Chapter Fifty Four

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54. Let it Be

'I am yours,
the way the sea belongs to the moon,
the way the moon belongs to the sky,
and even if the jealous stars break,
and shatter upon the milky way,
I will still see heaven in your eyes.'
-Mark Anthony

'-Mark Anthony

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Zeppelin had hoped that sex would distract her mind enough to sleep peacefully and had thought that giving her body to Daryl would keep the nightmares away as they had before. She had no such luck.

  The dream was just a flash of faces now, one after the other. All of them blurred and murky. All of them stared at her, fear and judgement clouding the colors of their eyes.

  She wanted to cower under those gazes. She felt how easy it would be to curl into a ball and shield herself from the eyes.

  She wouldn't, she couldn't. But those eyes...

  Watching, watching.

  She opened her mouth to scream. There was only the deafening silence.


  Daryl woke up long before the sun did.

  After he had finally, reluctantly, pulled away from Zeppelin in the shower, he gently lathered her bruised body in soap, careful to circle softly along her hips and spine. He felt weird at first, but that feeling dissipated with the steam rolling off her limbs. He even rubbed his fingers along her scalp, her long tendrils of hair slathered in shampoo that smelled like violets.

  Then he quickly washed himself with half the care he took with her, and Zepp just.. watched him.

  He hopped out first to wrap her shivering body in the fluffy towel hanging along the yellow wallpaper. She scrunched her nose and made a face at him for the hovering but accepted his care all the same.

  She changed into the clothes he had scrounged for her, a lazy smirk plastered across her mouth. Once her head hit the downy pillow on top of the mattress so tall she had to hop up into it, her eyes fluttered closed into a peaceful, deep sleep. He changed into a faded pair of sweats and a long-sleeved black tee shirt and hopped onto the bed beside her.

He watched her sleep for a while, her shoulders and chest rising, then falling, rising again in a steady rhythm. He tried to focus solely on that rhythm because the moment his mind wandered for even a second, all he could see was that night.

'Let's bring the others out. Right now," a voice called out from the other side of the barrier between him and the outside world. A blinding light seared his eyes when the Saviors threw open the truck door, and he barely registered it as headlights until his body was slammed into the cold gravel.

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