Chapter 80: Chapter 81

Read Mated To The King’s Ga*ma by Jessica Hall Chapter 81 – Abbie POV The only place I thought to go to was Azzy’s room with the king. How could he rob me of my peace, I just wanted to go home and let this end. I was no good to anyone, I wasn’t good enough for anyone, much less myself. I don’t know how long I laid there before I noticed Azalea laying next to me. I could see her but it was like she wasn’t even there.

“Abbie?” she whispered. The look of pity on her face made the reason I wanted to end it more evident. I was tired of people looking at me like the weakling I was. Azalea suffered enough because of me. Here she was trying to save me again. She has suffered more than enough because of me, so has Tandi.

Everyone has paid the price for me.

The memories kept pulling me under, replaying over and over again. I couldn’t get them to stop! The b**cher, Daley, Kade on repeat. It was like a hever ending carousel of horrors I couldn’t escape. They were sucking me under, drowning me in misery. I should have fought harder, but I didn’t. I should have listened to Gannon, but I didn’t. I should never have gone down to that basement. That one haunts me the most and I felt myself sucked into it, I fought trying to forget, trying to make it stop but nothing I did worked and I found myself back there.

We were 15 and I just finished helping Azalea hang out the washing, I remember that day so clearly, remember everything. I could still feel the breeze as we walked back inside and I retrieved the mop buckets from the closet and saw how dirty they were.

“I will quickly wash these,” I tell her and she nods Moving toward the stairs, clutching the railing tightly as she went to move on to the next chore I watched her go, her lashes tearing open and staining the back of her dress with each movement. She paused halfway up and I chewed my lip with worry. She had been having dizzy spells, we hadn’t eaten in days and her hands shook as she clutched the banister trying not to pass out.

“Ivy?” she had whispered. She waves me off.

“It’ll pass,” she tells me yet she was as pale as a sheet. She kept climbing the last of the steps disappearing and I clutch the mop bucket and move toward the kitchen to see the b**cher talking to Mrs.

Daley. They both stopped and glanced at me and I went to stop and turn back around.

“Be a love and help me carry the meat from the truck down,” the b**cher told me. He always creeped me out, something was off about him, he was always trying to touch me. I shake my head.

“No I can’t, I am busy,” I tell him, holding up the bucket. I turn to leave.

“That can wait, you will help Doyle,” Mrs. Daley says and I freeze, turning back to look at her.

“Go start bringing it in, I will send Abbie to help in a minute,” she assures him. I swallowed looking at Mrs. Daley frantically. “Ma’am, I really can’t,” I tell her grasping at any excuse I could when she holds up a hand making me stop.

“You will help him, it will take you only a few minutes,” she snaps but I shake my head and start backing up.

“You will help him Abbie, Or I will make Ivy help him,” she snapped at me and I should have known something was up because she said Ivy’s name, she never referred to us by name, always you, or rogue or some other filthy vile thing she would call us.

We hadn’t eaten in three days. Mrs. Daley used to make us share whatever scraps were left over. We hadn’t eaten in three days. There was nothing left over for the last three days and I knew Azalea wouldn’t last much longer, she was fainting frequently and each time Mrs. Daley would catch her, would accuse her of slacking and whip her more, she couldn’t handle much more, she needed food and time to heal.

“You just need to help him stack the freezers, if you do, I will let you eat with the rest of the children tonight. A reward, I know you girls have been working hard today,”

“You’ll let us eat?”

“Of course,” she smiles. I swallowed glancing at the basement door where the freezers were kept.

“Will only take you a few minutes, he has already put half of it down there,” she tells me and I shiver runs up my spine, I ignore it, I shouldn’t have.

“So chop, chop, then you can prepare dinner and eat with the rest of them,” Mrs. Daley says. So I helped, I rushed around, helping carry the meat down. Taking the last box down and setting in the freezer I turn toward the stairs just as Doyle sauntered down them, I step aside letting him pass with the chicken he had but he doesn’t.

“Excuse me,” I murmured, keeping my gaze on the floor. He clears his throat and I look up to see Mrs.

Daley closed the basement door. My heart beat like a drum in my chest before I heard the TV turn up.

Too loud. Too loud I thought.

The b**cher reaches for me and I shriek at the look on his face before he grabs my hair, shoving me toward the back of the basement where the freezers were.

I want to leave, you’re scaring me,” I tell him trying to pass him when he grabs my hair, bending me over the freezer as I struggle and kick. I almost froze in fear when I felt his breath on the back of my neck as he pinned me down.

I feel his calloused fingers skimming my thighs as he gripped my tunic and yanked at it tearing the bottom open.

Then the sting of my flesh as he ripped my underwear down and felt the warmth of my blood as it cascaded down my legs when he shoved his way inside me and made me scream. His hand closed over my mouth to m**ffle me. His scent was putrid, like rotting meat and steel as I choked on the breath stolen by the pain.

“I have waited so long for this!” he groaned, using his other hand to hold my head against the cold freezer top. The taste of his fingers as he m**ffled my screams of agony made me gag and retch The voices above us coming from the TV grew louder, and I knew Mrs. Daley turned it up so the kids wouldn’t hear me. The tune that played at the start of it I would never forget. It taunted me as I tried to focus on it instead of the agony tearing up my backside as he raped me. It felt like it stretched on hours before he was finally done. I remained frozen in place staring off at the wall covered in cobwebs as I heard him zip his pants before he pressed his lips to my cheek. I squeeze my eyes shut. “Good, girl, hopefully by next week you’ll be ready for round two” he purred before I listened to his footsteps climb the stairs.

I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed with fear, paralyzed with the humiliation I felt as my blood streamed down my legs, I wanted it to stop, when I noticed the rope hanging on the wall. My hands shook as I reached for it and tossed it over the banister above before dragging a chair over to it as I made a noose.

He would come back for me, he would come back. So I slipped it over my head.

I wouldnt let him do that again, I thought as tears streamed down my face. The chair wobbles and I am about to take a step off when I hear the door open. Fear momentarily paralyzes me again wondering if he came back when I see her.

Azalea had stepped into the basement and ehr eyes roamed over me and widened in horror as they take in my torn tunic, my thighs covered in blood. Then the rope around my neck.

“Abbie,” she had whispered, taking a step toward me but I shook my head, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t live like this.

“Go, Ivy,” I sobbed, my shoulders shaking with each breath I took and tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Not without you,” she chokes. I shake my head and she moves closer before looking around the room.

She moves toward a chair and places it next to mine. She climbed up on it and loosened the noose, slipping her head in beside mine.

“More than my life. Mine isn’t worth living if you aren’t in it, if you go, we go together because am not without you,” she tells me.

We both jumped, but the rope didn’t hold our weight. I felt the burn of the rope as it slashed through my neck and our heads clanged together before we hit the floor.

Azalea POV I could feel every beat of my heart through every pulse point in my body. I could hear it in my ears as the scent of her blood wafted to my nose. I follow her scent, and the blood drops on the floor before finding Abbie soaking wet and lying on the bathroom floor. Her ear pressed to the tiles as she stared vacantly at the bottom of the sink başin.

“Abbie?” I whispered, my heart breaking at the sight of her. I hadn’t seen her like this in ages. Not since she first returned home and before was after what the b**cher did to her.

Abbie doesn’t answer, and I watch a tear slip down her cheek. When I saw Gannon, I had first thought he hurt her, and I am sure he did, but not in the way I first thought. I thought he had murdered her, but the moment I stepped into the bathroom, I realized she had hurt herself.

She had been through so much, and everyone broke, though I didn’t think it would ever be Gannon that would cause her to snap. We were all waiting for it. I knew it would eventually come because, at some point, everything weighing us down and suffocating us becomes unbearable.

We just dealt with it in different ways.

Kyson, with his drinking, me with the way I shut down and turned everything inward. Liam with his sick games of torture and then Abbie. Abbie always fights hers because there is no comeback from the sort of vice she fights, and that is death.

I kneel on the tiles before lying down beside her, resting my head on the tiles beside her. She blinked at me, and by the hollow look in her eyes, I knew she was somewhere else, somewhere far away. A place that lives inside us and haunts us, plagues and destroys us, the past.

Moving my hand, I swallow as I place it on her cold cheek, brushing my thumb below her eye. Tears filled her eyes but didn’t fall as she just stared back at me. “I can still feel it,” she murmurs.

“Feel what Ab’s?” I whisper.

“The noose. It’s still there, so tightly wound I can’t breathe,” she whispers. I touch the scar behind her ear, the one that matches mine, a death we almost shared.

“I can feel it growing tighter, digging into my skin and burning through my flesh. I can feel the way it slides over my skin, growing tighter and tighter. Feel my blood rushing in my ears. I don’t want to feel it anymore.”

“What happened?” I whisper, needing to know. I couldn’t help her if I didn’t know what put her back in this dark place. A place I had only escaped from recently myself.

“I can’t be what he needs me to be,” she says, sniffling. She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve.

“He shouldn’t be punished because I am broken,”

“You’re not broken, Abbie,”

“But I’m not whole either. He deserves better than that. He deserves better than what I can give him. So does Tyson,” she says.

“And what does Gannon need, Abbie?” I asked, and her brows furrowed. “A mate. Someone to love him that won’t hurt him as she did,” Abbie whispers.

“Who hurt Gannon?”

“She did. She didn’t want him, and I couldn’t have him. It’s the same.” her words confused me because I didn’t know of this woman she spoke of.

“Gannon wants you, Abbie. Tyson wants you. And me? I want you, Abbie,” I tell her, but she slips back away to some dark place again while I fight to bring her back. When I hear movement behind me, my eyes dart toward the door to find Gannon silently slipping into the room.

He moves behind her and sits on the edge of the bathtub. Abbie, though, doesn’t even notice him. She was not here in the present.

“I don’t know how to help her,” he admits through the mind-link. But I was as baffled as he was. I was no doctor, no shrink, and I knew Abbie would never spill her secrets to strangers. So I knew we wouldn’t get far with that suggestion.

I turn my attention to Abbie. She shivers, and her teeth chatter. She was drenched, soaking wet, and laying beside her had drenched me. She was soaking my clothes with her blood, yet she had no open wounds. I lift her shirt slightly; she doesn’t even respond to me touching her when Gannon’s voice flits through my mind.

“She slit her wrists in the bathtub. I found a bottle of wolfsbane beside her. She drank it so she wouldn’t heal; I had no choice,”

“Wolfsbane? Where would she get that?” I ask him, but I see him shrug. “I never got a chance to ask her,” he replies, and my eyes flick back to her distant ones.

I grab her wrists, seeing the long thick scar running up each one, now closed, but by the thickness, I knew they were deep. I swallow and lift her hand, kissing her fingers.

“Come back to me, Abbie,” I urged, but she just blinked. So instead, I lay beside her, holding her hand and reminding her of every good little memory we shared. Talking to her just so she knew | was here until she returned to us. Hours I laid on that floor, hours Gannon remained next to the bathtub, and I could feel Kyson nearby, yet couldn’t hear Tyson, so I figured Clarice or Liam had him.

“Abbie?” I whisper, and she blinks.

“More than my life,” I whisper for the hundredth time today, only this time she reacts, and her eyes move to look at me.

“We made a pact. You need to come back to me Abbie, or I will come with you. No matter where I will come with you. Remember that.” she shakes her head.

“You don’t want to go where I have been. The things I have seen, the things they did,” she whimpers.

“What they did, Abbie. They can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t let them. Gannon won’t let them. They aren’t coming back. They are gone. Everyone from the past is gone. They are dead. We are still breathing, so don’t let them win,” I tell her.

“They already did. They don’t have to live with what they did, but I do, and I will live with it for the rest of my life. I will live with it, not them, me. And me living with it makes them live with it. I can’t do that to Gannon and Tyson, don’t you get it? I can’t, Azzy.” she says, sitting up. Her eyes burned with rage.

“I don’t want to live with it. I don’t want to force them to live with it!” she screams at me.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she breaks, and I suck in a breath when she suddenly loses it.

She starts clawing at herself, ripping herself to pleces and ripping out her hair. Abbie lost it. She broke and broke some more, and it broke me seeing her give up because that’s what she was doing.

Rage bubbled in me as hot as hers while Gannon grabbed her, but she screamed. Blood-curdling screams echoed off the tiled walls as her anger tose, and she started attacking Gannon as he tried to stop her from destroying herself.

“More than my life, Abbie! You promised!” I scream at her just as I feel hands grab me, trying to haul me away. Sparks rush across my arms, and I feel Kyson hold me.

“Let me go!”

“She will hurt you,” he says, but I pull out of his grip. “Seeing her like this hurts me,” I tell him. Scrambling toward her, she thrashes, kicking me, and Gannon pins her arms by her sides while try to stop her kicking legs. Gannon grunts when she tosses her head back, but his grip doesn’t waiver. Even when the back of her head connected with his nose.

“Stop. We are trying to help you.” I tell her, but she continues to thrash, this time kicking me in the chest and sending me flying back into Kyson. Anger and grief at seeing her like this licked through my veins.

Burning hotter than the sun. It makes my skin prick with the intensity of its searing heat, and I lunge at her. My hands clamp on the sides of her head.

“Stop!” I tell her, and she freezes instantly. Yet her following my command didn’t shock me. It was the glowing of my hands that did before I am plunged into memories that I know aren’t mine. Memories I know are hers.

I blink around, my surroundings evaporating as new ones take shape, nightmares, things I wish 1 could unsee, yet I couldn’t bring myself to pull myself out of her head.

Trapped, just like she was. Trapped in the past, that was darker than an abyss. Tortured and broken. I could hear their voices distorted as if they spoke underwater, yet I knew it was Kyson and Gannon.

Tingles rush up my arms, and I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.

Yet instead of looking down at myself, I looked down at Abbie in the tub, where she tried to kill herself.

Her wrists slashed open, and she truly believed she was hurting them by being here. Yet the devastation of Gannon finding her told a different story as he tried to save her.

Yet all while I watched her bleeding out, the walls of her bathroom were no longer tiled but filled with every bleeding memory, every tainted word, every bad thing painted on the walls here, bearing her tortured soul to me. I wanted to escape these memories when they weren’t even mine. I couldn’t imagine them being mine and the horror she lived with.

Yet the longer I stayed, the more I found I couldn’t pull myself out of her head, out of her consciousness.

I was trapped, and I was drowning in despair. I couldn’t take it. I needed out; wanted out. It was too much, too much pain. Too much suffering for one soul, too much pain for one to endure.

My heart broke for her, over and over again, until I was left as dead inside as she was. I screamed inside, writhed, trying to break free, yet I had no idea how I was even here, how I invaded her like this.

“Kyson!” I screamed, trying to break free. I wasn’t sure if I screamed his name aloud or only in my head, but sparks rippled violently over my skin before his voice was in my head.

“Give me control of our bond,” he kept repeating, trying to manipulate it as he did my aura, but this was different. My bond was breaking, untrusting from the feelings swirling inside Abbie becoming mine. I had become her, trapped within her. Yet Kyson prompted and coaxed me.

“Whatever you’re doing, you can control Azzy,”

“You used power to get in there. Use it to get out.” his words made no sense because I don’t remember doing anything. I just remember being angry at her, angry she was giving up.

She promised. She promised! “More than my life” this was not my life yet. I was trapped in the past that was hers, not mine. We shared it, but not every trauma. I look around the room I am in, the walls of her destruction closing in.

“This is not me. This is not Abbie,” I breathe, closing my eyes. This isn’t Abbie.

“Breathe, Azzy,” Kyson murmurs in the distance, only this time, when I open my eyes, the walls are no longer painted with her darkest fears. No, they were decorated with every memory I had of her, every good memory. The night of the festival when we danced in the attic together.

Playing in the sun when our parents were with us, painting with the children, the apple fight, her smiling face, and as my memories began to paint the walls, I felt her wake. Felt her adding her own, her and Gannon. Tyson. A small cottage with wildflowers and pebble footpaths and her mother.

Tile by tile, we built the walls up that kept her going, kept her strong, the little things worth fighting for until the blood evaporated and the bathroom was clean, and it was just us. Just us and every good thing we remembered.

“More than my life,” I whispered to her as my heartbeat slowed and I could finally breathe.

“How are you doing this?” she asks and tears brim and spill in my eyes.

“I have no idea,” I choked, seeing her whole and smiling.

“But it’s time you let it go,” I tell her.

“How?”

“By letting me replace the feeling behind it,” “You can do that?” she asks, glancing around at all her memories. “I don’t know, but I feel like can,” I tell her, holding up my hand. It glowed subtly.

“What are you doing?” she asks as I step closer to the walls of her mind. “Reinforcing these memories and overriding the others,” I whisper, pressing my hands to the tiles, and we are flooded with white light. I gasped, being thrown back into the real world, and I was shocked to find my hands in the same place, one on each side of her head.

“More than my life,” Abbie whispers, her vibrant green eyes peering back at me.

“Always more,” I tell her when I feel something dribble down over my lip. “Azzy?” Abbie frowns, her hand reaching toward my face just as I feel my eyes roll into the back of my head.

Spread the love