Chained (Caged #2)(7)

My eyes slid to hers when I placed the police report down next, and I had to clench my fists together. “Care to tell me which is lying. You, or the report?”

She stiffened, her back slamming ramrod straight as she turned her face away from mine.

She gasped when I grabbed her jaw and forced her to look at me. “Why – did – you – lie?”

Tears rolled over her cheeks, wetting my hands with her suffering as she tried to shake herself from my grip.

“Tell me!”

“Fuck you!” she spat, agony pouring from her with her tears. “Stop it! Stop this!”

“Tell me, Kloe.” She wrestled with me, trying to scramble back, but she couldn’t escape, not this time. “Tell me the f*cking truth. Stop lying to yourself. Face it!”

“No!” she screamed as her fists fought to connect with any part of me she could.

The evidence of her pain was crippling me, but she needed to face it. She needed to stop hiding from herself. She would never heal if she didn’t cede to the correct memories.

“It was all bullshit, Kloe. All lies you told yourself to stop it from hurting. But hurting is good. It’s the only thing that can help you to accept the truth.”

She pushed at me, desperate to escape what I was forcing her to remember. She’d built so many walls that even now she struggled to knock them down and allow the truth to seep inside. I understood her, I did, and I knew when she bore the real story of her life that it would crush her. Maybe that’s why I was forcing her to see, or maybe I actually wanted to help her, or maybe it was both, but either way, she had to admit to the past.

“Your mother never called you Honey Cup, did she? She never held you and loved you. She never comforted you in the hours you spent alone in that attic. Because she was as bad as him. Wasn’t she? She hurt you as much as he did. Didn’t she? DIDN’T SHE?”

The wail that left her broke something inside me. It was raw and unbridled, the devastation she had locked away, hidden from even herself, spewing from her as I cracked open the part of her mind she had locked away, and compelled her to see the truth.

“Stop!” she cried, shaking her head. Her eyes implored, begged for me to stop. “Please…”

“It’s time to see the real you, Kloe. Time to allow Samantha the truth she deserves.”

I didn’t see it coming. I should have. I should have been prepared for it.

The glass in her hand smashed against my temple. The scent of whisky and blood stung my nostrils. The room swam when her fist followed it, her knuckles hitting my temple in such a way that stars burst behind my eyes.

“Shut up!” she screamed.

I’d seen her angry before. I’d seen her furious. But this, this was something entirely different. The chains she had padlocked herself into many years ago disintegrated and the real soul held hostage by them finally surfaced. I had wanted her to accept Samantha, allow the child who she had once been liberation to heal. Yet, for a brief moment, I wasn’t sure if I had finally destroyed her. Ruined her like I promised us both.

“You shut up!” she demanded in an icy tone that curdled the blood within my veins. “You know nothing. Nothing!”

“Let her have her say!” I shouted as I took hold of her arms and forced her down onto the sofa beneath me. “Samantha deserves freedom, Kloe. Stop burying her beneath all your f*cking lies! She’s slowly drowning you in lies, massacring who you really are!”

She was feral, tossing and twisting. Her teeth snapped as she tried to bite, and her legs flipped as she wrestled with me. “Let me go!”

“Tell me who you are!”

“Let – me - go!”

Forcing her backwards I brought my face an inch from hers. “Tell me who you f*cking are!”

“I’m no one!” she screamed. “I’m a girl that was only birthed to be abused. A child reared to be whored and sold for drugs. A little girl with no heart, and no soul. I’m no one. NO – ONE!”

She collapsed, sinking back as her sobs took her breath and the truth took her sanity. My heart broke along with hers as I witnessed her eyes deaden when her mind cracked and everything she had forced back spilled into her head in one furious overload of horrific memories.

“Samantha Rowan was a payment in kind for goods received,” she whispered. “She wasn’t a Honey Cup. She wasn’t even a Honey.” Her bleak eyes found mine and I had to bite back the vomit when it piled up my throat. “She was nothing more than an IOU.”





I HAD STIRRED A WHILE back but I hadn’t found the energy to move. If breathing wasn’t involuntary I think I may have given up on that too. My body ached with sorrow – with the truth.

The flames in the fire roared high and I still shivered although Anderson had placed a blanket over me some time during the night.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but sunlight was starting to stream through the cream curtains, the splatters of Richard’s blood projecting a light pink pattern across the carpet.

Richard’s body had disappeared, an abstract of blood on the carpet and curtains the only evidence he had been there. I hadn’t heard Anderson shift him, but come to that, I hadn’t much of anything other than the echo of Samantha weeping in my head.

I could feel Anderson’s presence in the room, but other than his soft breathing he was silent.