Darling lay completely still as his emotions ripped him apart. Rage. Hatred. Revulsion. And an effing headache that rode him with spurs.

But underneath all that was a need so deep and compelling, he wanted to claw it out of his heart.

Zarya was in his home. She was here. Close enough to touch…

Don’t be stupid. She’s a lying whore who slapped you. Twice.

Just like your mother. Throwing you to the wolves to save her own ass. Hauk’s right. All women do is take and forget everything you did for them. Every sacrifice you made. You were never anything to her.

Nothing.

Just a means to an end. A tool to be used. Dirt beneath her feet.

And he kept coming back to the reality that she was in his home. Just down the stairs and one long hallway…

His stomach heaved. Darling rolled from the bed and stumbled to his bathroom. He barely made it to the toilet in time.

His body was really not happy with him.

Gah, he’d drank himself stupid last night. He felt like complete crap.

Maybe Maris was right.

It was time for him to finally shower.

“What is taking so long? Are you an idiot retard or just lazy?”

Zarya counted to ten so that she didn’t grab one of the knives on the nearby table and cut the cook’s throat with it. She was getting really tired of the offensive insults and abuse dealt to her. Not just from the cook, but by all of them.

She was a trained soldier, not a domestic. Since they’d eaten mostly table scraps since her father had been branded a traitor, cooking had never been a skill she’d had an opportunity to pick up.

The ability to kill bitches…

That was something she was more than proficient at.

Calm down, Z, calm down. They’re not worth a death sentence.

But if they didn’t lay off her, she might reconsider.

And now that she had clothes again, she’d be able to escape tonight. One way or another, she wasn’t about to spend a single second longer as a slave than she had to. Collar or no collar, she was out of here. And damn anyone who came after her because they wouldn’t live long enough to regret it.

Part of her wanted to stay for Darling and keep the promise she’d made last night, but at this point, she was done. He didn’t want her and she wasn’t going to put up with this kind of abuse, waiting for him to come to senses he most likely didn’t have anymore.

Screw him. If he didn’t want her, she didn’t want him—plain and simple.

His life might not mean anything to him, but hers meant something to her and she’d be damned if she would spend it waiting on a man. Any man. She might be a lot of things. Stupid wasn’t one of them.

The kitchen bitches had been riding her since they’d dragged her out of her closet at dawn. Nothing she did was right and she was done with the pinches, slaps, and insults.