Atone (Recovered Innocence #2)(37)

Something about it pokes at me.

She discards her towel and climbs into bed. I stop a few feet into the room, my memory snagging on Marie’s first mention of the tattoo and Vera’s extreme reaction. The thought of it made her physically ill. And then again when Marie posted a photo of the drawing. She went totally white, scaring the shit out of me again. What does the tattoo mean and why does Vera have it? It’s more than just a way for that * Javier to mark the girls he’s been with. It means something. Something bad.

“What’s wrong?” Vera asks.

What does your tattoo mean? sits on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t say it.

“Nothing,” I answer instead, taking off my towel and climbing into bed.

“Are you sure? You had a look just now.”

“It was seeing you naked.”

“And that confuses you?”

“Sometimes.”

I pull her in the way she likes—her back to my front. I can’t see the tattoo from here. She’s lying on it. Clever girl. I shouldn’t think that it’s on purpose. I shouldn’t and yet I do. I want a better look at it, but if I ask to see it up close she might react the way she did at the office. I don’t want to do anything to upset her. There are other ways I could find out about it. I have Marie’s drawing and the Internet. It would be a simple Google image search. If I go looking for information behind her back, how will Vera react? Not well, probably. We have an unspoken pact about not prying into each other’s past lives.

I can’t help it. It’s driving me insane. I have to know.

“What does your tattoo mean?”

Her whole body goes bow tight. I’m not even sure she’s breathing. The silence in the room reverberates in my ears. Other than the holes where her piercings were, it’s the only mark on her. That has to have meaning. I’m taking a chance here that we’ve come far enough for her to trust me with what might be her biggest secret yet. Bigger than learning she’s not who she claims to be and learning her real name. I may have seriously f*cked this up by not keeping my damn mouth shut.

She rolls onto her stomach, her face buried in her pillow. I can see the tattoo very clearly now. I trace around the heart shape. Up close, I notice that what I thought was just an intricate design is really a series of numbers. No, a date. And a number. The key is in the shape of the letter J. I get that the J part is for Javier, but what do the numbers mean?

She turns her face toward me. That look from the diner is back. I now recognize it as the place in her head where she deals with things that hurt. It’s defensive, protecting who she is as a person from what’s about to happen. I hate it. I wish I’d never opened my mouth. Why did I have to f*cking pry? Why did I choose causing her pain over avid curiosity? I want to take the question back, but it’s too late.

“September twenty-nine is the day I became his. Sixteen is my preferred number. My chosen number. The order in which I was acquired. It’s a way for him to keep track of his inventory. Girls with this tattoo sell for the highest price.”

I can’t process what she’s telling me. I know all the words, but they don’t seem to fit in my brain.

She comes up on her forearms and leans in until our noses nearly touch. Her gaze is hot and challenging on mine. Figure it out, it dares. Don’t make me say it.

I can’t get my jaw to work.

“He sold my virginity to a Taiwanese businessman who had the highest bid.” Her voice isn’t hers. Neither is the expression on her face. “Men paid hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to f*ck me.”

My body burns with a fevered mixture of anger, fear, revulsion, and revenge. I bleed for her. I want to kill for her. Mostly I want to stuff the words back into her mouth and make them not exist or pull them all out of her so that she doesn’t have to carry them around anymore.

“What number am I to you?”

Her question confuses me.

“How much am I worth to you?”

She’s not making any sense.

I sit up and glance around the room. It feels like forever ago we were in the shower. How did we get here? When I look back at her she’s watching me over her shoulder with the tattoo, taunting me with it. Her smile is far from polite. It’s almost predatory. This is another test.

And there’s no way to pass.





Chapter 18


Vera


I’ve had men look at me like I was a prize or like I could solve all their problems. They’ve looked at me like I was a toy or a dream come true. They’ve looked at me with pity, lust, disgust, blame, and shame. They’ve looked at me like they owned me and like I was nothing.

But they’ve never looked at me the way Beau is looking at me right now.

“That’s not fair to either one of us,” he says. His voice is careful yet determined. There’s an anger burning just under the surface and sincerity woven throughout it. “What we are is not what either of us was.”

He rips the rug out from under me. He doesn’t let me torture him or myself. He sees things in me I didn’t know were there. He delivers hope on a silver platter. Where he gets it from, I don’t know. Like a magician, he pulls it from thin air and presents it to me as though I have a right to take a portion of it.

What I am is not what I was. It’s not what he is. We aren’t who we were before. I like that idea. I want it to be true. I tell him that.