Page 177 of Sins of the Hidden

The color drained from her cheeks, leaving her pale and stricken. Fear of the damage her love could do—not just to me, but to herself.

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, words failing her. I watched her struggle, watched as she drowned. I wanted to believe that love could fix something in me, but I was learning love hurt more than it healed.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I wasn't the monster I'd believed myself to be all these years. Maybe I was just a man—broken, scarred, but still human somewhere beneath it all.

I just didn't understand why she couldn't love me anyway. Why couldn't she take the risk? Why, after everything, this was the line she couldn't cross? I'd survived torture, captivity, certaindeath—but this, her fear of loving me, might be the thing that finally broke me beyond repair.

"Just lie to me," I begged, my voice a controlled whisper. My hands moved to clutch at her shoulders, fingers pressing into her flesh with restrained desperation. "Tell me you love me. Just once. Just fucking once." My voice choked out, ruined and desperate. "Just let me believe I was something worth loving."

For a split second, her fingers curled weakly into my shirt, the gentlest of grips before slipping away, leaving me emptier than ever.

"I never realized my home could be someone's heart." The confession was pulled from somewhere deep inside me. "Don't take my home away from me. Please."

My eyes found hers, midnight pools suddenly exposed, vulnerability carved into features that never showed weakness. My jaw clenched with the effort of containing everything inside me, muscles working against what threatened to break loose.

The sight of that battle—of me fighting my own body's response—struck her harder than any blow. It contained oceans of unspoken truths—the lonely child with no voice, the boy who learned to kill to survive, the man who had only known possession, never love.

"I want to love you," she finally whispered desperately, each word dragged from some deep, wounded place inside her. Tears spilled freely down her cheeks now, cutting silver paths through the grime and ash.

"You're choosing me?" My voice barely audible, flat as a heartbeat, containing a universe of disbelief. The question hung in the air between us, weighted with decades of rejection, of being seen as nothing but a body to use, a weapon to wield.

She pressed her lips to mine again, and I tasted salt and copper and something else—something that felt like redemption. My arms pulled her against me, desperate in a wayI never was, my fingers pressing into her skin like I was afraid she'd dissolve, disappear, leave me alone in the darkness again.

She pulled back just enough to meet my gaze, her hands cradling my face like it was made of spun glass rather than the steel she'd always believed. My eyes were different now—not just steady, but changed. As if something fundamental had shifted behind them. The perpetual emptiness had given way to something raw and newborn, alert and focused all at once.

The final wall crumbled away in my eyes then. I—the man who felt nothing, who feared nothing—let her see everything. The terror. The shame. The desperate, clawing need to be wanted. To be chosen. To be seen as something more than the weapon I'd been forged into.

"You're the only real thing I have left," she whispered, voice breaking. "Because I don't even know who I am anymore."

My hand found hers, lacing our fingers together—scars against scars, brokenness against brokenness. Monster against monster. For that was what we both were now—creatures transformed by trauma, reborn into something unrecognizable to our former selves.

In a world where everything else had been revealed as lies, my truth was the only solid ground beneath her feet. In my arms, surrounded by rubble and blood and broken glass, she found the one place where she still made sense. Where we both did. Two broken things that somehow, impossibly, fit together to create something whole.

Her heart twisted in her chest, the agony visible in her eyes as the realization dawned—I expected nothing in return for everything I offered. That after a lifetime of taking what I wanted by force, I was now willing to give everything and ask for nothing. The irony wasn't lost on either of us.

Movement caught her eye—dark wetness seeping through the fabric of my sleeve. She shifted slightly in my arms, herattention drawn to the spreading stain. Her fingers reached out, concern overriding everything else.

"You're bleeding," she whispered. I loosened my hold on her, allowing her to take my arm as she moved to examine it more closely. She carefully pushed up the soaked fabric, revealing what I'd kept hidden.

Her breath caught sharply, a pained sound escaping her throat. There, carved into the inside of my right forearm, was her name OAKLEY, the letters jagged and fresh, still weeping crimson. I shifted my position, extending my other arm toward her without being asked. When she reached for it, I let her take it, watching her face as she discovered SUMMER etched into my left forearm, the cuts deeper, more deliberate.

"When did you..." Her voice broke, fingers hovering above the wounds, afraid to touch them.

The morning before her parents came over. I carved my reasons into my arms—Oakley and Summer.

Her eyes lifted to mine, swimming with more tears and horror and something else—a terrible understanding of what it meant to carve someone so deeply into your flesh that you carried them in your blood.

"Why would you do this to yourself?" She sounded horrified.

"You might never love me." I accepted reality. "But that won't stop me from loving you."

And I did.

I fucking loved Oakley.

She held me tighter, her arms encircling me completely, her fingers digging into my flesh like she could anchor me to life itself. The weight of what we'd shared, the intensity of the confessions, began to take its toll. I felt my strength ebbing, my body growing heavy against hers.

My weight began to settle into her gradually, a slow surrender rather than a sudden collapse. She felt the change,her arms adjusting to support me as I let myself lean more fully into her embrace. The physical surrender mirrored something deeper breaking loose inside me, something I'd held rigid for decades now allowed to soften, to yield.

---