Then six hours later, as she slept, she started to have nightmares.
I’d woken her from them three times already, but the moment her eyes closed once again, and she drifted back to sleep, she was right back in the throes of her nightmare.
Now it was three in the morning, and we both had to be up in less than three hours, and I was wondering if I should just wake her up completely.
The scream of terror that was ripped from her throat solidified my decision as I wrapped my hand around the outside of Sawyer’s hip, letting my hand play along her ass.
“Sawyer,” I said, shaking her slightly.
“Noooo,” she moaned. “Please. Don’t.”
The sound of her pain tore through me like a hot fire poker right to the gut.
Leaning down so I could gather her completely into my arms I said, “Sawyer, wake up!”
Sawyer jolted awake, shaking uncontrollably in my arms.
“What…what’s wrong?” She asked shakily.
“You tell me, darlin,’” I said. “You’re not ever going to get it out if you don’t talk about it. Tell me what they did to you.”
I could feel Sawyer’s eyelashes fluttering on my chest as she opened and closed them rapidly.
Then I felt the telltale trail of tears sliding down my bare chest, and I pulled her to me a little tighter.
“Tell me,” I urged.
“If it wasn’t for Ruthie, I’d be a very different woman right now,” she started.
Instead of saying anything, I just ran my hand through her hair. Stroking it lightly in encouragement, urging her to continue.
“I was paired with Ruthie right off the bat,” she whispered. “Thank God. Ruthie had gotten there about two weeks before me, and she’d already had to suffer at those men’s hands. I never really heard what exactly was done to her, because she didn’t want to talk about it, but I figure they went a lot further with her than they did with me.”
The hand that was propping my head up clenched in a tight fist as she got to what I really wanted to hear.
“The first time they cornered me was in the laundry area. I was in charge of folding the towels.” She swallowed, her tiny hand sliding up the outside of my abdominals, playing along the ridges and valleys of my chest. “I was bent over the basket, reaching for the last towel, when one of the guards came up behind me and pinned me to the basket. My pants were around my ankles before I even realized what was happening. When his hands touched me there, Ruthie came up and started to scream, drawing the attention of the entire laundry area, as well as the guards not in the laundry area.”
My eyes clenched shut tightly as I tried to reign in my fury.
“From then on, Ruthie and I had each other’s back. We never left one another alone, and the guards weren’t brave enough to do us both at the same time. So we basically had to stay with each other twenty-four seven,” she continued. “But there were the times where we were separated. Sometimes she’d be assigned to a different job for the day. When I started working with the dogs, she wasn’t allowed to do the same. That’s when it started up again. Not for me, but for Ruthie. I didn’t even realize anything was happening until about a month before I was let out. And I feel like a total and complete heel for not noticing it sooner.”
I brushed my lips across her head before I said, “She was protecting you and letting you do what you love. You’re good with those dogs.”
She was, too.
I was impressed.
She could easily rivaled Trance with her ability to train dogs.
Trance’s skills, however, were focused on training dogs for police procedures.
Sawyer’s abilities were geared more toward training them to be service dogs.
Like Belly.
Belly was trained to find people in the aftermath of a storm or a natural disaster.
Sawyer was a savant with dogs, an absolute natural, and I bet she’d start to get serious about dog training once the trials of the guards made it through the courts and everything related to her own charges had been settled.
“Anyway, it’s not really me you should be worried about. It’s Ruthie. I only had them touch me. She…I don’t know. They did more to her, but I don’t know exactly what because she won’t say. I hope one day she entrusts that information to someone,” Sawyer said tiredly.
“I want you to talk to a lawyer. I want you to get more from the state than the twenty-five thousand they say they’ll give you.” I said suddenly.
It was something that’d been weighing on my mind since I’d read the letter Sawyer had received.
“I don’t know. I don’t really want to start something. I just want it all to be over with,” she explained.