Page 25 of Damaged

I’d seen the heavily wooded surroundings when we’d arrived at Dalton’s house the night before, but that hadn’t worried me because I’d run through woods like that when I’d escaped Ivan’s house.

I forced myself to bide my time before dropping the blanket wrapped around me, running past the small kitchen table, and flying out the front door that was only a handful of steps away. Despite all the old and now new aches, my instinct to survive was the same as it had been the night Maggie and I had made our escape.

I kept my eye on the door and mentally counted the seconds down even as I tried to sense exactly where Dalton was behind me. I knew if he wanted to catch me, he probably could. Despite how much pain I’d seen him experience in the past twenty-four hours, none of it had seemed to exist the second he’d grabbed my arm and thrown me to the floor. That pain hadn’t been there when he’d put his forearm against my neck and applied pressure.

Except…

I stopped abruptly and immediately felt something hit my back. A solid wall of muscle.

But I was too caught up in my thoughts to care. Despite the awkwardly long blanket, I managed to spin around.

“It wasn’t me,” I blurted. I had to look up to catch Dalton’s eyes.

Eyes that were now filled with remorse and shame.

There’d been nothing in those eyes just moments ago when he’d had me pinned beneath him, but truth be told, I’d been more scared than anything. Ivan had done far worse when he’d wrapped his big hands around my throat as he’d fucked me. Dalton was a big guy and I suspected that if he’d used all his strength, I would have been dead before I’d even had the chance to get his attention.

“It wasn’t me,” I repeated.

I was surprised when Dalton dropped his eyes.

Men never did that around me. I did it. I was the one who always dropped my eyes because that was one of the many things I’d had to do to survive my captivity.

“It wasn’t me,” I repeated softly, more to myself than anything else. “Maggie and the other girls… they sometimes accidentally slapped me when I woke them up from a scary dream. Or they tried to get as far away from me as they could before they realized it was me.”

The words coming out of my mouth sounded raspy, but the discomfort was minimal.

Dalton didn’t look up, nor did he respond. It was like the floor had become the most interesting thing in the room. His lack of reaction gave me a few seconds to study him. He was breathing hard, like he’d just run a race or something.

Or like he’d been the one who’d been running for his life through a maze of trees and brush in a desperate attempt to escape. He was sweating, and his features were drawn tight. I doubted it had anything to do with holding me down on the floor because that hadn’t seemed to take any effort on his part.

“Dalton…?”

“We should get that ice on your neck,” he murmured. He tried to step around me, but I stopped him by putting my fingers beneath his chin. I wasn’t sure who was more surprised, him or me, because as soon as I lifted his face enough that our eyes could meet, we both sucked in our breath. I’d touched him in the same way to get his attention when he’d been cutting off my air supply.

“It wasn’t me that you were seeing, was it?” I asked.

All I got was a brief shake of his head and then he was carefully maneuvering his big body around me and striding for the kitchen. One of his hands brushed over my stomach as he gently moved me aside so he could get past me. The comforter kept his hand from coming in direct contact with my body, but I still felt his touch and all the shame and despair that came with it.

The need to run evaporated completely. I released the blanket enough to bunch it up against my body and then made my way to the kitchen. Besides my pained throat, my back hurt a little, but as I replayed the scene in my head, I realized it could have been much worse because even as Dalton had thrown me to the floor, he’d put his arms around me in a way that had somehow shielded both my back and head. I wondered if he’d even been aware of that. I doubted he would have done that with a true threat.

I eased my body into one of the odd-looking kitchen chairs and then draped the ends of the still-tangled blanket over my lap. Dalton had his back to me, but I suspected it was intentional. Every move he made as he gathered the ice and began putting it into this weird-looking fabric tubing was frantic, and he ended up spilling more ice into the sink than getting it into what I assumed was an ice pack.

A weird discomfort grew in my belly as each second passed and Dalton got more and more frustrated with what he was doing. I wanted to tell him that he had enough ice in the thing, but I didn’t dare open my mouth. Not to mention I was focused on a strange ache building in my stomach. It hadn’t hurt a couple of minutes ago. The feeling began to spread through my upper body and landed hard in my chest.

Yes, my chest had hurt from what had happened when I’d hit the floor with Dalton’s heavy weight coming down on me, but this was different. I didn’t hurt because of him… I hurt for him.

The idea was so confusing and disturbing that I tore my eyes from Dalton and began looking around the small kitchen. It looked nothing like the massive kitchen in Ivan’s house. Dalton’s entire house probably could have fit into Ivan’s kitchen. And whereas Ivan’s kitchen had always been gleaming because his maids had worked hard to make it so, Dalton’s kitchen had a very used look. The chairs were strange because they weren’t made of wood. The material I was sitting on was somewhat slippery and the back of the chair was attached to the seat with metal rods. There was nothing special about the table. It looked like wood, but it also didn’t because it was peeling in a few spots. The refrigerator and stove were tiny compared to Ivan’s, but I didn’t know anything about how Americans decorated their houses, so maybe that was normal.

A quick glance at the windows showed them covered with dusty material that looked like it might have had fish on it. The thing that was most intriguing to me, though, was the clock that hung on the wall near the door. It was clearly supposed to look like a cat but in a bizarre way. The round black belly served as the time part, but for some reason the cat’s tail and eyes moved back and forth every second. I found myself caught up in the rhythm and closed my eyes. The sudden sound of kids laughing had my eyes popping open.

But there were no kids in sight.

I shook off the strange reaction and focused on Dalton as he moved behind me, his steps slow and careful. “I’m just going to put this around your neck so that most of the ice will cover your throat. It’s got some Velcro at the end which I’ll adjust to stay around your neck so you won’t have to hold it in place.”

I had no clue what Velcro was, but I didn’t dare move an inch as Dalton placed the weird tube around my neck. The material was soft, and I immediately felt the coolness of the ice.

“Good?” Dalton asked hesitantly.

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