Page 100 of Boy of Ruin
My hand starts to tremble, almost imperceptible, except she’s staring right at it, and I know she sees it.
She reaches out, wrapping her slender fingers around my wrist, feeling the way I’m trembling in her touch.
I feel itchy, uncomfortable, and for a second I want to push her away. Shove her off of me and forget about this. Forget peeling away the mask I wear. The ways I guard myself.
I want to keep her out, just as I’ve ever kept anyone I’ve ever known out.
Even Nicolas doesn’t know this much about me. Neither does Brooklin.
No one.
But Sid deserves to know. She’s handled me at my fucking worst, and my best isn’t any better than that, but she deserves all of my truths.
I let my eyes flutter closed as her thumb runs up the inside of my wrist and her fingers start massaging my scalp again. It feels so fucking good I want to groan. I’ve never let anyone touch me this way.
Ever.
I dip my chin, press another kiss to her belly. Then I trail my tongue down her skin, over my name.
She sucks in a breath, and I’m sure it stings. She stops massaging my wrist and my hair, and her body tenses.
But I open my lips, press my mouth to her again, closing and sucking softly on her skin.
She shivers but keeps rubbing me.
I take a shuddering breath, rest my brow against her belly as I speak, unable to look at her when I say the words. “He came when my hands were bound,” I explain, trying to distance myself from the words even as I speak them. As I lay myself open for her, knowing she might try to run again. Knowing she might…reject me. “It was thin rope. Strong enough that I couldn’t seem to rip it apart, no matter how hard I tried, but small enough that it bit into my skin.”
I can still feel it, now, with my head against Sid’s stomach, as her thumb carefully runs against my inner wrist. I can feel it.
My mouth goes dry, but I force myself to keep talking. To keep giving her my truths, because she deserves them. I aimed a gun at her head once. I pulled the goddamn trigger. I almost raped her.
I hurt her.
I lied to her.
She deserves this truth.
“I’d tried to escape,” I admit, my voice breaking. “I’d tried to escape when one of my sisters came to feed me. I’d grabbed her, pulled her against the wire.” I remember her wide blue eyes. Her pulse beneath my fingers as I held onto her throat, the bread she’d brought me tossed into a fucking corner because I didn’t want her goddamn bread.
I wanted her blood.
I wanted to be free.
I wanted the light.
“I almost killed her.” And I had. I’d almost killed her right then, but her father must have noticed she’d gone missing. He came downstairs, pulled her away from me. She had tried to defend me. Tried to bullshit her way over excuses, but her father had struck her with the back of his hand, and she had gone down, onto the cement floor.
Anger had surged through me, and I didn’t know why.
I didn’t fucking know why because I wanted to hurt her too.
But it didn’t take me long to figure out why.
When he yanked me out of that cage, pressed my face against the cement floor, his foot against my spine, my arms jerked behind me as he wrapped the rope so tight around my hands, it cut off my circulation before he even threw me back in the fucking cage, I knew why I didn’t like seeing him hurt her.
Because she might’ve been a bitch too. A worthless fucking cunt, just like her sister and just like their mother, but her dad was worse.
He was…he was like Lucifer.
