Page 30 of Entangled in Them

My irritation was building. It didn’t help that I was struggling today. The pain had been worse than normal, and I’d been plagued with an itching that didn’t exist. Normally, sex would have taken my mind off everything, but both Dillon and Kodee were out. Besides, I was still angry with Dillon for creating this situation in the first place. I just wanted her to leave. My palms itched, tempted to grab her by the arm and throw her out into the corridor outside, but I couldn’t.

What would they others say if I did? They’d be angry with me, but not because of any concerns about the well-being of the girl. They didn’t want to get in trouble with the Capello brothers either.

Maybe I should tell her to go into the bedroom and stay out of my sight, but I didn’t want her spending more time in Kodee’s room. I didn’t like that some sex slave had spent the night in his bed, huddled into his sheets and with her face on his pillow. I didn’t want her to spend even more time around his things.

I stalked over to the bookcase and stood with my hands on my hips, studying the contents. I could feel her gaze on me, perhaps wondering what I was doing. This was mainly Kodee’s bookshelf, and he’d organized it into subjects and genres, with an entire row at the bottom dedicated to the giant, hardback cookbooks he loved. I didn’t know why he couldn’t check out the recipes online like everyone else, but according to Kodee, it wasn’t the same.

I scanned the titles of one of the shelves that contained the fiction books. I had no idea what a young woman might like. Something with romance, I guessed, though I pulled an internal face to myself at that. Real life romance was nothing like it was in the books. It wasn’t hearts and flowers and softly spoken words. It was tears and fighting, and bruising kisses and rough make-up sex. It was imperfect, broken people coming together and trying to patch up the jagged holes that remained, enough to keep them from falling apart. It was wanting to be with that person, no matter how much they drove you crazy. It was hating them for loving you, because you didn’t understand how they could love you when you couldn’t even love yourself.

I clenched my fists at my sides and gritted my teeth. Kodee, and even Dillon, had done that for me. They’d both loved me—even though we never actually said the words to each other—despite all my broken pieces. They had never known the man I was before I was discharged from the Army. I wasn’t sure I even knew that man myself anymore. He was like a dream I’d once had where I couldn’t remember if the dream was real or not. I’d been confident, cocky, self-assured—a little like Dillon was now. Everything had seemed so easy, and now I had to fight every day, with my head as well as my body. I never knew how powerful the mind was before now, the tricks it could play.

Sometimes, that was the cruelest trick of all.

My fingers alighted on the spine of a hardback novel. Something by an author called Jodi Picoult, who I thought I’d heard of. Not romance, but it seemed Kodee shared my point of view on that front, and there weren’t any to choose from. I slid the book out from the shelf and glanced over it. I guessed it looked like something a woman might read.

“Here.” I turned from the shelf and dropped the hardback onto the couch beside her. “This one is supposed to be good.”

She gave me a smile and picked up the book, turning it over in her hands. “What’s it about?”

“I’m not sure.” I’d only scanned the blurb quickly as I’d picked it off the shelf. “Something to do with racism that a nurse encounters, I think.” I gestured at the book, still held in her hands. “You can read the back for yourself.”

She gave me that same smile and turned the book over, her gaze dropping down. “That’s an interesting subject.”

She looked as though she wanted to make conversation with me, was trying hard to please, and a tiny corner of my heart melted. I was sure it couldn’t be easy being her right now, but I still didn’t want her on my territory.

“Yeah.” It did sound good, and I discovered it had piqued my interest. I frowned, straining my neck to get a better look. “What does the rest say?”

“Umm. Here. You look.”

She held the book back out to me, but I didn’t take it. “No, you can tell me.”

She dropped her gaze back down. To my surprise, a tear dripped off the end of her nose and onto the hardback.

“The thing is, I can’t read,” she admitted.

“Oh, shit.” Jesus Christ. What an utter ass I was. “You can’t read?”

Her blush deepened. “I can recognize some letters, and a couple of basic words, but that’s all. My mother never sent me to school, and she didn’t put much faith in reading. She told me a girl never got anywhere by relying on books, and that I had my beauty and body to use instead.”

I stared at her in horror. “How old were you when she said that?”

“I don’t know. Ten years old, maybe.” Rue gave a cold laugh. “She took her own words a little too literally, though, ’cause in the end she was the one to use my beauty and body to earn herself money.”

“Fucking hell. How old were you?”

That shrug again. “Fourteen, I guess.”

“Fourteen?” My mouth dropped open.

“She liked me to tell people I was younger, though. Apparently, she got more money then.”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth, disbelieving. I’d found it easy to dismiss her when I thought she’d been brought here as a sex slave. I’d assumed she’d somehow gotten into her situation willingly, that she’d offered herself up, and fallen into her role by choice, but now I saw how stupid and ignorant I’d been.

“What happened to your mother?” In a flash of anger on her behalf, I wanted to find out exactly where the other woman was and track her down, and make her pay for selling her own daughter for sex to get money for whatever nasty drug habit she’d had.

“I don’t know. She sold me off a year later, for good that time. That was the last time I saw her. I think she’s probably dead by now.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

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