Page 29 of Mountain Refuge

“Fuck.”

I seconded the expletive. “I jumped between them. Biological father or not, no man strikes my daughter. Trenton got her off the floor and cradled her to his chest. She was crying. And then…” I let out a shaky breath. “And then Gunther informed me of the choice I had to make. Lydia was my responsibility. Therefore, her failures and wrongdoings were my own. I either had to step aside while she was punished, or I could take her punishment for her. But if I took it, it would be twofold.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

I shook my head. “Trenton tried to talk his father out of it. He kept saying that she was just a little girl, and she was getting over a trauma, but Gunther didn’t care. I could see it in his eyes. Hewouldpunish Lydia for not greeting him in front of his guests when she entered the dining room.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat as I admitted, “I said that I would take her punishment for her.”

“Goddamn.”

“Gunther went over to his desk. I didn’t know what he intended. A part of me thought he was going to get his gun. All I knew was that I was not going to allow Lydia to be punished. Itold Trenton to take her back to her room and stay with her until I returned.” I hadn’t said theif I returnedto Trenton back then, but we had both known it was unspoken. “But Gunther told Trenton to stay. He wanted Lydia to see what happens when she misbehaves. I begged him to let her go. Told him that he could do whatever he wanted to me as long as Lydia wasn’t subjected to it.” I would never forget the stricken look on Lydia’s little face as she figured that I was going to be punished for something she had done wrong. Never. “Gunther still told Trenton to stay.”

I fell silent, terrible memories whirling around in my head. I wasn’t sure how to admit what happened next. Sometimes it still felt like a bad dream. If it wasn’t for the scars on my back, I might have been able to convince myself of that too.

“What did he do to you?” Corbin’s voice was low and gentle. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how hard admitting and reliving all this was for me.

“He flogged me.”

“Hewhat?” It was probably a good thing he was holding Henry just then or I had a feeling Corbin would have thrown a fit of rage with how angry he was at my admission.

“My daughter and her brother watched as I was stripped of my shirt, told to stand up against the wall, and then I was flogged with a whip. I don’t know if he would have used the same whip or a smaller one for Lydia, but I received twenty strikes, which meant she would have gotten ten. The man was going tofloghis six-year-old daughter.”

“Dear God. Did you go to the hospital? What happened?”

I turned my back to him and lifted up my sweater to my pits. I had three scars from my ordeal. One was long and went from my right shoulder blade, across my spine, and ended at my left side. That had been one of the first to bleed when I’d been struck. Most hadn’t broken flesh, but the ones thathad were permanently with me. The second scar was shorter than the first and almost directly below it. The third went from the left side of my spine around my side to almost my bellybutton.

“That rat bastard. I’ll kill him.”

Coming from a convicted murderer, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take that statement. I lowered my shirt and turned back around. “If you’re going to kill him, do it for what he did next to Lydia and not for what he did to me. I took that punishment to save my daughter. I’ll never regret that.”

“You’re a better man than I am, Adam. I don’t know if I could have done what you did.”

“When you have kids, you’ll understand. There isn’t anything you wouldn’t do for them.”

A haunted look crossed his face. It was there and gone again in the blink of an eye. “I don’t think kids are in the cards for me.”

That was a conversation for another time. “To answer your question, I didn’t go to the hospital. That would have raised too many red flags. Instead a physician came to the mansion to check on my wounds. Trenton called him, by the way, not Gunther.”

“I’m actually starting to like this kid.”

I gave a wry smile. “Me too. He took charge of Lydia while I couldn’t. He’d bring her in to me so I could see her and spend time with her. Otherwise, he was with her twenty-four-seven while I was laid up. He even changed my bandages and put the medication the doctor had prescribed me on my back.”

I had been stuck on my belly for over a week so the cuts could heal. The doctor had said I could get up if I felt up to it, but any movement would break the cuts open again. It was better to let them heal as quickly as possible to lessen the scarring.

“One night, it was super late, probably around two or three in the morning, I woke to find Trentonsneaking into my room. He’d been sleeping in Lydia’s, but he’d never come into my room like that before. He told me he had a plan to get Lydia out of the mansion and away from their father. After what had just happened to me, I was all for it. But we had to do it safely. We had to somehow escape and assume new identities that Gunther couldn’t track or trace. Trenton said he would start to work on it, but he wanted to make sure I was willing to leave with her. I never even hesitated. I told Trenton to do what he had to do and, when everything was ready, we would leave and never look back.

“It took almost a month for Trenton to get everything together. But fate had a plot twist neither of us were expecting.” I gestured to Henry, now asleep in his uncle’s arms. “Trenton found out another one of Gunther’s mistresses was pregnant.”

“Wow, this guy needs to learn to glove up or pull out.”

Surprisingly a snort escaped me. “I truly don’t think the man cared.”

“Obviously, you stayed.”

I nodded. “We had to. I wasn’t about to subject another child to that life. Trenton and I considered Lydia and I leaving before the birth and then Trenton would somehow get the baby to me, but we nixed that idea almost as soon as we had it. Once I was away with Lydia, I couldn’t ever contact Trenton or risk leading Gunther back to Lydia.

“So, we stayed. Once again Gunther came to me and told me that I was to be his son’s nanny too. The woman was further along than I’d expected. I was with Helena for almost six months of her pregnancy. This woman was almost eight months along when I met her.

“There were complications with the birth, though. The woman had preeclampsia and her heart gave out during delivery. Henry was a preemie too, so he was in the NICU ward for several weeks because his lungs weren’t fully developed yet.

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