Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(84)
“He heard that you would only fight for me.” The same thing I’d heard in the private viewing box. “We’ve become some kind of a Savage Spectacle legend, and Vandekamp plays it up.”
Gallagher nodded. “I told him that our relationship wasn’t sexual in nature. That to even imply such a thing was an insult to both of us, and could not be suffered.
“You started crying, and I wanted to rip his head from his body, but he wasn’t threatening your life, so I couldn’t, and I felt so...”
“Helpless?” I said, and he nodded. He didn’t have easy access to that word.
“When I refused, he put you with the incubus. Drusus promised you’d like it. He was trying to comfort you, but you didn’t want to like it.”
Of course not. I wouldn’t have wanted him inside my head any more than I wanted him inside my body. Being forced to enjoy something I didn’t want would have been another choice taken from me. Another humiliation.
“He... Drusus reached for you. He was just trying to save you both. But you started screaming.” Gallagher’s voice sounded thick, as if each word had to be forced from his throat. “You were terrified, but I’d promised you I wouldn’t kill anyone who wasn’t threatening your life. So I did the only thing I could think of.”
“You took his place,” I whispered.
“It was the best I could do.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and suddenly the memory was there.
Cushions and pillows. Thick rugs in shades of blue and purple, as if the room is one big bruise. Tear-streaked faces and bare bodies. Guards standing against the wall, watching with various levels of disgust and fascination.
Gallagher, naked, his face a mask of self-loathing, looking at me as if I were the source of all his pain, yet his only hope of redemption.
“Forgive me,” he whispers.
Then he reaches for me—
I opened my eyes, and the images were gone. And suddenly I was terrified to close them. I’d needed to know, and now I was ready to forget again.
“You remember?” Gallagher said.
“Some of it.”
His gray-eyed gaze captured mine, and the fear swimming in them was unprecedented. “Do you hate me?”
I hated everything that had happened in that room. Everything that had ever taken place at the Savage Spectacle. Everyone who’d ever worn the uniform or handed over a credit card. But Gallagher?
“No.” The truth was there, sitting right on the surface of our shared trauma. “You had no choice. The crime is theirs.” But I didn’t know how to look at him anymore. I didn’t know how to be near him.
“Indeed. Release me from my promise and let me rend limbs from the people who would send you on such an engagement, as well as any man who would pay to see you abused in such a manner.”
“Gallagher...”
His brow furrowed and his thick fists tensed with pent-up wrath. “Delilah. I cannot stand by and watch while you suffer.” Outrage burned deep in his eyes. “Let me do what I was born to do.”
Every muscle in his body strained against the promise he’d made me. He actually shook with rage, but beneath that was something even more visceral. Some combination of intense pain, profound affection and acute distress. And that’s when I finally understood.
It wasn’t just that the promise I’d demanded from him was in direct opposition to his oath to protect me. It was that with or without his oath, beyond the respect he had for my calling, he cared about me as a person. Probably in some honorable fear dearg manner that defied human understanding and vocabulary.
And watching me suffer—becoming a part of my suffering—was killing him.
If he knew I’d been sent on another engagement of a similar nature...
Oh, shit.
Suddenly the memory was there, disinterred by digging through my own psyche.
I’d realized that breaking his oath to me to keep a lesser promise was literally killing him. That’s why I’d had my own memory wiped.
I hadn’t been trying to forget what Gallagher and I were forced to do. I’d been trying to forget the other engagement, because if I didn’t know about it, he wouldn’t know. And if he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have to choose between slaughtering everyone involved—and getting himself killed in the process—or dying from breaching his own oath to do that very thing.
“Soon,” I promised. “Soon. We’ll get our chance to escape, and you’ll be free to tear the entire world in two, if that’s what it takes to get us all out of here. But that time hasn’t come yet.” And it couldn’t, at least until I knew about the baby. If it was Gallagher’s, he would never have to know about that other engagement.
“The time for patience has passed. Vandekamp doesn’t deserve to live, much less profit from what he’s doing to you. To all of us.”
“You won’t have to wait much longer. You have my word. Okay?”
Gallagher nodded reluctantly. “Until then, I will sate my thirst for blood on the memory of past vengeance and the promise of more to come.”
Delilah
Pagano came for me the next morning, before my breakfast arrived. Before the sun had truly topped the horizon. He led me to the basement lab, where the elevator doors slid open to reveal Tabitha Vandekamp standing next to a doctor in a white lab coat.