Free Savage Chains: Scarred (#2) by Caris Roane Page A

and despair that he couldn’t release. The last thing she wanted to do was tell him that Engles had been present at Reyes’s initiation into the world of sex slavery.
    Having finished her glass of wine, she rose from the tub, crossed to the shower, and moved inside.
    Reyes faced away from her, his hands planted on the far carved-stone wall, the water steaming hot and pummeling his shoulders across the tattoo of the hawk. The chain at her neck still spoke of Reyes’s anguish.
    She went to him, grateful all over again for the worthy man he’d become despite the horror of his captivity. He was attempting the impossible and had been doing it alone for decades, to destroy something that had brought him a century of pain and that murdered humans every day. Her people.
    Tears burned her eyes as she moved in behind him and slid her arms around his chest. He tensed up, because she’d startled him, but then he relaxed and she felt his chest rise and fall in what felt like a terrible tremor.
    She hugged him hard. She felt his body shake as he let loose. He shouted, then pounded the stone wall with his fist. He wept like one whose heart had been torn from his chest.
    Angelica never let go of him; she just held him, stroked his arms, his back. She said nothing. What good were words at a time like this?
    But her presence might help, a physical representation that she stood with him in this moment and that he wasn’t alone anymore.
    At last, he stopped shouting and when the water grew cold he shut it off.
    Slowly, he turned to face her, his cheeks drawn, his eyes haunted. “Are you ready to go back to Newport Beach, because I can’t take you one more step down this road. I’m done. It was one thing when it was just me, but I can’t do what’s being asked.”
    “What’s changed?”
    He thumbed her cheek. “What Scorpion requires of us tomorrow night Sweet Dove used to demand on a regular basis. She loved to watch me tie down one of her female slaves and work her over, bring her to orgasm, repeatedly, the more times the better. She often instructed me how to get the job done, or how she wanted it done.”
    “Did you hurt them, the women I mean?”
    He didn’t say anything; he just held her gaze. “There, you see what I am? I’ve bruised women just to stay alive. Still want to be with me, Angelica? Still think I’m worth anything?”
    He moved past her, grabbed a towel, and started drying off. She followed him as much by the necessity of being chain-bound to him as by the need to resolve their current situation.
    “Will you be expected to hurt me during the show?”
    “No. Engles would have been more explicit. Besides, I’m pretty sure by now he knows I would have refused.”
    “But I’ll be tied down.”
    He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’re not doing this.”
    As he wiped down his legs, taking the towel slowly to his feet, she felt his refusal like a brick wall between them. But she wondered if he understood her own current resolve.
    He lifted up, wrapping the towel around his waist.
    She had things she needed to say. “I didn’t know a woman could look like that, her eyes so dead.”
    “That’s the way I feel right now. Dead.”
    “Anyone would in your situation.”
    He glanced at her, then turned toward her. She stood completely naked. He reached for a second towel and brought it to her. “What are you saying, Angelica? Because what I’m getting from the chain makes no sense to me.”
    “We have to do this, Reyes.”
    He shook his head. “No. We don’t. I’ve changed my mind completely.”
    She moved closer to him. “I had some time to think while I soaked in the tub, about you and what you’ve been trying to achieve. And earlier, I felt the level of your relief, when the slave from that club went through the door and crossed your threshold, moving from slavery to freedom, because you know what that feels like.” She held his gaze. “I don’t, not really, except for what I can experience