“You’re my fuckin’ world, you know that, woman?”
She didn’t respond, she just continued to massage his head with those firm strokes. He felt love in every single one. Caring. She took care of him. He mattered to her. There was an intimate feel to the way she touched him. It wasn’t sexual, although there was a kind of sensuality to their connection. It was more the intimacy of intense caring. She shook him every time she touched him the way she did. She had from the very first time he ever met her.
“I just knew I didn’t ever want to be like them. I didn’t want anything about me to be like them. Everything about them was wrong. I vowed I wasn’t going to cooperate with them ever again, no matter how many times they took the skin off my back. I was used to pain. I was used to rape. They couldn’t break me. I knew they couldn’t.”
He rubbed his face over her belly again, mostly to get rid of the moisture leaking down his face. Fuck that. Fuck them. He had sworn he would never give them the satisfaction of seeing him broken.
“They aren’t here, Savage,” Seychelle reminded him gently, her fingers whispering over his temple and then his scalp in that way of hers that told him far more than words ever could. A declaration. “I’m here. It’s just the two of us. We can both break into a million pieces, remember? That was our promise to one another. We’ll find every piece and put us back together. I’ll do that for you, and you do that for me. We’re safe with each other. I give you my tears. You can give me yours.”
He rubbed his jaw along her soft belly once more. The bristles left faint red marks, his marks, along with those wet trails in the silk of her skin, but she never once stopped him. He kissed the marks and dipped his tongue in her belly button, closing his eyes, savoring the taste and texture of his woman. The closeness of her.
Safety was relative. He didn’t want her to know that even surrounded by his brothers and sisters, even as they grew, toughened by the thousands of drills they’d done down in the dungeon to strengthen their bodies and build muscle—push-ups, sit-ups, running in place or around the room, all with one of them on shoulders or back—that still hadn’t saved them. They’d practiced martial arts, every kind of hand-to-hand combat skill they were taught, day in and day out. They still weren’t safe.
“When they wanted my cooperation to train, they would take Reaper to another room and torture him until I did what they said. I became the Whip Master, and they burned that into my skin. Permanently. They knew it would shame me when I faced the others. I was a teen by that time. Absinthe and Demyan—he was Absinthe’s older brother—would whisper to me that I was the best at what I did. That I liked doing it. That no one could be better, ever. It was the only way I could get by. It sickened me to train those girls. At the same time …”
Savage lifted his head, his blue eyes twin hot flames. Shame. Guilt. “I got off on it. I would get so fucking hard. I would have to take them one after another. They would beg me to, and I would tell myself they needed me to help them through it. It was part of their training, but it was still self-gratification any way you looked at it.”
She didn’t look away from his gaze, but in true Seychelle fashion, there was no judgment. “Honey, you insist on being so tough on a young boy. They held your brother hostage, hurting him mercilessly, and you were trapped doing their bidding. If that was part of the training, what would happen to Reaper, and those girls, had you not followed through?”
“That’s true, Seychelle, but I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to. I tried not to be aroused. I tried not to like what I was doing, but I did. I couldn’t hide it. There was no way to hide it.” He buried his face on her belly and let her comfort him when there had been no comfort as a child. Especially once he’d been a teenager.
“They were afraid of me. Sorbacov and his cronies. The instructors at the school. Reaper and I were different; we’d grown too powerful. Reaper made his first kill when he was five, creeping through a vent to get to one of the worst of the instructors. We had to be so careful, and we couldn’t kill too many too fast. We had to take only the very worst and spread the kills out. Months apart. A year. Try to make them look like accidents. Never use what we’d learned at the school. Czar planned. The others helped, were lookouts or created illusions. Whatever we needed. But for the most part, Reaper or I were the ones that made the earlier kills. I think that began to show on our faces or in our eyes, whether we wanted it to or not.”
He was trying to prepare her for the worst of him. That side of him that was even more of a monster than he had to show her in the bedroom. Wasn’t that bad enough to have to confess to? Wasn’t it bad enough to have to tell her he’d been raped and tortured as a child? That he’d crawled through vents and killed the men who had done their worst to all of the children in the school, not just the survivors?
“Why did I have to be so fuckin’ good at it, Seychelle?” He could hear the whispers of Absinthe and Demyan telling him he was the best. No one better. He would be huddled in a ball, hating himself, wishing he was dead, knowing the only thing that kept Reaper alive was his ability to use that whip. His expertise. He detested himself for being aroused every time. For participating to keep those he cared about alive when others suffered at his hands.
“I got so I didn’t know right from wrong. The lines just kept blurring, no matter how hard I tried to live up to the code. If they didn’t take Reaper, they threatened one of the girls. I got so good at it. And so good at the assassination work. Too good. Sorbacov loved sending me out. I was his golden boy. I always got the job done, and he liked it messy. Bloody. Not at first. At first, he wanted accidents so no one could trace the deaths back to him. But then he wanted his marks to suffer and know they were suffering because he’d decreed it. I excelled at making them suffer. In fact, Seychelle, I was the best in the school, so once again, I was the golden boy, the Master of Pain. Had that shit burned right into my skin declaring me so. It wasn’t just about my ability with a whip or a fucking flogger. The things they taught me there to do to the human body …” He trailed off.
He waited. Anger building. That red swirling up in him through the black. She remained silent, her fingers on his scalp, moving to his temples and then down to his neck, where his muscles were in merciless hard knots. That didn’t deter her. Nothing seemed to. He wanted to knock her hands away. He wanted to shake some sense into her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Seychelle? Do you not understand what I’m telling you? Why they took a red-hot iron and burned that title into my back? When Sorbacov wanted information, I got it for him by taking his enemies apart. Enemies of the state, he said. I kept them alive until they told me everything he wanted to hear and then some. Do you know what I felt when I did that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What does that make me? If you were thinking of running away from me because I stupidly fucked up over not telling you why someone might want to kill me, then baby, you might consider this a much better reason.”
What was wrong with him? Was he deliberately trying to drive her away from him? At the same time, he was holding on to her hips with everything he had. He had thrown one leg over her thighs, pinning her down, his head on her belly. She wasn’t going anywhere, even though he was deliberately shocking her. Angry. Raging. Showing her the worst of him. Letting her see glimpses of the true monster inside him. Because he still did that shit for his club. He wouldn’t admit that to her, because he knew she wouldn’t be able to handle it.