TRISTAN
I knocked softly on Scar’s door, not wanting to scare her if she was sound asleep. I couldn’t imagine how exhausted she must have been after weeks of not sleeping in a bed. But since Seb was out walking god knows where and Elliot definitely wasn’t going to keep her company, I was more than happy to take care of her for a while. It had also been a few hours since she had eaten, and she needed to eat again to take her meds.
“Yeah?” Her soft voice came from the other side of the door.
“Hey, princess,” I said, walking into the dimly lit room and closing the door behind me. “I brought you some water and a little lunch. You need to eat so that you can take your meds again.”
“Thank you,” she said, trying to prop herself up.
“I’ll help you, hold on.” I walked over to the bed and sat down the water and soup on the nightstand. Picking her up was like lifting a small child. There was no meat on her. They couldn’t have fed her a single thing in the couple of weeks she was with them. There was no other way she could have lost so much weight so fast. I placed her in a sitting position and made sure there were enough pillows to support her back and ribs.
I handed her the water, and she smiled up at me before taking a sip. She started in on the soup and groaned as she took the first few bites.
“I never thought I would be so happy to eat chicken noodle soup,” she said with a laugh. Fuck, I had missed her laugh something fierce. It made my chest swell when I heard it and saw her eyes light up just a bit.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked her in between bites.
“Still in a lot of pain,” she said, sitting the soup on her lap and leaning her head back. She looked and sounded utterly exhausted. “Mentally and physically,” she admitted. I reached out and took her hand in mine.
“You’ve left Thing One and Thing Two alone together down there?” she asked, changing the subject. I laughed and nodded to her to resume eating. I wanted to feed her every morsel of food in the entire house just to see her get some meat back on her bones.
“Sebastian needed to cool off, so he took a walk. I think Elliot is working out, but I honestly couldn’t tell you. I haven’t really been keeping tabs on him. He does his own thing.”
“Since when?” Scarlet asked incredulously. “You keep tabs on everyone all the time, Tristan.”
“I didn’t keep track of you.”
She looked at me for a moment before setting her bowl on the stand next to her. I wanted to shove it back in her hands and watch her lick the bowl clean, but I could see she was determined to say what she wanted to say, and I knew better than to fight her on it.
“You couldn’t have possibly known that they were trying to get you out of that house just to take me. None of us thought they even knew where we were.” She had a good point. We still hadn’t been able to figure out how they knew where we were keeping her, and that was another reason why Elliot thought she was behind it all.
“But I should have taken better precautions against it.” The truth was, we all felt responsible for what happened to her, even Elliot. I knew him well enough to know where his anger was coming from. He wasn’t fooling me, even if he was fooling Seb and Scarlet. I knew he felt guilty, and he was taking it out on everyone around him. “It’s all my fault, Scar,” I confessed.
“What do you mean? How is it all your fault?”
“Because I wasn’t there for you. Because I forced Seb to leave you alone that night. He fought me on it. He didn’t want to leave—he thought it was reckless—and it turned out that it was. It was a stupid decision, all for the sake of appearances. It’s my fault, Scar.” I choked back the emotions that were threatening to overflow. “It’s my fault we almost lost you.”
“Tristan,” she said while trying to lean forward to grab me. She flinched and grabbed her sides. “Come over here so that I don’t puncture a lung trying to get to you.”
I moved to her side and gently pulled her into me, holding her as tightly as I dared. I would never get the sight of her in that basement, being thrown onto the hard floor and spat at, out of my brain. That image was scarred in my brain for the rest of my life, and it all happened because of me.
“I was more worried about our image that night than I was about you,” I told her. “I thought you would be fine with the rest of the guys there. I never anticipated them coming in full force like that. I’m not trying to make excuses for my actions—I just hope you’ll forgive me one day for leaving you like that. I’ll never do it again.”
“There isn’t anything to forgive, Tristan,” she said, drawing patterns with her fingers on my arms. “I need you guys to stop blaming yourselves.” Her icy blue eyes met mine, and it was relieving to see some of the spark back in them that had been missing last night. “I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
“Thank god for that,” I said, laughing and stroking her hair. “How’re you feeling with some food in you? Want to take a shower before we change your bandages or just go ahead and sleep for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Feeling better, even though I’m still tired. I feel like I’ll never be awake again,” she said through a yawn. “But a bath sounds nice. Could you run me one?”
I kissed her forehead and helped her sit back against the headboard before getting up to get her bath ready. I looked back at the soup on the nightstand.
“Eat the rest of your soup and drink the rest of your water while I get it ready for you, okay? We need to build your strength back up if you’re going to be our badass woman again, yeah?”
“Yes, mother,” she joked, picking up the rest of her food and making a show of eating it before I disappeared into the adjoining bathroom.
Once the bath was full, I went back to get her and found her sound asleep, hunched over awkwardly with the empty bowl in her hand. I smiled to myself and moved it, picking her up gently from the bed. She sighed and laid her head on my shoulder but didn’t wake up. Having her back in my arms, even though she was more fragile than before, sent all the blood rushing straight to my cock.
The way her ass had turned red under my belt not that long ago still played on repeat in my head, like my own personal porno. Her moans, her sighs, the way she tasted…fuck.
Fucking focus.