“Beth,” I whisper, remembering what she told me about her daughter.

“Yes, Beth,” he confirms. “It wasn’t any of my business, but I’d had a couple of drinks and I was curious. So I came closer… and that’s when I saw that the small figure on the ground was a child. A beautiful baby girl with red curly hair, a tiny replica of the woman crying over her.” A savage, furious glint enters his eyes. “The child was lying in a pool of blood, with a gunshot wound in her small chest. She had apparently been killed to punish her mother, who didn’t want to let her pimp offer the child to some clients with more unique tastes.”

Nausea, sharp and strong, rises in my throat. Despite everything I’ve been through, it still horrifies me to know that there are such monsters out there. Monsters far worse than the man I’ve fallen in love with.

No wonder Beth saw the world in shades of black; her life had been overtaken by darkness.

“When I heard the full story, I took Beth and her daughter with me,” Julian continues in a low, hard voice. “It still wasn’t any of my business, but I couldn’t let this type of thing slide—at least not after seeing that child’s body. We buried the daughter in a cemetery just outside Tijuana. Then I took a couple of my men, and Beth and I came back to look for the pimp.” A small, vicious smile appears on his lips as he says softly, “Beth killed him personally. Him and his two thugs—the ones who helped murder her daughter.”

I inhale slowly, not wanting to start crying again. “And she came to work for you after that? After you helped her like that?”

Julian nods. “Yes. It wasn’t safe for her to stay in Tijuana, so I offered her a job as my personal cook and maid. She accepted, of course—it was far better than being a streetwalker in Mexico—and she traveled with me everywhere after that. It wasn’t until I decided to acquire you that I offered her the opportunity to stay permanently on the island and, well, you know the rest of the story.”

“Yes, I do,” I murmur, pushing against his chest to extricate myself from his embrace—an embrace that suddenly feels suffocating rather than comforting. The ‘acquire you’ part of the story is an unpleasant reminder of how I came to be here… of the fact that the man by my side ruthlessly planned and carried out my abduction. On the spectrum of evil, Julian may not be all the way on the black side, but he’s not very far from it.

Still, as days go on, my nightmares slowly ease. As perverse as it is, now that I’m back with my kidnapper, I’m starting to heal from the ordeal of being stolen from him. Even my art has become more peaceful. I still feel compelled to paint the flames of the explosion, but I have begun to get interested in landscapes again, capturing on canvas the wild beauty of the rainforest that encroaches on the borders of the property.