Bad Love: An Alpha's Regret (Leah and Aaron) novel Chapter 339

EMILY

I’m confused when my mind comes back to itself.

I’m no longer in the cellar storeroom, I’m in my bedroom with no recollection of how I got here.

I’m no longer cold, but wrapped up tight in a blanket, being held tight in a strong embrace.

Being held tight by—

Axel?

He’s humming some tune I don’t recognize, but it doesn’t sound like anything composed this century. More like classical music of some kind.

It’s hard to imagine a hardened Alpha, a warrior, the Slayer, enjoying something so tame as classical music.

I don’t know what to make of this moment.

Axel was the one who locked me up.

He’s the one who refuses to understand my need to escape, to shift and run on my own.

He is my mate who rejected me out of hand.

I should hate him.

I should be furious with him.

I should be escaping his hold and kicking him out of my room, telling him I never want to lay eyes on him again.

However, it’s like whatever happened down in that cellar storeroom has burned away all that anger I was holding onto.

Even though I want to be angry, I can’t find it within me any longer.

Instead, I just feel this overwhelming need to cry.

I feel this deep, rending grief for what happened to me.

For the loss of the girl I was before I got abducted.

I’m devastated at what I was forced to endure, at the person—thing—I became during those ten years and all the horrors since.

I think now this is the reason I was hanging onto all that anger.

Why it was easier to respond to everything—including Aaron and Axel—with fury, because if I let myself feel this anguish, it’s so deep and vast, I’m not sure how I’ll survive it.

Or, how I’ll ever escape it.

And then there’s Axel.

Yes, he was the one who put me in that situation, but he couldn’t have known what I’d endured at the hands of the old Roberts Alpha. He couldn’t have realized what his actions would trigger within me, because I’ve refused to talk about it.