Page 76 of Broken

“I don’t. Not always. When I was in Switzerland, the blood seeped into my chasuble. It caused complaints.”

She snorts. “I can imagine.”

My lips curve, and even though I never in a million years imagined smiling about something like this, I do now.

And it’s… pleasant.

“I’ll be two seconds.”

“Don’t you think it needs more than a shirt?” she asks, watching me move off the bed.

I wear a pair of boxer briefs, but it feels like I’m naked when I can sense her eyes drifting over me.

When she sees my back, she hisses at the wounds.

Then, from out of nowhere, she’s there, arms sliding around my waist, face pressing into my arm.

She doesn’t say anything, just holds me, and somehow, that’s what has my eyes burning with tears.

I don’t let them fall.

They’re not for me anyway.

They’re for the fallen. The innocent. Those I failed and who’ll haunt me until the end of time.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” she keens.

“The barbs in the whip make more of a mess than the leather itself. But it’s only when I bleed that I feel clean once more.”

“Clean from what? Youareclean?—

“I was kidnapped because the rebels wanted me to absolve them of their sins,” I answer huskily. “They wanted me to hear their confessions and for me to permit them to commit the atrocities while whitewashing their souls.”

“You refused.”

Not a question.

“I did.”

That earns me a squeeze.

“I refused to the point where they decided to choose a different means of gaining my compliance. They’d take a woman from a village, from a town, or wherever they were attacking. Sometimes, it happened once a week, sometimes once a month. But they always did the same thing.

“They’d bring them, strip them of their clothes, and rape them in front of me. It was?—”

“Hell on Earth.”

“Yes.” Even that couldn’t describe it. “I fought but they’d torture me beforehand. Punish me until I was nothing more than a shaken bag of bones and I had no will to do anything other than lie on the ground.

“That was when they’d drag me out and do it. One would rest his boot on my face, making sure I was watching.” I clear my throat. “A few days before I was liberated, they kidnapped a little girl.”

The sob that escapes me this time is impossible to contain.

She squeezes me so tight that it hurts, my wounds, my organs, but it feels so fucking good.

And I know, all of a sudden, what I need.

I drop out of her hold—literally—sinking to the ground so she has no choice but to release me or fall with me.

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