Page 56 of Shielded Heart 1
Not James. He’s not James. He’snotJames.
“Someone hurt you,” Arcanthus said, his voice lower and deeper than it had been a few moments before. His center eye was narrowed to a slit. “Someone isstillhurting you.”
Faint tremors coursed through his hands. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, considering his arms were cybernetic, but she couldn’t deny it was happening. His dark brows were angled down harshly, his nostrils flared, and his lips peeled back to reveal his fangs.
For an instant, cold fear crystallized in her chest; she’d made him angry, just like she’d so often made James angry. But Arcanthus was much larger and infinitely stronger than James. She had no hope of defending herself against him.
It was the gleam in Arc’s eyes that gave her pause and brought her to her senses. It was tinged with a helplessness that she knew all too well. She realized suddenly that he was not angry at her, but for her, angry for what had been done to her.
“Tell me, Samantha.”
There was a pleading note in his voice, a hint of desperation. She guessed that few people, if any, had ever heard it.
“He was my fiancé,” she said quietly.
Arc smoothed his hands down her arms to caress her elbows. “What did he do, little terran?”
Samantha held his gaze and took in a deep, shuddering breath. “My father died three days after my eighteenth birthday. It was a construction site accident. I was at work when I got the call. He was just…gone, without any chance to say goodbye. He was the only family I had left after my grandmother passed away two years prior. It was…too much. Too soon. I mean, there’snevera good time to lose someone you love, but…”
Arc raised a hand and wiped a tear from her cheek. She hadn’t realized she was crying.
“Go on, little one,” he said.
“I fell into a deep depression. And no matter how much I worked—and I worked hours and hours just to keep my mind busy, just so I didn’t have tothink—I couldn’t keep up with the debts his death passed on to me. I was losing the only home I’d ever known. I was losing…everything.
“And then he came. James. He was…good. So good. He treated me nicely, said all the right things. So when the house was finally taken away, I…I wasn’t too upset because I had him. He gave me a place to stay, a place to call home—with him. He even asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I never cared that he had money. He was kind to me, and he made me feel safe. And I thought that I…”
The words lodged in her throat. She couldn’t say them, didn’t want to. She thought she’d loved James, but she hadn’t. She’d loved the mask he had worn in those early days. And she’d just been a lonely, grieving, innocent woman.
The perfect prey for a man like him.
She felt something brush her leg and glanced down to find Arc’s tail curling around her ankle. The gesture seemed…possessive.
“After that, things changed.Hechanged. It wasn’t subtle either. But I…I had no experience, no knowledge of how things were supposed to be. My mom died when I was just a baby, and mygrandmother was elderly. My father was too embarrassed to talk to me about things like that, and I was so insecure throughout my adolescence that I didn’t have any friends to confide in. How was I to know?”
She sniffled, and more tears spilled down her cheeks. “It started that first night I moved in. We were getting ready for bed, and he was touching me. I was…excited. I was going to-to lose my vir-virginity to—” The words caught in her throat, blocked by the burning tightness brought on by her crying.
Arcanthus’s thumbs, so gentle despite being made of metal, could not staunch the flow of her tears, which blurred her vision. He was reduced to a gray and purple blotch as he moved to sit beside her. When one of his arms slipped around her waist and the other beneath her legs, she didn’t fight him. She couldn’t.
He pulled Samantha onto his lap, guided her head to rest against his shoulder—his strong, solid, flesh-and-blood shoulder—and held her, one arm wrapped around her while his other hand smoothed down her hair.
Once her shuddering breaths eased, she continued. “It hurt. I knew it would hurt a little the first time, I knew that much, but oh God, it hurtsomuch. I told him to stop, but he didn’t listen. I felt torn up inside, and he just kept…kept… He only stopped because I vomited, and then he was angry, disgusted. He hit me. He called me weak, worthless, and so many other names.
“He said I was his, th-that I existed only for his pleasure. He used me like that for three years. We never got married, but he knew he didn’t have to marry me to keep me trapped. I had nowhere else to go, no one to turn to. And the more he wore me down, the more confident he became that Icouldn’tleave. His family had money, a lot more than I ever realized, and connections all over the place. I couldn’t even go to thepolice, because his father was friends with the commissioner, and I didn’t have any money to my name. He made sure of that.
“He’d apologize sometimes, tell me that he only acted that way because he loved me so much, because he was obsessed with me.Idrove him mad.Imade him act that way. But the only times he really eased up on me were when he brought another woman home, but…sometimes he’d force me to join, too.”
Samantha fell silent. In that silence, she noticed three things—Arcanthus was no longer petting her hair, his body was trembling, and there was a loud, vibrating growl emanating from his chest. She lifted her head to find his markings aglow as though they were on fire. His eyes were focused elsewhere, and his pupils had contracted to such thin slits that they were almost swallowed by his blazing irises.
“Arc?” she asked in a small voice.
His third eye was the first to look at her, followed a second later by the other two. His features were strained; his lips were pressed into a tight line, his brow creased, his jaw muscles bunched. Then he brushed his fingers over her cheek, and his expression softened. “Would that I could’ve spared you all that suffering, my precious little flower.”
His touch, combined with his words, was like a soothing balm to her wounded soul. “He’s gone now. I’m here.”
“But he’s notgone. You’ve carried him with you across the universe, Samantha. Even if he were dead, which hedeservesto be, you haven’t yet left him behind.”
Samantha looked away from him in shame. Arc was right. She had carried James with her.
