She touched her throat, her voice disbelieving. “That's how the others got away?”
Should he worry about her connecting Liv's escape with hope for her own way out? Nah. She couldn't even look at the windows, let alone step outside. And by the time she overcame the agoraphobia, she would be too attached to him to leave. “Yep.” Liv had been a very naughty girl, but her ability to outsmart him and Mr. E lifted his chest with pride. “I didn't know Liv had freed the others until I started watching her.”
“Stalking her.” She flashed him a reproving glower. For long moments, she didn't move, but she seemed to be calming herself. It was a fascinating thing to watch. The heave of her torso slowed, and her hands loosened around the knot of the towel. She had no idea how strong she was. “You said you were twenty-five when he brought you into the...business. Does that mean you and your mom had escaped before that?”
Not quite. He smiled as his acidic existence burned him from the inside out. “Mr. E took my mother from a US-Mexican border ghetto when she was sixteen. He broke her, impregnated her, and returned her where he'd found her.” She'd been his first, after all. His guinea pig. And a pregnant slave, so far beyond mentally ruined, had no value on the market. So he'd thrown her away like a used condom.
She stepped toward the kitchen table and sat two chairs away. “And you went with her?”
“Yeah.” The unwanted spawn. He rolled the toothpick with his tongue and relaxed against the chair back as every organ inside him twisted and turned. He'd only ever shared this with Liv, and he'd been weak from her bullet when the truth spilled out with his blood.
Her slim eyebrows pulled in, her face pinched in thought. “What did her family do when she returned? Wasn't there retaliation? An investigation?”
He laughed and shook his head. “My mother was a run away, and we lived in a colonia. The dumping grounds for America's uneducated, discarded waste. No drinking water, no working sewers, no law, and certainly no care for someone else's problems.” A wave of bitterness tightened his muscles. It was no wonder he took pleasure in human suffering.
She gripped the knuckles of one hand. He waited for the four cracking pops, a mechanism he'd noticed she turned to when she was upset. But they never came. She flattened her palms over her thighs, staring at them, and spoke quietly. “You were cursed at birth to be fucked-up. Just like me.” A ragged inhale. “Honestly, I'm surprised you're so...” She closed her eyes.
He leaned toward her, his heart knocking at his ribs with anticipation to hear the rest of that thought. “I'm so...what?”
Her eyes cut to his, and she shrugged. “You're smart.”
The compliment curled through him, loosening his shoulders and thickening his tongue. He'd never considered himself smart. He researched anything and everything that interested him, but he certainly wasn't educated in the traditional sense. “Mr. E taught me what I needed to know.” How to read expressions, lure the unsuspecting, calculate human reaction, and how to break the strongest will. “But I couldn't tell you what the square root of sixteen is.”
She moved her mouth as if tasting her precious number. Then her eyes glimmered. “Liar.”
True, but that was the extent of his math skills. Feeling playful, he smirked. “You know what the square root of us is?”
She cocked her head and wrinkled her nose. Then her lips curved, dimpling her cheeks. “Fucked-up.” The strength of her brilliant smile hit him smack in the chest with a shimmering burst of warmth and connection.
He was so fucking tempted to grab his chest and trap the feeling there, that strange exuberant joy. Whatever his expression held made her lips soften. The seam of her mouth slowly separated, the rosy flesh clinging together then letting go. Something was inching its way into the air, energizing the space between them, and she was two chairs too far away.
Carefully, he slid back from the table. Her shoulders tightened, and her chest expanded on an inhale. He stood and covered the distance between them with lazy deliberate steps, marking her subtle breaths. When he reached her, he lowered to his knees.
Her gaze dipped to his mouth, and her tongue darted out to tap her upper lip. “What's with the toothpicks?”
The question stiffened his back. He'd acquired the habit as a means to intimidate. Nothing conveyed scary motherfucker like removing something from his mouth, something he would've appeared to be concentrating on, to focus all of his attention on a frightened little slave.
No way would he remind her what he was and ruin the moment. “It used to be a tree trunk. I'm so badass I chewed it down to a toothpick.”
She shook her head, gifting him with another sweeping smile.