Page 17 of Dragon's Revenge

The moment of truth. Oliver took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened his mouth. “I don’t like milk and sugar in my tea.”

Holy shit! He’d spoken. Actual words had come out. Tears formed in his eyes.

“I’m so proud of you, Oliver,” Delton said. “Not for speaking but for daring to try. It’s terrifying to even attempt it when you’re not certain you’ll succeed.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank you for sharing that with me about the tea. I call that progress, as silly as that may sound for something so trivial. It’s not trivial for you. You’re developing preferences, which is a critical step in discovering who you are.”

“It is?” Oliver frowned. “How?”

Delton handed Oliver his tea, then grabbed his own mug and sat across from Oliver in a reading chair. “One of the consequences of growing up in a traumatic environment is that you adapt to the circumstances. It’s a survival instinct to do whatever is necessary to stay alive, physically and psychologically. In a situation like that, you can’t be who you are. You can’t have preferences. You can’t make free decisions. You are who and what you need to be. You tell yourself what you must do to make it through to the next day. You survive. But you’re here now, and that necessity for survival is gone. So now you get to develop those parts of your personality.”

He was so good at explaining things. His lessons had always been Oliver’s favorites. Fallon loved everything about the law, but Oliver was intrigued by what Delton shared about the human mind. “What do you mean by telling yourself what you need to hear?”

“Good question. Well, let’s say an omega was raised by conservative parents who forced him to adopt strict role patterns. If that omega was forced to marry an alpha who embraced those same stereotypes, what would he tell himself to get through it? He has no choice, not legally, so all he can do is try to make it bearable for himself. So he tells himself that at least the alpha is handsome or that he looks virile and might give him lots of kids. Or that maybe underneath, he’s kind. That he’s rich and can buy him stuff. That maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem.”

“I didn’t tell myself anything,” Oliver whispered.

“No?”

“At first, maybe. When I was still a teenager.”

“You lost hope.”

Oliver nodded.

“Is that why you stopped talking?”

Was it? Funny, but Oliver had never asked himself that question, which, in hindsight, seemed silly. Something so monumental, and he’d never wondered how it had started. He’d simply attributed it to trauma, like everything else. “Maybe?”

“When did you stop? I think Fallon said it was about two years before you came here, right?”

The memory came out of nowhere. One moment, he was sitting in Delton’s room, and the next, rancid sweat filled his nostrils, and he gagged.

He couldn’t breathe, Dempsey’s hand on his neck, forcing his head down. He was bent over a desk, papers roughly sent flying, and Dempsey pinned him down with his body as he yanked Oliver’s pants down.

Pain.

He hadn’t recovered yet from the last time. Dempsey would fuck him till he bled. He took a perverse satisfaction out of that.

Oliver screamed and screamed, but no one listened. No one came.

No one ever did.

And so he stopped screaming. Stopped talking. Stopped…being.

“Oliver.”

He blinked.

A firm hand covered his. “Oliver, honey, stay with me. Stay in the present.”

The present. Delton.

He swallowed, then took a deep breath. No smell of sweat. Instead, he smelled flowers. No one was holding him down. He was safe.

He was in Delton’s room. Delton sat in front of him on his knees, holding his hand and watching Oliver with concern in his eyes.

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