Page 136 of Tempt Me (Dark Odyssey 4)

“Vincent… I …” I begin.

“Ava… I understand you’re scared. These are dangerous men. So, I understand why you didn’t want to talk to me about it. What I need to know is why… why do they want you dead?”

I shake harder hearing that. I shake so much my thoughts rattle in my mind. He’s holding me, and I can’t bare it. I can’t breathe.

They want me dead. They’ve always wanted me dead. But first, they wanted to make sure they played with me and messed up my mind. Torture me. Torture me and make me worry if I just had hours to live,minutes, seconds.

It’s not just what I know. It’s what they did to me.

I back away from Vincent, out of his grasp, and shake my head.

“Ava, tell me what happened to you. What did they do to you?”

“I can’t… I can’t talk about it. I can’t say it outside my head.” I never have.

I never needed to tell Dad. He knew. He knew what men like them did to girls like me. He didn’t need to be told.

I had to have therapy for three years just to get me back on track to some level of normalcy. All the while I spoke to my psychiatrist, I never gave details. I never said the words. Said the names I was supposed to, to acknowledge what happened to me.

I think if Ilya didn’t hate Ma as much as he did, she would have suffered the same fate.

Sometimes, I wished they had just burned me alive the way they killed her.

Throw gasoline on my skin and set me on fire. It would have been over quickly. I wish they’d done that because what they did was so much worse.

“Ava… to help me fight these guys, I need to know. I need to know what happened,” Vincent says.

“I can’t,” I cry. Feeling trapped suddenly, I rush over to the window. He comes up to me and reaches for my arm. “I can’t, Vincent… Please don’t make me.” I try to pry the window open, but either it’s stuck or my hands are shaking so damn much that I can’t grip the latch to open it.

He tightens his grip on my arm.

“Juliette,” he says, and I stop. I just stop.

I stop, and my lips part. Hearing that name, being called that name, reaches me deep inside. It reaches that girl I used to be. I might be here, but she’s still locked away in that room with the monsters. She’s still watching for the shadows. She’s still hiding.

But that can’t be me.

Such a terrible thing couldn’t have happened to me.

“Is that your name?” Vincent asks, and I turn to face him. “Juliette?”

Hearing it again makes something snap in my brain. Something cracks around the edges, and I start shaking my head.

“No… that can’t be me. I can’t be that girl, Vincent.” I shake my head harder. “She is not me. I can’t be that girl who watched her uncle cut off her father’s head and burn her mother alive. I can’t be her. That couldn’t have happened. It wasn’t me. I can’t be that girl who was raped by her uncle over and over again.”Rape… I said it. I actually said it. His eyes bore into me like daggers. I’m on a roll, and now that the secrets are starting to spill out, I might as well drop them all. He won’t want me now. “I can’t be her… I can’t be that girl who was raped by all her uncle’s men. They raped and tortured me. Burned me when I tried to fight back. Why didn’t they just kill me then?”

When his hand drops to his side, I fall to the ground and scream. I scream the way I did back then, scream all the pain from my being. I unleash it and let it out, feeling like surely this must be it. I’m going to die from this.

Those arms that surrounded me earlier when I found Dad surround me now. They take me now and hold me.

Through the blindness of tears that blur my vision, I see tears stream down Vincent’s cheeks too.

He scoops me up and holds me to him, holding me as close as he can, and I let him.

“I got you,” he whispers. “I got you.”

I continue to cry, letting the pain drain from my body while his words soothe me, like balm on my weary soul.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

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