She turns her narrowed eyes to me. “I didn’t do anything worse than he’d have done to me. In fact, I showed mercy by killing him quickly.”

“Christ,” I mutter while Bastian remains silent. I try to read her and figure out where her head is. She’s under severe stress. Traumatized. But fuck, taking the gun and shooting holes into that man is not how I expect her to react. “You don’t understand, Dandelion.”

“I understand just fine. That man delivered me to those others to be raped.”

“It shouldn’t have been you,” I add.

She snatches her hands from Bastian’s grip, closes them over the steering wheel, and tugs.

“Are you fucking insane?” I yell over the screaming of brakes and honking of horns as I right the SUV in our lane and Bastian regains control of her. She struggles against him the whole way home, and once we get there, he lifts her out and carries her up the stairs to her bedroom. He sets her on her feet, and she stumbles backward to get away from us.

“Get these off me!”

Bastian’s phone rings again, and he walks out of the room to take the call.

I stalk toward her, taking her arm and walking her into the bathroom where I switch on the shower and force her under the flow fully clothed.

“What are you doing? Stop!” she yells, sputtering as water pours over her head and face. I tear at the clothes she’s wearing, stripping her naked.

“I’m cleaning the fucking blood off you. Look at yourself.”

“He deserved it! He deserved worse!”

“Oh, I know he did. And he would have gotten it. But it shouldn’t have been you. Don’t you understand that?” I shake her, pressing her into the wall. I keep her there with one hand while I strip off my shirt with the other. Her nipples pebble and press against my chest when I step closer, and the fingernails of her locked hands scratch my chest and face.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat! And I’ll do it to you, too!”

“For fuck’s sake, you’re fucking mad!” I draw her bound arms over her head. We’re so fucking close, her naked body against mine, skin to skin, that I’m breathing in the air she exhales. But behind the raw fury in her eyes, I see the bruised pieces of the girl she is beneath. The vulnerable, broken thing. It’s not what I’m expecting. “It shouldn’t have been you, little Dandelion.”

“I had every right!”

I shake my head. Yes, she had very right. But it shouldn’t have been her.