But she’d beg for me.
“I thought that was unique,” I reminded her of her words the other day.
She nodded and then seemed to remember something. “You said you’d met someone like me. Who was it?”
She had grown used to my hands on her bare waist, so now I circled my thumbs. She swayed closer to me. The girl was touch-starved. I knew how she felt. I’d spent long touchless years in the Special Forces. It was a particular kind of loneliness.
I hesitated. Sharing wasn’t something I was inclined to do with anyone, and yet, I could tell she needed something from me. A concession.
“My mother,” I admitted. I didn’t want to lie to her. There was something refreshingly honest about every interaction I’d had with this woman. I’d seen her dark parts, and she’d seen mine. I wasn’t changing that now.
“She heard angels speaking?” Katarina asked.
I nodded. “In the end, before they sent her away, and after, too, I guess, going by the journal they sent me of her last days.”
Katarina’s breath hitched. “She died?”
I nodded and slid my hands slowly up her torso. “She died, her head full of angels, alone, far away from the boy who loved her, without a single person to put her favorite snowdrops in her hair when she was laid to rest. But that’s not what’s going to happen to you, little stray.”
Her breath caught. “It’s not?”
I passed my hands slowly over the cups of her worn cotton bralette, and her nipples poked against my fingers, hard and hungry.
I shook my head. “No. It’s not. I won’t let it. I take care of my belongings, and now that includes you.”
“I—” She took a deep breath as I rubbed the backs of my fingers insistently over her nipples. “I’m not a possession. I don’t belong to anyone, including myself. I’m... I don’t know what I am anymore.” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “The truth is... I’m nothing.” Her words were so desolate.
I slid my hands up her chest, leaving her pert breasts and passing her pounding heart. I wrapped them around her neck, as fragile as a stalk, and cupped the underside of her jaw. Her face fit in my palms like I’d been designed to hold her, just like this.
“You’re not nothing. Not to me,” I told her. My tone offered no room for disagreement. “To me... you’re mine... just like you agreed to be.”
The phone rang on the desk beside us, the sound jarring after the quiet intimacy we’d just experienced.
Katarina pulled her gaze from mine and picked it up.
“Hallow Hall Institute,” she said quickly into the receiver. She turned away from me to write something down.
“I’ll make sure Dr. Blackwood gets the message.”
She hung up and gazed at the phone longingly.
“Why don’t you call the cops?” The question had been nagging at me. She claimed not to be crazy, but her presence here didn’t quite make sense. Why hadn’t she escaped already?
She looked at me.
“If those men deserve to die, if they’re hurting the patients here... why don’t you call the cops? They leave you alone, unattended in this office, like they trust that you won’t.”
“I tried once, in the beginning, but they know that I won’t try that again. I can’t.”
She said it so certainly, I knew they had to have some kind of leverage over her.
I thought for a moment.
“Who are they threatening?”
She blew out a long breath, and her shoulders sagged.
“My mother. They’re threatening my mother.”