Ice kept his gaze fixed on her face. Her chair was angled toward him and her eyes had jumped to his. He saw trepidation there, but mostly compassion. Soleil was all about that emotion. She had gone very still.
Shit. He’d been such an idiot not sharing anything about his life with her. If he gave her anything, it was done so casually, as if the tidbit meant nothing. This meant something to her. He reached for her hand and immediately brought her palm to his thigh, his thumb sliding back and forth across her knuckles. He needed that connection to her.
“Alena was a baby, an infant really. Storm and I were toddlers. Unfortunately, we were striking, all three of us. Our unusual eyes and hair made us prime targets for the pedophiles running the school Sorbacov sent us to. He liked little boys. More, he liked to see little girls hurt. The school was the perfect playground for him, and with our looks, he wasn’t going to give us up.”
She was beginning to register what he was saying, the vile truth of his past. Her breath caught, and her expression was one of horror. He kept doggedly on.
“They ran the school as if we were being taught to be assets, but they didn’t expect us to live, so we weren’t taught much about society outside the walls of the schools. The first thing they did was take our clothes.”
He leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes and tried not to let that little, terrified boy out. There were so many things to be terrified over, but losing her was the worst. He kept rubbing his thumb gently over her knuckles, needing the contact.
“I want to tell you about my past, Soleil, because I want to spend my life with you. If you want that as well, you have to know me. You have to know who I am and what shaped me into being this person.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want to lose you, Soleil. It’s taking a big chance giving this to you. The things I had to do to survive and to make certain Storm and especially Alena did will turn your stomach. They also shaped me into a pretty fucked-up mess of a human being.”
Soleil moistened her lips and then nodded. “I married you, Ice, without knowing you, but I made a commitment to you when I knew exactly what I was doing. Did today shake me up? Yes. I had several things to think about. One, I put you in jeopardy. But two, how easily killing came to all three of you. I never thought of you like that. Savage, maybe, but Absinthe or you, not at all.”
He understood. He hid the killer. Taking a life was instinctive in him. A survival trait. “We were ‘pretty’ and favorites of the instructors. They would rape us, pass us around. Beat us. Throw us back into the dungeon, broken, bloody and traumatized. Little Alena. She was just a baby. We couldn’t stop them.” He shook his head and looked away from her, not wanting her to see the rage that sometimes consumed him. “Czar was only a kid as well, but older by a few years, and everyone looked to him to find us a way out.” He shook his head, trying not to allow the bile to rise.
He couldn’t look at her now. He could only stare into the flames dancing in the fireplace. “There was no way out. They began to teach us how to have control. They did that by arousing us while we were being beaten. We were supposed to force our bodies to cooperate no matter how much it hurt. Sometimes it was the opposite, we weren’t supposed to react when someone was arousing us. That training continued for years, day in and day out. Depending on who the instructors were and what type of sex they got off on, we were used and taught to be proficient at their games until those games were normal to us.”
Her hand went to her throat in that defensive way she had. When he glanced at her, her eyes were wide with shock.
“Ice.” She just murmured his name. Softly. Lovingly.
The sound of it wrapped him up in something safe. He wasn’t used to that feeling, and it nearly undid him. He needed distance from his past. He expected her to reject him for many reasons, one of the biggest that he’d been a victim of pedophiles for years. He knew there wasn’t a lot of sympathy for male children, regardless of the fact that they were helpless and the act was rape. He forced himself to continue, to get to the worst. There was a lot of the worst.
“Along with sexual training, they trained us to be assassins, how to kill in a thousand different ways. To slip in and out of homes, crowds, over rooftops, vehicles, whatever it took. If we blew it during training, the beatings were horrendous. We used every kind of weapon. Learned about explosives, how to use them, how to build bombs and take them apart.”
“I would think they would have become a little afraid of you.”
Her statement gave him some hope. He wasn’t coloring in the details because he couldn’t look at them. He had to make her see just how desperate they were without opening those doors too wide and letting the monsters free.
“So many children died in front of us. We all were freezing. There were rats, bugs, little food, no medicine. It reeked. The longer we survived, the more they devised brutal, cruel tortures to use against us. The more children died and the worse our captors got, Czar decided we had to fight back, and he had us work on various skills or talents we had. He wanted each of us to contribute so that we all could get out of there alive.”
“You said he was a child.”
Ice nodded. “He was maybe ten or twelve, I don’t know. He and Reaper had begun devising a plan even before we arrived. Reaper was around five at that time, I think. He and Savage were extremely popular, the way Storm, Alena and I were. I don’t know if when we came, it took some of the pressure off them, but I doubt it. They were much more savagely beaten than us.”
He fell silent, lifting her hand to his mouth, his teeth on the pads of her fingers, scraping back and forth gently.
“Savage and Reaper appear to be very scary men.”
He nodded. There was no denying that fact. “They are for a reason. They had to be so the rest of us could get out of there alive. All of us had to be.”
He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, and he caught the moment when knowledge was beginning to blossom. She went very still, and she briefly closed her eyes. Her expression was cautious.
“The instructors liked to force us to do different things in these sexual training sessions. One of the things I was supposed to do was get a girl excited sexually and show her off to others so they could get off. A group of pedophiles liked that kind of thing. I was getting older then, meaning twelve or thirteen, and the girls were thankfully a little older, not the usual six or seven, but still, it was abhorrent to me when I knew that all these men would be watching her and getting off. It sickened me. Still, if that’s all they’d done, I could have taken it better.”
He shook his head, looked down at her fingers and then brought them up to press them over his forehead. He just sat there, breathing hard. He couldn’t look at her. He had never acknowledged his shame to anyone but Storm, who’d often been forced to participate.
“Ice, it’s all right,” she whispered softly, compassion in her voice.