Page 64 of Vengeful Vows

Ark takes my silence as an outright denial. He bristles with anger, his fury hot enough to scald. “I’m going to track down that fuck and make him regret the day he laid eyes on you. I’m going to kill him.”

I follow him out of the bathroom and down the hallway, my strides remarkably strong for how hard I am shaking.

Ark grips the handle of my front door when I say, “It’s too late.” A shiver moves through me as flashbacks of my past rear their ugly heads. “He’s already d-dead.” I stray my eyes to the floor to hide the deceit in them before saying, “There’s no one left for you to punish…except me.”

“Punish you?” He spits the two words as if disgusted. “I don’t want to punish you, Mara.”

“You may not want to, but you are.”

“How?” he bites out.

“By not trusting me to do what is best for me and my daughter. By letting me believe my st-stutter makes me weak.” I fold my arms over my chest to ward off the chill rolling down my spine. “By taking what he did to me and using it against me.”

“That’s not what I am doing.” His voice quickens with fury. “I just found out, so how could I have already used it against you?”

“You knew,” I whisper, my chest rattling as I strive to hold back a sob. “You knew because a victim knows a victim.”

He tries topfftoff my underhanded claim that he is an abuse survivor. It rumbles in the back of his throat and tightens the firmness of his jaw, but not a waft leaves his lips when I stare at him, pleading for him to be truthful.

A relationship doesn’t need to be perfect.

It just needs to be honest.

Desperate for him to open up to me, I push past the barriers he is erecting between us. “Was it your mother?”

“No!” he denies in a hurry, the rebuttal cracking from his mouth like a whip.

My stomach gurgles when I say, “Your father?”

“No. It wasn’t anybody, so stop asking!”

His anger should scare me; it should have me backing away with my hands held in the air, but the nurturing side he pulled out of the trenches in the elevator only hours ago refuses to surrender. I need him as open and raw as me. I need his heart unguarded if I want any chance of infiltrating it.

“Intra-familiar sexual abuse?—”

My knees weaken when he shouts, “It wasn’t sexual.”

I’d give anything to hug him, to lessen his shakes with some form of contact, but I keep my hands at my side, rewarding him with the same respect he offered me only hours ago.

My dedication is rewarded tenfold when he mutters a short time later, “If she had to pick between maiming me and touching me, she mostly picked the former.”

Mostly?God.

I take a conscious breath to lessen the nerves in my voice before asking, “She?”

As Ark’s eyes float down the hallway, he breathes out so heavily his chest sinks. “My step-grandmother.” I learn this goesway deeper than the occasional whack on the bottom when he murmurs, “She hurt him as a child, so he hurt them.”

My lips quiver when I speak. “Your sisters?”

He nods almost robotically, and it breaks my heart. I was able to leave my abusive home because there was no one there to protect but myself, and I only built the courage when I found out I was pregnant with Tillie. I doubt I would have ever left if I had siblings, particularly a younger one. I struggled to leave my mother, and she was an adult.

“Ark… I’m s-so sorry.”

He shakes violently, but since the lid has been lifted on years of secrets, he can’t reseal it. “I didn’t know about any of it until just before Karolina couldn’t handle the shameheforced on her for a second longer. I assumedhismother hated me because he hated her. I had no clue he was hurting my sisters because she had hurt him. I swear to you, I didn’t know. I would have stopped it if I had known.” It is a fight not to wrap my arms around him and hold him tight when his voice dips with shame. “I should have known. It’s rare for the abused not to become abusers.”

“That isn’t true.” When he grunts as if he doesn’t believe me, I speak loud and clear. “The rate of abuse amongst individuals with a history is approximately s-six times higher than the base rate for abuse in the general population.” I talk even faster so he can’t interrupt me. “But that’s because those figures don’t include the choices?—”

“Choices? What choices? They take them all away.”

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