Page 53 of Burn

GRACE

The world was hazy when my eyes opened again. Hazy, dark, and unfamiliar. It took two blinks before I jerked my eyes wide open. Where was I?

I tried to sit up, but a sharp pain in my back had me gasping for air. It was like someone had slammed a knife into the middle of my back or I’d swallowed something too hot and it scalded down my back as it went through my esophagus.

“Easy, Firecracker,” a sleepy voice wrapped around me, and vibrated beneath my ear. “You’re safe.”

A hand brushed over my hip, just a light caress and it was more unsettling than comforting. I scowled into the darkness and pushed upward again. I didn’t want to be lying down or lying withsomeone.

The man had chained me to a pallet at the foot of his bed. This was meina bed with?—

My stomach bottomed out, but I managed to get myself up partially by wedging my hand against the bed. The man I’d been using as a pillow shifted beneath me.

“You need to be up?” All traces of drowsy left his voice. The fight to get up vanished as he sat us both up.

Pain raked right between my shoulder blades. It was so intense, I thought I would throw up. As it was, I hissed out a breath as words abandoned me totally.

“Breathe,” Voodoo said, the order penetrating the fog around my brain. “You tore open the wound where the doc took out the tracker.”

“That’s bad,” I managed to push the words out around the bubble of pain trapped in my throat.

“It could have been worse,” he said, in a voice filled with gentle kindness that seemed grounded in practicality. “The blood loss wasn’t ideal, but I got it cleaned out, the bleeding stopped, and resealed it.”

“That must be why it hurts like hell.” I hated complaining, but I was still sitting right there with his arm around me. Beads of sweat popped all over my face even as I shivered.

“How much pain are you in?” He moved behind me, then lifted me like I weighed nothing and shifted me to the edge of the bed as he rose. “Watch your eyes.”

I barely managed to close my eyes before the light came on. It seemed almost red from behind my eyelids. When I squinted them open, I found Voodoo crouched in front of me. The intensity in his dark eyes added another shiver to my trembling. I folded my arms trying to ward off the cold.

“It feels like someone is stabbing me,” I said. “Not that anyone ever has, but if it feels like there’s something ripping into me from my back and hitting so deep, I can almost taste it when I breathe. But I don’t want to breathe at the same time cause it makes it hurt more.”

“Well, that’s about what being stabbed feels like,” Voodoo said. “Usuallyafterthe blade comes out. Let me take a look, cause you’re flushed and shaking.”

I raised a hand to check it and it was definitely trembling. Then I looked down at my bare legs and the t-shirt I hadn’t been wearing before. It was far too large.

“I changed you.” He was all business as he rose and he grabbed something from his bag—a little travel toiletries bag maybe. He set it on the bed. “Need me to help you with that or can you lift it up?”

There was vulnerable and then there was on display. Nothing in his manner suggested lust or demand. It was a body. Everyone had one and plenty had seen me in far less.

Not usually in a hotel room—I guessed that was where we were—or when alone with a new captor.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. Those words were loathsome. “Do I need to take it all the way off?”

“It would be easier,” he said. “Here, roll onto your stomach and I’ll lift it in the back, then if we need to take it off, we can revisit.”

That seemed fair—reasonable even.

“Okay,” I said, around another hard breath and he helped me as I tried to turn. Pain seemed to sizzle along my nerves and it was hard to do anything thatdidn’tpull against my upper back.

Far more breathless than I wanted to admit, I pressed my face against the duvet of the bed. At least it smelled clean.

“Touching you now,” Voodoo warned. The glide of his warm fingers against my skin sent another shudder through me. The air was suddenly chillier against my skin and I swore I was sweating. “Yeah, okay. That’s not pretty.”

“I’ll have you know, that my ass is insured for close to a quarter of a million dollars. I think it’s a little more than pretty.”

“Quarter of a million, huh?” He placed the flat of his palm right over the center of the knife digging into my back. I was really missing that lidocaine shot. Or any shot really. “I think they weren’t going for full value there, Firecracker. But give me aminute and I’ll do a squeeze test. Maybe it’s a little jigglier than it looks.”

I laughed and it turned into a gasp. Oh fuck, that hurt.

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