No! The word erupted from her subconscious, reverberating through her entire body. The savagery of the instinctive reaction shook her; she never allowed herself to feel that deeply about anything. Then something inside her settled and she felt the utter rightness of it. She and Rafael were over, finished. He’d given her away as if she were nothing to him-as if she were nothing, period.
She hated him, hated him even more than she hated herself. She’d completely subjugated herself to him, bitten her tongue and smiled and gone along with him no matter what he wanted, and for what? For him to treat her as if she were a common whore? She trembled with a primitive need to hurt him, to see his blood, to physically beat him and bite him and tear at him with her nails.
She couldn’t; she knew that. His goons would either shoot her on the spot or drag her off to be disposed of at their leisure. Admitting her own helplessness against him was even more galling.
The ruthlessly logical part of her brain ordered her to pull herself together and just deal with this, but she couldn’t seem to shove all these turbulent emotions away. They were like giant waves that kept crashing over her protective walls, and she was going under for the third time.
Rafael had to pay. She didn’t know how, but she had to make him pay. She couldn’t live if she let him get away with grinding her into the dirt the way he had. No matter how low life had pushed her, she’d always managed to reassure herself that at least she hadn’t been reduced to prostitution. She’d seen herself as Rafael’s mistress, not his whore, which maybe was splitting hairs but to her way of thinking it was a damned important hair.
She no longer had the comfort of that illusion. To him, she was nothing more than goods to be traded for a service, and the mirror she held up to herself reflected back only what he saw. Her entire body shuddered from the force of her sobs, her throat under such strain that she began gagging, but her stomach was empty and the spasm produced only dry heaves.