“I’m tired of games.”
“You are never tired of our truth or lies game.”
I freeze. I don’t want to play that game. I don’t want to tell him the truth. I don’t want to tell him how wrong he was downstairs. How badly he hurt me. But I can’t keep it in. And I want to hurt him as badly as he wants to hurt me.
“Fine, you go first.”
“You’re a whore,” he says.
I growl. “You did not just say that.”
“Truth or lie, you’re a whore,” he repeats as plainly as if he were telling me the weather.
“Truth,” I say, because that’s what he thinks of me.
He waits for me to say something. Because apparently, this game is more about telling the truth than it is about concealing things from each other.
“I spent the last three weeks hiding,” I say.
“Truth,” he says almost bored.
Then he looks me dead in the eye. “I never sold you.”
“Lies,” I answer.
He opens his mouth to speak, but I stop him. I need to get my own truth out before he tries to hurt me with whatever comes next.
“Milo beat me.”
“Lies,” he says rolling his eyes.
I rip my hat and sweatshirt from my body, revealing the truth. I spent three weeks alone trying to heal so Enzo would never know what I suffered from Milo. So he wouldn’t look at me as broken. But the damage Milo did couldn’t be healed in three weeks.
My body is as purple and black as it was when I first arrived here after being held captive by Jarod. I’m broken. Milo only had me for twenty-four-hours, but he housed a rage I didn’t think any man could.
“Kai,” Enzo’s voice breaks as he looks at me. And a silent tear drops down his cheek seeing the pain. Seeing what I went through. What I was desperate to stop from happening.
“He beat me because I wouldn’t sleep with him. I wouldn’t spread my legs and become the whore he wanted me to be.”
Enzo winces when I say the word whore, realizing how stupid it was to call me that earlier. I can see the terror on his face at realizing how badly his words hurt me. Almost as badly as what Milo did to my body.
“And your mother’s ring—it did save me in the end. It saved me from being raped. It was his payment, because he knew how badly it would hurt you, which in the end was all he wanted.”
Sorrow fills his face in a way I’ve never seen before. Pain, agony, despair all flow through his veins.
“I didn’t betray you. I never would. I did everything I could think of to keep him from touching me. To keep him from getting your mother’s ring because even though you gave it to me to protect me, I knew how precious it was.”
Silence.
There is nothing he can say to fix this. This can’t be forgiven. Not easily, by either of us.
“You promised to protect me, and you did, with the ring. The bruises are nothing. I would have died if he had raped me. I couldn’t have recovered. But he didn’t, because of that ring.”
My words hurt him, because whatever he came up here to say he still hasn’t said it, and I know his words will be a betrayal of his own. He needed to get back at me, so he did. And I need to hear the monster he has become. Because despite all of it, I still want Enzo. His ring protected me. And that I can never stop thanking him for.
“Tell me,” I say.
His eyes bug open. “I can’t.”