Merciless Hunter (Dark Syndicate 4)

23

Aiden

Iswitch on the lamp and grab some tissues to wipe her nose.

I don’t know what grips me more, the blood seeping through the tissue, or the tears drifting down her cheeks mingling with blood.

Nothing grips me.

Nothing is supposed to, but there’s something about seeing her so terrified that gets to me.

It reaches a place inside me that used to be human, and the man I used to be wants to look inside her head to see what nightmares fill them.

Having a nosebleed and screaming in your sleep is no run of the mill nightmare. That comes from having something bad happen to you.

She said quite clearly please don’t let him hurt me.

That’s the second time she’s said something like that.

The him she’s referring to has to be Jude.

The motherfucker must have abused her. Abused is what she’s acting like, and I’ve been around enough of the abused to know.

Right off the bat you can’t tell. But, eventually the truth comes out in whatever form it chooses to take.

The abused person tries to hide it well and most of them do an excellent job. Others have that recluse personality. Some are a mix of both.

Like her.

And like Gabriella. She was raped when she was fifteen. It happened before she met me. That was as much as I could get out of her. She never told me who hurt her. Probably because she knew I would have killed them.

“I’m sorry,” she says trying to pull away. I hold her back though and press the tissue to her nose.

“Keep still. It’s best not to move around when you have a nosebleed.”

“Sounds like you’ve had them,” she mutters and her eyes lock with mine.

“I used to.” After Gabriella died, all kinds of shit used to happen to me. I’d have dreams where I saved her, and the reality was the nightmare. In the dream, within a dream I’d wake up to find she was alive, and I had my happily ever after. Then I’d wake from that and realize the horror of my reality.

I grab more tissue and discard the others. The second lot seems to do it, but Olivia looks drained.

“You okay?”

“Water, my throat feels like he’s still …” Her voice trails off and she looks away. “I’m just thirsty.”

I bite down hard reading between the lines but calm my racing thoughts.

“I’ll get you water.”

I pull on my pants and get her a glass of water. She takes it and gulps it down like she hasn’t had water in days. It’s the first time she’s willingly taken anything from me and not put up a fuss.

Olivia goes back to sleep, but I don’t. I watch her, and I do the same the next day when she doesn’t know I’m watching.

She sits in the garden just looking at the dirt. It’s like she’s in a catatonic state similar to the patients you’d find in a psychiatric hospital. People who live in the desolation of the bad shit that’s happened to them.

I leave in the evening for a meeting with the Brotherhood and when I get home, I find her sitting on the floor in the room with her head resting against the wall.

There’s an ashen look of worry on her face and I can tell she didn’t eat dinner again because now she looks gaunt.