Burn (Bayonet Scars #5)

My arms are wrapped around my torso, like I’m trying to give myself a hug. Tears fall down my face in a blurry rush, and I walk in circles in the sizeable room. With every lap I take, I feel the burn of my nails dragging down the flesh at the back of my arms even harder. I don’t know how many laps I’ve done or how long has passed, but there’s what I think are tiny drops of blood on my fingertips. I’m freaking out in an epic way, worse than anything that’s come before it. I’m not back in Eileen’s office this time, and I’m not remembering every vile way they violated me. No, this time I’m hearing the EMTs talk to one another. They’re checking me out before they load me on the stretcher. Ian’s nearby and is helping the EMTs give me privacy before they cover my lower half with a sheet to spare me my decency.

While making my circles, I snort at the memory. What fucking decency? I had none left. I had nothing left. Ian’s wrong. There’s no good left in me and no way for me to make any because they stole that from me, and it’s not something I can get back.

Raped.

Excessive force.

Foreign object.

Blood.

So much blood.

The only word that stands out to me, though, is the one that I can barely bring myself to think.

Raped.

It’s not like I don’t know what happened to me. It’s just that putting a label on it makes me feel like a statistic. I grew up hearing grown women talk about things I didn’t understand. Women in big cities talked about not going out after dark, living by a “rape clock,” carrying pepper spray with them, and how something like one in every six American women will be raped or nearly raped at some point in their life. Being a rape victim is like being a breast cancer patient. Everybody either has suffered from it, knows someone who suffered from it, or they’ve come close to suffering from it. Worse than being a fucking victim is being a fucking statistic.

A guttural, violent, crazed scream flies out of me. It’s not fearful like it always was before I started working through my damage. No, it’s angry and hateful and just plain fed up. I scream like it’s a battle cry and I’m about to rush into war without an army to back me up. My feet move quicker now, in their infinite, dizzying circles, until I have to stop or fall over with the room spinning.

In my last crazed loop around the bathroom, I stop at the sink and grab hold of the edge of the countertop. On both hands, my fingertips are covered in a mix of fresh and drying blood from my arms, but I can’t bring myself to care.

Blood.

So much blood.

Raped.

Everything around me is like a backdrop of a picture perfect landscape that doesn’t really exist. Tears still fall down my face, and I’m hiccupping now and even more frustrated because I hate having the hiccups. The woman who stares back at me in the mirror is a pathetic bitch with red, puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks. She’s practically hyperventilating, and there are a few streaks of blood on her collarbone just above where her T-shirt hits. I don’t remember touching my collarbone, but it doesn’t matter because the evidence is right there.

There’s a knock on the door that I ignore. And then another. And another. But I don’t give a single fuck.

I can’t stand to look at her anymore, so I slap my hand against the mirror right where I see my face reflected back at me. I hit the mirror harder than I intend to, and the impact makes my palm tingle. It’s not quiet painful and it’s not enough, so I do it again, this time harder. When I remove my hand from the mirror, I realize that I must look almost as bad as I looked when Ian got into the room and tried to block my exposed body from being viewed by the entire club as they barged into the room to rescue us. I haven’t been knocked across the face today, nor have I been choked or kicked, but I look pretty bad, and I hate my reflection all the same.

“Go away!” I’m screaming into the mirror as I slam my fists into the reflective glass, wrists side first. For half a second, I’m terrified it’ll break under my assault, but then when it doesn’t, I’m disappointed. The knocking on the door turns to banging, which turns into something heavy being slammed into it. There’s yelling on the other side, but I don’t care.

I was raped.

I slam my closed fists into the mirror again and again with all my might until it starts to crack under the pressure. The door behind me is broken open just as the glass shatters against my fists. Ian is yelling behind me and pulling me away from the mirror just in time for me to see my handiwork. My wrists are covered in blood, and they throb from my fingertips straight up my arms. I can feel wedges of glass caught in my skin. It’s painful, to say the least, but also kind of exciting. Finally, I have a physical pain that’s the closest to what I remember feeling back then. Still, it’s nothing compared to detoxing, which I thought was going to kill me.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Ian asks with a strained voice as he pulls me into his body and slides down the wall. I’m tucked into his lap with his face buried in my neck. He’s holding one of my arms and inspecting the damage. I don’t know how he can see anything through the blood that’s streaming down to my elbow and onto our clothes.

“I was raped,” I whisper. The tears start again, even more fiercely now. Before they were a steady stream, but now I’m wailing. My grief can’t be contained any longer. My entire body shakes in Ian’s steady, firm hold as I scream and buck against him, shouting the only thing I can again and again until I’m no longer doing anything, no longer aware of being alive or dead. The world doesn’t melt away—it just drifts, and a black void takes its place.

I was raped.





Chapter 17