Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 100716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Don’t,” Ark snaps out. “This isn’t about me. This is about that fuck”—he points to the door as if Dr. Babkin is on the other side—“and what he did to you that made you so scared you can’t speak without a stutter.”
The thread I mentioned earlier wholly unravels, and in all honesty, it’s freeing not having it flap between us anymore.
“He raped me,” I confess, stealing the air from Ark’s lungs. “The first time was when I was—”
“First?” He’s enraged with anger, filled with hate, yet there’s something hauntingly beautiful about the protectiveness beaming from him. “He did it more than once?”
I look at my feet and then nod, the memories too hard to bring up without a dip in confidence.
Ark takes a moment to compose himself before asking, “Did you tell anyone? Did you report him to the medical board?”
Again, I nod. This one is weaker than my previous one.
My chest heaves for air when the softest touch lifts my chin. Ark stares at me after aligning our eyes. His spine is rigid and his jaw is tight, but there’s no hate in his eyes. No pity.
Not for me, anyway.
“You told?” His voice is a whisper, full of disbelief.
I nod before brushing away the tear the bob forced from my eye.
“Did it stop?”
I’m torn on how to reply. Speaking up saved me from Dr. Babkin for a couple of weeks, but it also thrust me into a nightmare far darker and more depraved.
Ark takes my silence as an outright denial. He bristles with anger, his fury hot enough to scald. “I’m going to track down that fuck and make him regret the day he laid eyes on you. I’m going to kill him.”
I follow him out of the bathroom and down the hallway, my strides remarkably strong for how hard I am shaking.
Ark grips the handle of my front door when I say, “It’s too late.” A shiver moves through me as flashbacks of my past rear their ugly heads. “He’s already d-dead.” I stray my eyes to the floor to hide the deceit in them before saying, “There’s no one left for you to punish… except me.”
“Punish you?” He spits the two words as if disgusted. “I don’t want to punish you, Mara.”
“You may not want to, but you are.”
“How?” he bites out.
“By not trusting me to do what is best for me and my daughter. By letting me believe my st-stutter makes me weak.” I fold my arms over my chest to ward off the chill rolling down my spine. “By taking what he did to me and using it against me.”
“That’s not what I am doing.” His voice quickens with fury. “I just found out, so how could I have already used it against you?”
“You knew,” I whisper, my chest rattling as I strive to hold back a sob. “You knew because a victim knows a victim.”
He tries to pfft off my underhanded claim that he is an abuse survivor. It rumbles in the back of his throat and tightens the firmness of his jaw, but not a waft leaves his lips when I stare at him, pleading for him to be truthful.
A relationship doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to be honest.
Desperate for him to open up to me, I push past the barriers he is erecting between us. “Was it your mother?”
“No!” he denies in a hurry, the rebuttal cracking from his mouth like a whip.
My stomach gurgles when I say, “Your father?”
“No. It wasn’t anybody, so stop asking!”
His anger should scare me; it should have me backing away with my hands held in the air, but the nurturing side he pulled out of the trenches in the elevator only hours ago refuses to surrender. I need him as open and raw as me. I need his heart unguarded if I want any chance of infiltrating it.
“Intra-familiar sexual abuse—”
My knees weaken when he shouts, “It wasn’t sexual.”
I’d give anything to hug him, to lessen his shakes with some form of contact, but I keep my hands at my side, rewarding him with the same respect he offered me only hours ago.
My dedication is rewarded tenfold when he mutters a short time later, “If she had to pick between maiming me and touching me, she mostly picked the former.”
Mostly? God.
I take a conscious breath to lessen the nerves in my voice before asking, “She?”
As Ark’s eyes float down the hallway, he breathes out so heavily his chest sinks. “My step-grandmother.” I learn this goes way deeper than the occasional whack on the bottom when he murmurs, “She hurt him as a child, so he hurt them.”
My lips quiver when I speak. “Your sisters?”
He nods almost robotically, and it breaks my heart. I was able to leave my abusive home because there was no one there to protect but myself, and I only built the courage when I found out I was pregnant with Tillie. I doubt I would have ever left if I had siblings, particularly a younger one. I struggled to leave my mother, and she was an adult.