Page 71 of Protect Your Queen

I placed my hands behind my back and looked down at her. “Like what, ma’am?”

If I didn’t like being called the help, she didn’t like being called ma’am. She was just getting a taste of her own medicine.

“Don’t you dare!” She hit me again, and I stood like a statue, absorbing the blow with no reaction.

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t act like you can’t see me. Don’t act like I’m nothing.” Another hit. Then another.

When I didn’t react, she screamed. It was a restrained, angry thing, as she covered her mouth to stifle the sound. Then she turned, her hands coming to the nape of her neck and tugging at her hair as she walked away.

“I’ll call your brother,” I said in a bored tone, bringing my phone from my pocket.

It was a stupid game. A stupid fucking charade. I felt it as I clicked my phone screen on. I felt even stupider as she fell to her knees, her head falling to the floor as she kept that scream in her throat. Then she went still.

Fuck, she was so still, that I worried she had fainted. That broke my resolve.

“Jesus!” I came down to my knees beside her, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Jes?”

I shook her, her hair flying at her shoulders, her grimace of pain unmoving as I tried to get her to look at me.

“Jes… sweetheart?”

She was crying. Not a small sob. Not a few silent tears. She was outright weeping, her teeth bared, her cheeks moist with tear after tear as she clawed at her own hair, pulling out strands as she kept a scream lodged in her throat. She was breaking.

“Jes? What’s happening?” I pleaded as I grabbed both of her wrists in one hand and pulled them away from her nape, bringing them to her chest so she couldn’t keep tugging at her scalp. I brought her head to my chest, pulling her onto my lap as I sat on my haunches. I started rocking her as she cried. “What’s happening, Songbird? Talk to me.”

When her hands went limp in my grasp, I let them go, wrapping her in my tight embrace until I felt like I was squeezing the life out of her.

“Talk to me, Songbird, please. Talk to me.”

I was such a fuckingasshole.

She didn’t speak. She just gasped, her chest heaving with every ragged inhale. I waited, letting her cry, my lips against the top of her head. Her tears soaked my shirt, and it made me hold her even tighter.

“I feel like I’m bleeding on the street in front of everyone,” she finally said between her pants. “And no one is helping me. They’re just watching, taking pictures. No one cares. They’re looking at me and they don’t seeme.”

She was breaking my heart. Her façade was cracking, and I was getting a glimpse of the woman beneath.

“I see you, Songbird.” I was trying my best to hold her together as she shattered. “I see you. I hear you.”

She shook her head, her face scraping against my silk button-down. Her makeup and tears stained it black and brown, but I didn't care. I just held on for dear life.

“If you could see me,” she said, softly, her tears slowing, “then you wouldn’t like me. You’d leave anyway.”

“Try me.” I dared her.

I hoped she’d rise to the bait. I wanted her to bristle. But she didn’t. She just slumped in my arms.

“I don’t want to wake up anymore,” she whispered. “I’m so tired. I’m so alone.”

I was starting to get it, now. Christ, why did it take me so long? The wound that I had seen that first day was a bone-deep loneliness that she hid from the world.

I came here thinking that the greatest danger lurked somewhere out there in the dark. From some old, rich fuck who wanted to do her in for whatever reason, but I was wrong. The real danger lurked in her mind. Behind those autumn eyes was a blood red pain that no one else could see.

“When you feel like that, Songbird,” I whispered into her ear. “I want you to come to me. I want you to sit with me just like this, until the feeling passes.”

“What if it never does?”

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