him if he was really afraid of her memories coming back.

Like a switch had been flipped, she'd gone into a trance.

Was it something he had said?

Done?

No, couldn't be. They had agreed to be honest with one another, no secrets, no holding back.

Was she having memory flashes?

So far, she hadn't had any while she was awake, and she hadn't had a single one since he had woken from his coma. Part of him had believed she wasn't going to have anymore. That they had been a way for her subconscious to work through her fears of losing him and now that she knew he wasn't going anywhere, he wouldn't have been surprised if her subconscious shut that down again.

"Beth? Wisp? Come back to me, honey. Do you know where you are? You're here, in our home, in the kitchen making lunch. You're safe here, wisp. Perfectly safe. No one can hurt you here. I won't let them. Whatever is going on inside your mind can't hurt you. It's all in the past. No one is ever going to hurt you again."

Axe prayed that was a vow he could keep.

But even as he knew he would do anything to keep her safe, Leonid Baranov was still out there, and as long as the man remained free, Beth would always be in danger.

Gathering her into his arms, he ignored the microwave's insistent beeping—fear a knot of nausea sitting heavily in his stomach made him have zero interest in lunch—and sat at the table, cradling his wife in his lap.

"It's okay, wisp, everything is okay. Come back to me, honey. Please. It's Axel. Your husband, the man who loves you more than anything else on the planet. The man who would do anything for you. Right now, I need you to do something for me. I need you to look at me, Beth. I need you to tell me if you're okay, I need you to tell me what you need from me."

There was no response and his fear and anxiety ramped up several notches.

Unsure what he should do, how to coax Beth out of her trance and back to him, he pulled his cell phone from his back pocket.

Speed dialing Rock, he disposed of pleasantries and got straight to the point. "I need you here. Now. Something's wrong with Beth."

In the background, he could hear his friend moving about. "What's wrong with her? Is she sick? Did she fall and hurt herself?"

"We were making lunch, and she just … checked out." Axe wasn't sure how else to explain it.

"Checked out how?"

"I'm not sure, but I think she's having memory flashes."

"What?" The surprise in Rock's voice reminded him that no one but him knew that Beth had gotten any of her memories back.

"She's been having them since I was in a coma," he explained. "Only flashes of her childhood, although she remembers being sold and getting into a car with Leonid Baranov. Nothing after that. She's been asking me questions, and I've been telling her things about our time together after we found her. We were talking, and then suddenly, she just froze."

Tightening his grip on his wife, Axe pressed a kiss to her temple, concerned about how cold her skin felt.

"Froze, how? Is she talking? Interacting with you in any way?" Rock asked, and he could hear the rev of an engine that told him his friend was on his way.

"No. Her eyes are blank, and her lips are moving, but she's not saying anything. She's cold, trembling, and completely limp. She's like a doll, Rock. I'm talking to her, trying to get her to answer, but she's not hearing me. She's locked inside her head, and I'm terrified about what she's reliving."

That was why he was afraid of those memories returning.

All he wanted to do was protect her from fear and pain, and yet he was forced to sit here, completely uselessly, holding his wife, doing nothing meaningful to help her while she relived the hell she had lived through.

"I'm on my way, I'll text the others. If she's having memory flashes, she'll likely wake up on her own when she's ready. If she doesn't, we'll take her to the hospital," Rock told him. "For now, just keep talking to her, keep doing what you're doing."

As he set the phone back on the table, Axe began to rock his wife on his lap, so very aware of how impotent he was in this moment.

Since there was nothing else to do but sit there and wait it out, he rocked Beth, whispered to her, touched kisses all over her face, her cheeks, her forehead, and her temple, whispering his lips against the corners of her mouth, praying every second that she would come back to him.

Minutes or hours might have passed when he heard the door to his cabin swing open, and the sounds of several sets of footsteps. Rock appeared in the kitchen doorway, the others standing behind him.

With his team there his confidence grew a little. Beth wasn't lost to him this time, she was still here, safe in his arms. While he couldn't protect her from the memories assaulting her mind, he could hold her, make sure she felt his presence, be there for her when she snapped out of it.

"How's she doing?" Rock asked as he knelt beside the chair and picked up Beth's wrist to check her pulse.

Hating how her hand hung so limply in the medic's hold, Axe forced himself not to focus on it. Beth was breathing, her heart was beating, she would be okay. "Still the same. I don't know how to snap her out of it."

"Maybe you shouldn't try," Trick suggested. "Just let it run its course. If her mind has decided it's time for her memories to start returning, then it knows she's ready to handle it. "

"I agree," Panther said. "Beth is tough. Tougher than any single one of us. She can handle this. You just need to make sure you can."

There was no choice.

He had to handle it.

Beth was his number one priority, and he would give her everything she needed. More. He'd give her everything he had to give.

"Here, tuck this around her," Tank said, holding out a blanket.

Taking it, he wrapped it around Beth, then stood, carrying her through to the living room, he sunk down onto the couch. A couch where they had spent many an evening together, curled up reading or watching TV. There had been more of those shared moments the last few days since he woke up from his coma, and he'd been able to feel his wife slowly moving closer to him again. Beth hadn't felt so far away anymore, that distance was almost gone.

Just as he sat down and curled his wife into his lap, he finally felt her stir.

"Axel?" Beth's weak voice murmured his name, and relief hit him hard.

"Right here, wisp. I'm right here," he assured her, touching a kiss to her temple and tightening his hold so she could feel him around her.

Tears began to flood down her cheeks and she buried her face against his neck as she began to sob. Still her words when she spoke were clear enough for all of them to hear. "I remember everything Leonid Baranov did to me."

April 15 th

1:01 P.M.

Pain burned every nerve ending.

It didn't matter that it was nothing more than echoes of pain from newly recovered memories, right now, Beth was feeling every single thing she had felt in those months she had been Leonid Baranov's prisoner .

This hadn't been how she'd expected her memories to return.

What she'd thought would happen was more flashes appearing in her dreams. Dreaming had afforded her a measure of distance from those memories. More like she was watching them play out rather than experiencing them herself even as she knew she was seeing things that had actually happened to her younger self.

But this had been like she was picked up, transported back through time, and set down right in the middle of that hell she had lived through.

There had been no distance.

None.

At all.

She had felt each burning sting as the whip connected with her back, each hit as the man who had bought her ordered his men to strike her. She'd felt the gnawing pain in her stomach from being starved, she'd felt the pain and humiliation as he forced his way inside her body. She'd felt the terror as he covered her mouth until she passed out, then revived her and did it all over again, and the terror when he did the same thing shoving her head in a bucket of water. The agony as he burned the soles of her feet, dragged the tip of his knife over her nipples, and peeled off layers of skin on her backside, then made her sit on it for hours.

Every horrific second played out in her mind and she was powerless to stop it.

Even now, the lingering pain had her shaking and crying, the only thing stopping her from completely falling apart was Axel's arms, warm and steady around her.

Axel was here. That meant she was okay. It meant she was safe.

Beth knew that down to her bones even as the pain and terror refused to release their hold on her mind and body.

"Shh, wisp, it's okay, I've got you," Axel's voice murmured against the top of her head. The warm puff of air and the steady beating of his heart helped to reassure her that she was safe. She had been rescued, and Leonid Baranov would never touch her again.

Of course, she had seen the scars littering her body, there was no way she could not have. The only thing she had been told when she turned up there with amnesia was that there was a bad man who had hurt her in the past and who had taken her again. They had only told her that much because they needed to see if they could get her to remember where she had been held so they could hopefully get a lead on Baranov.

But knowing she had been hurt and experiencing that pain were two completely different things.

"You're not alone, Beth. Not anymore. Not ever again," Axel's voice continued to speak. She wasn't sure it had ever stopped, she remembered it even as she'd been trapped in reliving her trauma. "It's not just me here. All the guys are here, too. We all love you. You're not just my wife, you're family to all of us. None of us will stop until he's caught, until he's dead and you can believe he will never hurt you again."

Slowly strength began to ebb into her, quieting the panic.

While she still had no memories of the months she had disappeared before returning with amnesia, she did know that she had escaped.

No one would have set her free, if they had, they wouldn't have just dumped her and let her run through the woods to find her way home.

That meant she had strength inside her.

Strength she needed to summon.

Because if Axel and the others were going to have any chance at finding and stopping Leonid Baranov, they needed her help to do it.

Carefully, she eased herself off Axel's chest. While she wasn't ready to leave the security of his hold, she needed to face this head-on.

Abysmal as her childhood had been, it had taught her to be a fighter from the earliest of ages. Survival meant fighting, for a scrap of food, to ignore the pain, and to not give in to the voice whispering in her head that it would be easier to be dead than to keep enduring.

But dead wasn't better.

Dead meant giving up, and never once in her life had she given up.

If it hadn't been for the lessons she had learned as a small child, she wouldn't have survived Baranov. That much she now knew without a shadow of a doubt. Baranov had kept her alive so long because he was yet to break her. That intrigued him, that a person could be immune to his sadistic torture. Well, not immune exactly, but Beth had already suffered so much that while intense, he wasn't dishing out anything she hadn't already endured.

The moment she gave in she was dead .

That was Baranov's game. Play with his toys until they broke, and then get a new one. His near-limitless finances meant he would always have the money to buy another person. It made him almost unstoppable because he also had the money to keep moving to remain hidden. You couldn't catch what you couldn't find.

Grasping her chin between his thumb and forefinger, Axel tilted her face so he could study it. "You okay, wisp?"

Yes.

No.

Had to be.

Giving a shaky nod, she crushed her mouth to his, Beth infused every ounce of love she felt for this man into that kiss. He hadn't just saved her life when he and his team rescued her from Baranov, he'd saved her soul. Without him, she would never have experienced love, peace, and belonging. While she might have been alive she wouldn't have lived . Not like this, not the way Axel had taught her.

"I'll be okay," she whispered against his lips. "I have you."

His dark eyes were serious as he stared back at her. "Always."

"Then I can do this." Drawing strength from her husband, Beth faced the others. "I don't remember when I was missing, I'm sorry. I've been having memory flashes since Axel was in a coma, well while he was in a coma, but they were just of my childhood. Today something triggered my memories of when I was sold to Leonid Baranov. I remember … everything … from while I was there."

When Axel's arms tightened convulsively around her, Beth rested a hand on his forearm and began to stroke, soothing him, knowing how hard this was for the both of them.

"We don't have to do this now, Bethie," Scorpion told her.

"You can rest now, and we can talk about it tomorrow … or another time," Tank added.

Okay, so it wasn't just hard for her and Axel but all of them.

Since she couldn't sit on all of these men's laps and stroke their arms to soothe them, she offered what she could, a reassuring smile.

"I can do this. I have all of you, I'm not alone, I'm okay." The words were for their benefit and her own. "I think two other women were rescued with me, right? "

"Two others," Panther confirmed. With a glance at Axel, when her husband nodded, Panther continued, "One of the women committed suicide shortly after being rescued. Her name was Veronica."

"Veronica," she murmured to herself, forcing her brain to focus so she could sift through those newly returned memories. "I … remember her. She was new. Had only been there a few days. He hadn't broken her yet."

"Broken her?" Trick asked.

Her memories of after she was rescued hadn't returned yet, so Beth wasn't sure what she had told them the first time around. "Baranov only liked to play with his toys until he broke them. Then he killed them. It's why I was there for so long, he hadn't broken me yet."

"He would never have broken you," Axel said fiercely, and Beth found herself smiling despite the lingering pain and fear still rolling through her body.

Pressing a kiss to his jaw, she continued, "Veronica wasn't broken because there wasn't time, but I remember the other woman. Sarah?"

"Sarah," Rock confirmed.

"She had been there longer than me, but … I don't think that makes sense," she said, unsure if her memories were reliable.

"What do you mean, sweetie?" Tank asked.

"Baranov told me on more than one occasion that I was intriguing to him because I was the only toy he'd had who had lasted that long without breaking. It was exciting to him, he was curious about why I was able to withstand his torture better than all the others. So, if I was the only one who lasted that long without breaking, why was Sarah still alive? If he considered her to be broken, why wasn't she already dead by the time you guys found us?"