Page 63 of Taken By the Convicts
“You’re miserable.”
“Telling you the past won’t change it. It won’t even change the fucking present or future.”
She knew that all too well. “I felt the scars on your back that night you came into my room.”
His entire body stiffened, and he pulled away a fraction of an inch. The source of all his anger was tied to those scars.
“Have you seen my scars?” she asked.
“Yes.” His eyes softened as he slipped his hand under her shirt and traced the scars that ran diagonally across her back from her spine to her hip. He knew precisely where they were.
“Do you know how I got them?” she forced the question out even as his hands continued to trace over every damn scar.
“A knife or razor. The lines are too fine to be anything else.”
Why was his hand still on her back, touching those wretched scars? She swallowed the cry that wanted to escape. She hadn’t meant for him to touch her scars, to touch her so intimately there of all places. Anywhere else but there.
“Each time I disobeyed, I was disciplined with a knife.”
“That’s not discipline. That’s torture. Just as deliberate as a whip.”
“Then you fell in with the wrong crowd too?” she said, trying to smile, to put him at ease, but a nervous laugh escaped her instead. She was in no position to console him, and yet she couldn’t walk away from him, not when he had all that anger trapped inside of him.
Jayce’s hands moved to her sides, the scars no longer holding him. “A deal went bad,” he said, sounding less angry. “I couldn’t produce. Danning made me his slave.”
A far-away look crossed Jayce’s face. His hands dropped from her sides where he’d been gently caressing her. As he inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, Jayce backed up a step, giving her the opening to leave. He was done talking.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pressed,” she said as she sidled past him.
He threw his arm out to block her from exiting the kitchen. “Why did you?” he asked, the anger underpinning his words.
“I want to understand you.”
“There’s nothing to understand. I killed the guy who humiliated and tortured me for three years. End of story. I never would have been in a deal with Wes if I’d known Danning was involved. I know my customers and my enemies. I study my contacts before I get involved with them. Working in the dark or ignorance is a sure way to get killed. Or fucked over like I was. I got sloppy. Ivan had signed up to work with the military, and I had no one to watch my back. I thought I could go it alone. I was wrong.”
“You’re blaming Ivan?”
“No, I’m telling you I got sloppy. I should have found someone to watch my back, but it takes time to earn trust. Like with you. I’m still wondering if I can trust you.”
She ducked under his arm. “Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you. Especially with how cavalier you are about shoving any medicine you find into Ivan.”
He grabbed her by her arm and dragged her down the hall to his room, pushed her in, and slammed the door. “You’re the one who drugged him in the first place two years ago. I’ve put up with him yelling one minute and then flailing on the ground the next since he landed on Veenith. For two years, I’ve been doing whatever I can to keep him alive even when his teammates abandoned him. Ivan’s barely holding his shit together, but you don’t see that.
“You think going above and playing in the snow was easy for him to arrange? You have no idea what it takes to survive here. You spent your first three weeks in the med-center, with guards to protect you. Here, you have Ivan, Zev, Crusher, and me, with no manager coming down on you or gangs trying to thrust a knife in your ribs or worse. That little jaunt above cost us all, but especially Ivan. He’s been working extra shifts to pay off the use of the rifle Reece used to watch over us. Working back-to-back shifts always leaves him in more pain than a single shift. He didn’t need to do that, but he did it for you. And when you’re gone, I’ll be the one still here to clean up the mess like I always do.”
“Don’t you dare blame everything on me,” she said, getting in his face. The man was infuriating, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. “If you’d let me go to the med-center, I could develop a cure for him. I know you care for Ivan, but do you care enough to see that he’s holding me here at the expense of his life? His symptoms will only get worse with time. I created the drug that did this to him, but you’re preventing me from curing him.”
“You’re staying here.”
“You’re the one killing him, Jayce, not me!”
Jayce’s mouth crashed down on hers, his tongue pushing into her mouth as if he needed something from her. His hands slipped under her shirt, feeling every inch of her as his mouth took control, determining the angle, the depth, the speed. Jayce needed to control.
That’s what he needed from her, a way to feel in control of his life.
He broke the kiss, picked her up, and placed her on the bed.
“Jayce—”
