Page 73 of Beckett
I knew what was coming.
“He… He… He…held it against the back of my neck while he counted to ten. Slowly. I could hear my skin sizzling. The pain was—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Afterward, he leaned close and said ‘Now you’re marked. An eye for an eye, bitch. You’ll never be free.’”
She pulled down her collar.
The scar was deliberate brutality. Raised, puckered tissue formed a pattern—not random but intentional. A brand. A claim of ownership burned into vulnerable flesh.
Silence detonated in the room. Even the electronics seemed to stop humming.
Travis had gone corpse-pale on the screen, his mouth slightly open in horror. Coop’s hands had formed fists that could shatter bone, the tendons in his forearms standing out like cables. Aiden had become perfectly, terrifyingly still—the stillness that preceded violence. His breathing had stopped entirely, chest frozen mid-inhale. Hunter’s scarred fingers had white-knuckled around his stylus until it snapped with a sharp crack that made everyone flinch.
But I—I was coming apart at the molecular level.
This woman had been tortured. Marked like property. Hunted like prey for over a year. And she’d endured it alone, protecting others even as she ran.
Every time she’d stopped my hand from her neck. Every flinch when I’d moved too fast. Every careful distance she’d maintained. Not rejection—survival. She’d been hiding this grotesque violation, while I’d been irritated by her secrecy.
“Jesus Christ, Audra.” The words ripped from my throat, raw and bleeding.
Her eyes stayed open but unfocused, staring at something beyond the conference room walls. Her breathing went shallow, barely there. She’d retreated so far inside herself that I wasn’t sure she even knew where she was anymore. Complete dissociation—I’d seen it in soldiers after the worst missions, in victims after the worst violations.
Hunter caught my eye, already rising from his chair. “We’ll give you some time.”
“Travis, we’ll check in later,” Coop said quietly, reaching over to close the laptop. The screen went dark.
Aiden stood without a word, his massive frame moving toward the door with surprising gentleness. Hunter paused, his hand on my shoulder for just a moment—solidarity, understanding, permission to handle this however I needed to.
Then they were gone, the door clicking shut behind them with careful precision.
The silence that followed was deafening. Audra hadn’t moved, hadn’t even blinked. She sat frozen in her chair, lost in whatever hell her mind had taken her to. Completely alone with her terror, no comfort even from an animal who loved her.
I moved slowly, deliberately, not wanting to startle her further. As I lifted her from the chair, she was rigid, unyielding, like her body had forgotten how to be human. I sat down in herseat and settled her on my lap, arranging her carefully against my chest.
For a long time, nothing changed. She stayed frozen, barely breathing, a statue made of trauma and enervation.
Then the dam broke.
The sobs came from somewhere so deep I wasn’t sure her body could contain them. Great, wrenching sounds that shook her entire frame as thirteen months of terror poured out. Pure, primal fear given voice. The kind of crying that came from being hunted, tortured, completely alone with no one to turn to. Her whole body convulsed with the force of it, months of suppressed panic finally finding release.
I held her through wave after wave of it, feeling her tears soak through my shirt, hot and endless. Her fingers clutched at me like I was the only solid thing in a world that had turned liquid.
Minutes passed. Maybe ten, maybe twenty. Time meant nothing.
Then, gradually, something shifted. The sobs didn’t stop, but their quality changed. Deeper somehow. Less about fear and more about…loss. The way her brother’s name came out between gasps—“Todd”—barely audible but unmistakable.
That’s when I understood. She was finally mourning Todd.
She’d been running so hard, surviving minute by minute, that she’d never had the chance to grieve her brother properly. Never had the safety to fall apart over losing the one person who’d always protected her. Now, with someone else finally holding her up, eighteen months of suppressed grief came crashing down on top of everything else.
I’d hold her like this for hours if she needed it. Days. However long it took for her to empty out all this poison she’d been carrying alone.
The world narrowed to just this—her shaking body, her broken sobs, the sound of grief and terror finally finding release.
Chapter 24
Beckett
Her breathing eventually evened out, but I kept holding her anyway. Audra’s face was pressed against my chest, her fingers still twisted in my shirt like she was afraid I’d disappear if she let go. The conference room’s harsh fluorescent lights caught the tear tracks on her cheeks, and something primitive in me wanted to hunt down whoever had done this to her and make them understand what real fear felt like.
