Page 16 of Vicious Little Princess

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” I gritted out. “I’m sorry that—”

She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Shh. It did happen, and the fault is Angelo’s. But I handled it. I stopped them from doing what they’d planned.”

“You most definitely did.”

She flinched and pulled her fingers away. “You think I went too far, don’t you?”

I turned the shower water off and stepped out, grabbing a towel, then handing it to her.

I went to take her hand to help her out, but she batted it away and got out on her own, much steadier on her feet now. “Don’t avoid the question,” she said, taking the towel and securing it around her.

Normally, I’d be hard-pressed to keep my hands off her with her just being right in front of me, let alone wet and naked. But with her like this, not fully herself, even though I could see her getting there bit by bit, and after what she’d been through tonight, all I could see was the clinical side of things.

“I’m the last person to judge any of that,” I told her. “You know what I’ve done. Well, some of the things. You’ve even borne witness to some particularly brutal instances.” I shrugged my soaking wet shirt off, then opened my pants. “Furthermore,Iwasn’t the one bound to that chair and facing off with four sexual predators intent onbreaking me infor when I was shipped off to some sick sex slave buyer.”

She gasped at my words and stilled. “How did you know that part?”

“The guys were ID’d by a source of ours and Milo put the pieces together from there.”

“Source? What source?”

I shoved my pants and boxers down, then kicked them off, thankful to be free from the uncomfortable feeling of wet clothes sticking to me. I snatched another towel off a rail, then wrapped it across my hips. “We’ll get into that later. When you’re… better.”

“Better? I’m fine now.”

I scrubbed my hand over my face. “Caterina, stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Acting likethiscan just roll off your back.”

“Isn’t that what you want from me?”

“What?”

“You think I didn’t hear you talking to the guys when you sent me upstairs to get dressed for our sparring session that never actually ended up happening because of other dire circumstances? You thought I’d gone soft, lost my edge, that I was reeling from everything.Weak.”

“That’s not—I was airing my worries out loud in a burst. They weren’t all perfectly—”

“You need me this way.Ineed me this way. Able to take the hits and keep on moving. Not absorbing the trauma, not letting it touch me.”

“Notprocessingit is really what’s happening with you. And it’s an issue. You bury it down deep, hit after hit, but it can’t all be contained, and then it threatens to break you apart. Youneedto process it, acknowledge it. What happened in that garage is proof enough of that, of what can happen if you don’t.”

“I destroyed them, Nico.”

“There’s a difference between putting down an enemy and whatyoudid.”

“So you do condemn it? After wanting to see that side of me, to bring it out in me,thisis how you respond when I actually do unleash it? Is it because it wasn’t sexually? Is that why you’re condemning it? Because you didn’t get anything out of it? Because you and your dick didn’t benefit?”

Well, she’d certainly come fully out of her withdrawn state now.

But there was a whole lot of lashing out going on.

“You feel guilty.”

“What?” she bit at me.

“This is remorse kicking in. It’s why you’re lashing out, getting angry. It’s creeping up, and it feels like shit.” Or, so I’d heard from Milo and Julian whenever they’d crossed lines like this before over the years.

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