Blood Deep (Blackthorn Book 4) (29 page)

There it was: the true reason why she panicked over Pummel finding out about her liaison with him.

But it was a lie. And as he stared back at Jessie, as her gaze guardedly met his, she knew
he
knew it was a lie.

Suddenly what she had allowed to happen between them, the extent of the trust she had extended his way, wrenched at his heart even more. If he’d felt protective of her back at that van, now it was a full-on desire to shield her.

‘So, do you think you can keep your hands off her, Eden?’ Pummel asked. ‘Because obviously I’ll know if you don’t. Just as you need to know that if you agree to take this responsibility on, then you’re equally taking on the responsibility should you fail.’

Always the condition. Always the chance for Pummel to pull it back.

But not this time.

Eden rested his gaze steadily on Pummel. ‘
Nothing
will get near her,’ he said. ‘I guarantee it.’

F
rom home invader
to prison guard. Jessie had underestimated Eden Reece more than she would have thought possible.

Her prison guard who now had the ultimate advantage over her: knowledge of the truth behind the secret she had maintained, protected and reinforced for decades. Just one night where she had been driven by passion, by lust, by anger, by need, by loneliness and, above all else, an unforgiveable attraction, had now left her weakness exposed. An act that, if Eden chose to disclose it, could end any semblance of humane treatment she’d managed to sustain in her life.

Because no matter how she’d felt when he’d been the one to sweep her up from that van, no matter the reasons behind why he’d killed that con in front of her, no matter what had gone on between them before that, his focus was the woman he needed to save – not her.

With it also obvious that she couldn’t escape the place, he truly had the upper hand. Now he’d seen her as the lost cause she was, he would surely turn his new knowledge to his advantage. Should she not comply with what he wanted, he could reveal her secret and be gone, leaving her with the aftermath.

She’d be locked away for good then – the lycan young left to their fate, the weight of the prophecy still on her shoulders. And with potentially no outlet for the latter, she wasn’t even sure she’d survive imprisonment.

Jessie knotted the damp towel at her chest. As well as hoping to remove the smoke from her skin, the scent of the cons who’d attacked her, with it she’d equally hoped to eradicate the thoughts of what could have happened. But those thoughts still lingered deep beneath the surface, switching in rapid succession through all the disturbing, degrading things she had witnessed over the decades. Over and over again, she replayed suffering the same fate. Replayed them holding her down, the coldness in their eyes, her helplessness in her drugged state…

Despite trying to fight her tears, they started to fall. But she didn’t hurry to the bottom drawer of her bedside table. She didn’t pull it out to collect one of her spare glass vials. She didn’t catch as many tears as she could, the iridescent liquid collecting in tiny droplets at the bottom of the glass. Instead she let them fall wasted into the sink to be washed away.

She was
not
going to let the bastards win. That gang had had what was coming. And now they were gone. Just like the other two who had tried to take her only two weeks before.

The recollection crept over her like a ghostly chill again. Both of them had been killed outright in the front seats as they’d hit the wall too. As with earlier that night, she’d been on the way to the lock-up. Instead of the gang ambush, she’d recalled only her head hitting concrete as something embedded itself in her neck from afar.

She’d woken on the back seat just before the crash.

Pummel hadn’t known about those though. She’d managed to get back without the alarm having been raised. She’d kept it from him for fear of him locking her up for good. For fear of the repercussions should she tell him what she suspected: that her kidnappers had been from beyond the boundaries of Blackthorn. That the communication device she’d found in the car was far too technically advanced for anything in that district.

And now there was Eden. Eden who she’d already sensed was different from the cons in that place.

She may have allowed herself to run with the thought if she hadn’t heard Pummel’s revelation of Eden’s history. Savage had described a very different Eden to the one she had come to know. More so, with her own eyes she’d seen his brutal killing of Travis. There had been no hesitation. There had been no remorse.
That
was the con side she’d been yet to see.

Whichever was the more frightening prospect – that Eden too was from the outside, or really was the con she dreaded him to be – she still had bigger worries than her own paranoia. Worries about how she was going to slip out of Eden’s sight and get the food and water to the lycan young as she’d planned, for one. How she was going to keep them secret from Eden’s watchful eyes over the next couple of days as she tried to work out how to help them.

Her looked across her shoulder as she heard a key turn in the lock. She braced herself for the prospect of Pummel coming in. The fury in his eyes had been evident the minute he’d gained consciousness, as if she’d orchestrated her kidnapping out of some kind of spite against him. The glances of rebuke from the others, not least Homer, had exacerbated her isolation. They blamed her. They
all
blamed her for what had happened.

“Asking for it”, Pummel had declared before he’d used her like the commodity she was to him: her blood taken and infused with his. She knew that once he was fully recovered, she was going to pay heavily for putting herself in the situation in the first place. At a minimum, she expected to spend several hours in the hole. What she
hadn’t
expected was for him to place his holy grail in the hands of another con in the interim. A con who, if the history Pummel had disclosed was right, knew exactly how to turn his heart hard when he needed to.

She hurriedly replaced her contact lenses, not wanting to give Pummel anything else to complain about.

Instead, she glanced in the mirror to see Eden leaning against the bathroom doorway.

Despite her heart leaping at seeing him, she lingered in the awkwardness of their silence, feeling as exposed in the towel as if she was stood there naked.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

He’d been the first to ask it. Pummel had only wanted to know how far the cons had got. His interrogation had been curt, explicit, impatient – wanting to know only of the sexual details to uncover whether her value to him had reduced. Fortunately her healing him had maintained the fallacy and convinced him she’d not lied.

She turned to face him and shrugged. She couldn’t rid the thought from her mind – the faintest of possibilities that he was far more dangerous than the potentially fake tattoos on his arm dictated.

Because everybody knew you didn’t have to be an upstanding citizen to work for the authorities – at least morally. It was a bonus if you weren’t. She’d heard what went on, albeit from the perspective of the cons who had been on the receiving end. She’d heard about the immunity agents were granted. She’d heard what they were allowed to get up to.

But she’d also seen his reaction when she’d asked about the woman he needed her to save; that had been anything but faked.

The look in his eyes now was anything but faked too. The concern was clear. A concern for
her
. A concern that she hadn’t felt from anyone else in the two hours since they’d all got back.

He stepped in front of her, pushed her ringlets over her shoulder to reveal the mark on the side of her face where she had been hit, the cut on her lip. And she let him examine her as she scrutinized his gaze, looking for clues that she hadn’t been looking for before.

Despite her attempt at indifference to what had happened, Eden tenderly ran his knuckles down the wound on her cheek, reminding her of the same reassuring touch she’d felt in the van when he’d found her – when she’d wanted to wrap her arms around him and beg him to make it all stop, to make all the bad things go away. And, when he’d lifted her in his arms, she’d almost believed he could. She’d almost felt safe. Until Homer had prized her away, reminding her of the real world outside her moment of fantasy, the tear from Eden’s arms excruciating.

‘That’s going to be quite the bruiser,’ he said.

‘It’ll fade quick enough.’

‘Made of titanium. At least on the outside.’

She gripped the sink behind her. ‘Like I said, it’ll heal within a couple of hours.’

‘I’m more worried about the other impact.’ Those gentle brown eyes, contrary to the dark playfulness she so often saw, were now sombre and sincere. ‘Did they hurt you?’

She shrugged again as she swallowed the knot forming in her throat. ‘The bastards tried. They got what was coming though.’

His frown deepened. ‘We all need someone to turn to sometimes, Jessie. It’s not a sign of weakness.’

Her heart lunged. She looked to the floor as she felt the tears build behind her eyes, but she hoped she’d kept her expression stoic as she looked back into his eyes. ‘I hardly think what went on between us constitutes you being someone I can turn to.’

‘I’m here now.’

‘Because Pummel allowed you up here to check on me no doubt. Probably instructed you to.’

‘He did, but you know I would have come anyway. Whatever it took. You’ve been through shit tonight and you need to know that someone recognises that.’

Her gaze dropped back to the floor at the truth behind his words. But confessing the pain it had caused was another step too far – another step into Eden’s arms. Instead, she hurriedly wiped away a tear.

He tenderly cupped her neck, placed his thumb under her chin to encourage her to look up at him. ‘Talk to me.’

‘And say what? That, yes, they were going to hurt me?’ she said, surrendering to his gaze, reluctantly to her tears. ‘That they were going to
humiliate
and
degrade
me and to them it was fun?
Fun
. They were actually
enjoying
it. When did hurting others become entertaining, Eden? When did it become amusing to make someone suffer? When did it start giving people
pleasure
?’

He exhaled unsteadily, attempted to touch her cheek again but she recoiled.

‘Your kind goes on about these divisions,’ she snapped. ‘How they’re there to protect you – retaining this soul and shadow divide as if you’re some kind of superior species. Well, I’ve had a gut-full of the superior species for one night.’ She wiped another escaped tear from her eye. ‘So I suggest you give me some time and space because, right now, I don’t know what I’m capable of doing.’

She tried to brush past him but he caught her forearm furthest away from him, forging a barrier with his arm. Again, it wasn’t with a force or coldness that she had come to know from elsewhere – but with an open hand, a gentle one, yet with an insistence that was as compelling as the sense of intimacy it evoked.

She instantly came to a standstill as his arm remained braced across her body. He slid his hand down to hers.

‘We don’t all get our kicks like that, Jessie,’ he said softly. ‘We don’t all relish in depowering others to empower ourselves. And we don’t all see others as just objects for our own amusement or purpose.’

‘Then what was earlier tonight about, Eden, if not to get what you want?’

‘It was as much about being with you, which you know or there’s no way you would have given yourself to me like that.’

She looked him in the eyes again. ‘Who
are
you, Eden?’

‘Someone who knows you shouldn’t have gone through what you did tonight. Someone who’s going to do whatever it takes to get you out of here.’

Her heart rate picked up a notch. ‘You heard what Pummel said. You’re going to work a miracle, are you?’

‘If I have to.’ He freed her hand to catch her hip, encouraging her to turn to face him. ‘I know how hard this is for you, Jess, and I understand. But
if
you trust me, if you finally tell me the whole truth of what the fuck is going on around here, maybe I won’t need a miracle.’

As his fingers melded into her flesh, she should have flinched, recoiled. Her skin should have been crawling after what she had nearly endured less than a handful of hours before. But the attempted attack now felt like a distant memory, like some depleting nightmare.
He
had done that. Simply by being there with her, she was starting to feel safe again. Right then, she didn’t care what he was. Whatever the truth was, for just a short while, she needed to be held like she hadn’t been held in a long time.

Eden seemed to know. Without her even needing to tell him, he just seemed to sense what to do.

She lifted the heel of her palm to her eye and gasped for air as the tears erupted.

He closed his arms around her immediately, one crossing her mid-back, the other gently holding the back of her head as she curled into his neck.

She couldn’t bring herself to hold him in return but, for a couple of minutes, she let herself be consumed by the depths of solace his hold created.

‘Whatever that van hit keeps you contained, doesn’t it?’ he eventually whispered. ‘Is it some kind of spell?’

She reluctantly eased herself away from him. ‘In a sense.’

‘A spell that can be broken?’

She felt the renewed void between them as she stepped out of the bathroom and over to the wardrobe. ‘Yes.’

‘How?’

He deserved to at least understand what he was up against. Maybe then he’d give up. It crossed her mind to tell him about the lycan young too, to confide in him
exactly
what kind of a monster he was working for. Maybe if she showed them to him he would understand just how deep he was. One look at the lycan young, of understanding what it would mean for all of them in the row should Jask find out, would be enough for any con – or whoever he was – to run to the hills.

But she couldn’t. She knew that if he was anywhere as decent as her gut dictated, there was no way she could risk his reaction should he be horrified by Pummel’s intentions. There was no way she could explain her resistance to letting the young go, not without explaining the rest.

‘He has something of mine,’ she said, pulling on the first dress she found, letting the towel pool at her feet. ‘Something that keeps me bound wherever it is. The owner of it owns me. It makes me helpless against them – retaliation out of the question.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the way it is,’ she said, crossing her bedroom to her chest of drawers.

‘Is it because of what you are?’

‘In part.’

‘What is it of yours that he has?’

She pulled on her underwear, opened the middle drawer to retrieve a pair of socks. ‘It doesn’t matter, just that you won’t be able to find it. Pummel has it somewhere here in this house. It could be under the floors, in the walls. You’ll raise Pummel’s suspicion simply by looking. Should you even ask what it is, he’ll kill you. Should you be caught trying to find it, he’ll kill you. Should you threaten or torture him, he’d rather die than set me free of this place. If he believes he’s at risk of losing me, my freedom will be gone. Permanently. My life will be hell – and you will die trying. Are you willing to risk all of that, Eden, for an impossible find?’