To wake in the hospital, with the machines, the pain, the strange faces. What could the mind do but hide?
What's your name?
They'd asked her that. It was the first thing they'd asked her. Doctors and cops, standing over the gurney while she'd stared up at them.
What's your name, little girl?
The phrase sent her heart racing, made her try to curl up into herself. Little girl. Terrible things happened to little girls.
They'd thought at first she was mute, either physically or psychologically. But she could speak. She just didn't know the answers.
The cop hadn't looked mean. He'd come after the doctors and the others in flapping white coats or pale green smocks.
She'd learned later that it had been the police who'd brought her out of the alley where she'd hidden. She didn't remember it, but she had been told.
Her first memory was of the light over her head, burning into her eyes. And the dull, detached pressure of her broken arm being set.
She was filthy with sweat, dirt, and dried blood.
They spoke gently to her, those strangers, as they poked and prodded. But like the cop, the smiles didn't reach their eyes. Those were grim or aloof, filled with pity or questions.
When they went down, down to where she'd been torn, she fought like an animal. Teeth, nails, with the howling screams of a wounded animal.
That's when the nurse had cried. A tear sliding down her cheek as she helped hold her down until the calmer in the pressure syringe could be administered.
What's your name?the cop had asked her when she'd drifted back.Where do you live? Who hurt you?
She didn't know. She didn't want to know. She closed her eyes and tried to go away again.
Sometimes the drugs let her slip under. But if they took her too deep the air was cold, cold, cold and smeared dirty red. She was afraid, more afraid down there than of the strangers with their quiet questions.
Sometimes, when she was in that cold place, someone was with her. Candy breath and fingers that skittered over her skin like the roaches that skittered across the floor when the lights came on.
When those fingers were on her, even the drug couldn't stop her screams.
They thought she couldn't hear them, couldn't understand when they spoke in their hushed murmurs.
Beaten, raped. Long-term sexual and physical abuse. Suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, severe physical and emotional trauma.
She's lucky to have survived.
Bastard who did this ought to be cut into little pieces.
One more victim. World's full of them.
No identity records. We're calling her Eve. Eve Dallas.
She woke with a jolt when the car stopped, stared blankly at the dark stone of the house, the glow of lights against the glass.
Her hands were shaking.
Fatigue, she told herself. Just fatigue. If she related to Moniqua Cline, it was only natural. One more tool, she thought as she climbed out of the car, in the investigation.
She knew who she was now. She'd become Eve Dallas, and it was more than a name the system had labeled her with. Who she'd been before, what had come before, couldn't be changed.
If that broken, frightened child still lived inside her, that was okay.
They'd both survived.
She dragged herself upstairs, stripping off her jacket, releasing her weapon harness. Stumbling and peeling off her clothes as she headed for the bed. She tumbled in, curling under warm, smooth sheets and willing the voices that still echoed in her head to quiet.
In the dark, Roarke's arm came around her, drew her back against him. She shuddered once. She knew who she was.
She felt his heart, the steady beat of it, against her back. His arm, the comforting weight of it, over her waist.
The tears that stung her throat shocked and appalled her. Where had they been hiding? The sudden wave of cold warned her the shakes would follow.
She turned to him, into him. "I need you," she said as her mouth found him. "Need you."
Desperate for warmth, for him, she fisted her hands in his hair.
She knew him in the dark – taste, scent, texture. Here, with him, there were no questions. Just answers. All the answers. She felt his heart that had been so steady against her back leap against her breast.
He was there for her as no one else had ever been.
"Say my name."
"Eve." His lips ran warm over the bruise on her face, took the ache away. "My Eve."
So strong, he thought. So tired. Whatever images that were playing in her brain she sought to fight, he'd fight with her. It wasn't tenderness she sought, but a kind of ruthless comfort. He slid a hand down her body, used his mouth and fingers to bring her that first sharp release.
She trembled, but no longer from cold. The aches that ravaged her body were no longer from fatigue. She arched against him when he found her breast. Quick little bites that shot flashes of pleasure into her. A busy tongue that laved heat over heat.
She rolled with him, her breath ragged as they tangled in the sheets. Her body was a rage of wants and grew slick under the hands that met them.
He loved the long, lean length of her, craved it with a hunger that was never quite sated. Her skin, always a surprise of delicacy, was damp and hot so that it slid like wet silk over his as they moved together. Her mouth came back to his, burning like a fever, and drenched them both in madness.
"Inside me." She rolled, crawling, clawing over him. Straddling him. "Inside me." And took him hard, fast, deep.
Her hips pistoned, a speed that blurred his brain. He could see the shape of her over him, the gleam of her eyes against the dark as she drove them both, brutally.
Battered, he rocked in the pleasure, let her take and take until her head fell back, until he felt the orgasm punch through her like a fist through glass.
Until she shattered.
Then he reared up, dragged her still shuddering body against him. And let go.
She fell into sleep like it was a pit and stayed there, sprawled facedown, for three hours.
She felt considerably better when she woke. She told herself the headache was gone, and it was so deeply buried under denial, it was nearly the same thing.
And a couple of catnaps during the day, she was sure, would do more for her than some chemical.
She didn't even make it out of bed before Roarke was sitting beside her, fully dressed. He had his morning stock reports on screen, muted, a pot of coffee still seductively steaming on the table in the sitting area.
And he held a pill in one hand, a suspicious-looking glass of liquid on the bedside table.
"Open up," he ordered.
"Uh-uh."
"I hate to give you more bruises, but if I must, I must."
They both knew he'd enjoy using brute force. "I don't need anything. You're nothing but a chemi-head pusher."
"Darling, you say the sweetest things." In a move too fast to evade, he had her earlobe pinched between his thumb and forefinger. One flick of his wrist and the shock of the twist had her mouth dropping open.
He popped the pill in. "Phase one."
She swung at him, but since she was choking her aim was off. The next thing she knew he was yanking her head back by her hair and pouring the liquid down her throat.
She swallowed twice in self-defense before she managed to shove at him.
"I'll kill you."
"All of it." With grim efficiency, he pinned her and forced the rest of the booster into her. "Phase two."
"You're a dead man, Roarke." She swiped the back of her hand over her chin where some of the booster had dripped. "You don't know it, but you've already stopped breathing. The walking dead."
"I wouldn't have to put us both through that if you'd take reasonable care of yourself."
"And when you finally realize you're dead, and drop to the ground – "
"Feeling better?"
" – and you're laying there, I'm going to step over your cold, lifeless body, open the doors of that department store you call a closet, and I torch it."