“Sadistic bastard,” I hissed. Just thinking about it made me feel sick and useless. The fierce ache in my chest rivaled the vicious twisting in my gut, and if hearing about it was that painful, I couldn’t imagine how she’d held it together. How she’d come out of that cell traumatized, but mentally intact.

“I hate myself,” she whispered, and I blinked, sure I’d heard her wrong. I wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but I didn’t know how she’d react to being touched in the middle of remembered trauma.

“No, you don’t. You don’t hate yourself.” How could she? None of it was her fault.

“Don’t fucking tell me what I feel!” she snapped, her pale hair practically glowing in the light from the bathroom. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“I want to hear whatever you want to say.”

“I hate myself,” she repeated, and if anything, she seemed to believe it more this time.

“You hate him,” I insisted, because I couldn’t help it. I hated hearing her say that.

“Yeah. I hate him more than anything else in the world. Except Jake. I hate Jake more. But that’s normal.”

“Normal?” How could any of this be normal?

Kori shook her head, confused, like she could feel what she was trying to say, but the words wouldn’t come out right. “They’re heartless. Cruel. Jake and Jonah are sadistic, and I knew that from the beginning. Sadistic people do sadistic things, so they were just being who and what they are.”

My jaws ached from being clenched in anger. “That doesn’t excuse anything they—”

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “Nothing can excuse what they did to me, or to anyone else, and I’ll hate them until the day I blow their heads into a million shards of bone and splashes of gray matter. And that day will come. But they aren’t the ones who betrayed me. I betrayed myself.”

“You didn’t—”

“Yes, I did.” She stared straight into my eyes, trying to make me understand. “Bad men do bad things. That’s what they do and who they are. I fight. That’s what I do, and who I am. But in the basement, I didn’t fight. I couldn’t.”

“That’s not your fault, Kori.” She was killing me. She was carving out a piece of my soul with every word she spoke, and pain flowed in to fill the void.

“Don’t…” She shook her head in frustration. “I can’t explain what I mean. You can tell me it wasn’t my fault until the earth cracks into a billion pieces of space dust, and in my head, I know that’s true. But that doesn’t change anything. I fight for Kenley. I fight for myself. I even fight for Jake, but that’s really just another way of fighting for me and Kenley. But in the dark, I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t do what I do, and that means I failed. I wasn’t strong.”

“Kori, they took away your strength,” I insisted, and she flinched, like my words actually hurt.

“Yeah. And if someone can take away your strength, you weren’t strong enough in the first place. I wasn’t strong enough to fight, and if I’m not a fighter, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know how to be me now. I don’t know how to be anything. I lost myself in there, Ian.” Her fists clenched around a handful of comforter, and her eyes watered. “The Kori who went into that cell isn’t the Kori who came out. I can’t find the old me, and I don’t know how to be this new one.” Her gaze held mine. I was captivated and devastated by the pain she was showing me. “I’m not the Kori Daniels you would have met if you’d come here two months ago.”

“Good.” I reached for her hand and she let me take it. “I’m so very sorry and angry about what happened to you, but I like this Kori. I might even love her.” How could I not? She was a force of nature—a sudden fierce storm that had blown into my life, overturning everything I thought I knew about myself and exposing new truths. She was stronger than anyone I’d ever met, whether she could see that or not. “You may not know who you are, but I do. I know you, and I know you can be anything you want. What do you want to be? Who do you want to be?”

“I don’t know!” She pulled her hand from mine and shoved blond tangles back from her face. “All I know is that I don’t want to be her anymore. I don’t want to be the woman I hear screaming and begging whenever there’s nothing else loud enough to drown it out. I hate her. I hate what she said and what she let happen. I hate her so much that it actually makes me sick. She’s there, in the pit of my stomach, rotting me from the inside out, and every time I think about it, I need to vomit. But no matter how many times I throw up, I can’t purge her. She’s in there, and she’s scared and hurt, and I hate her.”

“No.” I shook my head and took her hands, and finally she looked at me again. “You may not be the woman who went into that cell, but you’re not the woman who lived there for six weeks, either. That Kori died so you can live, and that’s what you have to do. You have to live. And I want to be a part of that life. When the time comes for Jake and Jonah to die, I want to help you hunt them down, and slice them open, and watch their insides fall out.”

“Again with the poetry.” She managed a small smile. “That sounds so much prettier than blowing their brains out.”

“I doubt Jonah would agree with you,” I said returning her smile with a small one of my own. “But I think it’s worth dreaming about. Why don’t you try that? Try dreaming about what we’re going to do to them, instead of what they did to you? I’ll do it with you. We’ll share the dream. Then we’ll share the reality. I promise.”