Page 207 of The Carnage We Keep

I can tell from the way he stiffens next to me that he took it that way, though.

“Fuck,” he breathes. He turns to me and puts a hand on my knee. “Bella, I’m so sorry⁠—”

“No, no…” I smile weakly. “I’m not upset that you talked to her. I’m not⁠—”

“You’d been having those nightmares,” he says, his voice leaden and heavy. “And I…I needed to⁠—”

“Dame,” I turn to him, swallowing heavily as I flash another feeble smile. “You were curious about me.” I shrug. “It's okay. I’m curious about a lot of things about you,” I say quietly.

My wan smile makes one last appearance. “It’s my turn to tell you a story.”

I’m not at all religious, but when I start to talk, it feels how I imagine those who are feel when they give confession.

When they purge themselves of the dirt and the grime and the pain by giving it to someone who doesn’t judge, only listens.

And that’s what he does: he listens.

He listens when I tell him about going to the park that day with Ari. That her parents weren’t sure we were old enough at eleven to go to the playground by ourselves, but I talked them into it.

He just listens, even though his jaw grinds and his eyes flash with fury when I tell him about the men who grabbed us on our way home and shoved us into a van. How much later, I’d learned that the cruelest twist of all was that they didn’t even know who we were. This wasn’t a mafia thing.

It was just random.

It could have happened to anyone.

I tell him about the hours Ari and I spent terrified in the basement of the house in Queens they'd brought us to before one of them realized who they’d actually taken and separated us. Ari was put in one room.

I went to the red one.

He listens when I tell him how I lost track of the days. How I heard snippets of the six of them arguing upstairs about the best way to ask for a ransom without getting themselves killed. How I’d try to talk to Ari through the wall when I heard her crying.

I start to shake when I get to the really bad part.

The part that still hurts and always will.

But even though he looks like he wants to destroy the world and roar into the ashes, he just fucking listens when I tell him about the man with the words “FEAR ME” tattooed in jagged black lettering across his throat.

How on the second night in that red room, he came into it.

How he hurt.

How he took.

I should probably cry when I tell him how my innocence was taken from me before I even lost all my baby teeth, but I don’t.

I can’t.

I’ve never actually cried since that room.

His eyes are squeezed shut and there’s a world of pain etched over his face when I tell him about the man coming again the next night.

And the next.

But he listens.

He holds my hand in an iron grip and he keeps listening when I get to the moment it all changed. The sudden realization that I was more than all this. That I didn’t have to be in that room.

That I already knew what I was and had talked to Cillian about the urges I felt, and the needs that bubbled inside me. And how that last night in the red room I realized I wasn’t a prisoner they’d locked up.