Page 54 of Broken Discipline
“Why did he keep doing that?” I repeated.
Ramona lifted her shoulders, her eyes shifting away from mine, as if she didn’t want to face the truth.
“I guess he just wanted to,” she said.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, my words even and measured. I knew everything, but I wanted to hear it from her. To learn what she remembered. What hurt her the most. She rubbed her forehead, and when our eyes met again, there was a dullness to her expression, like she was trying to remove herself from it.
“What the members did to me reminded me of medieval torture. I had to sit on this cone and this weird triangular bench, while they strapped me down and put weights on my legs so that the fixtures dug into me even more.” She put a hand against her chest. “The worst was being clubbed. That was the night I met you, actually.”
“Upchurch?” I asked.
She nodded. “He hit me with a wooden club until I was unconscious. Then screwed me with the handle.”
“And Bruce watched?”
“He jerked off to it.”
I snapped my teeth down and tasted blood on my tongue. The only thing keeping me from going ballistic was the fact that four out of five of the men that were responsible for her torture were dead. All that was left was Upchurch. He would take time; I could accept that.
“It was one night a year,” she said, eyeing me nervously. “Anyone can survive a night.” She stared down into the murky brown liquid in her mug. “Sometimes, it wasn’t that bad,” she said quietly. Any time a man had touched her, to me, was a bad fucking time. “One member fisted me. Maybe it would’ve felt good if he hadn’t been so aggressive, you know?” She bowed her head. “But it was like he was literally ripping me apart. Until I got used to it, I guess.”
A vein throbbed in my neck, my forehead creased with tension. “Getting used to pain, and feeling good, are not the same thing,” I said.
Her gaze trailed off to the dark windows. The first fingers of light stretched over the horizon, signaling dawn.
“I was grateful that it wasn’t anything worse,” she said.
My pulse thumped rapidly, angry that she thought she had to endure that. I had stayed away because I thought she was better off. But how could I have been so stupid?
“What were their names?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “Bruce kept a journal with details about each time. It’s probably in his office somewhere.”
I softened, sitting down on the barstool next to her. I took her hands in mine. She was avoiding the question, knowing what would happen once I learned their names. But most of them were already dead. I just needed to know what she remembered about them.
I asked again, quietly this time: “What were their names?”
Her eyes fluttered back and forth over mine, like she was trying to decide whether it was the right thing to tell me their names.
“I know you may not remember a lot, but do you remember that?” I asked.
“Lennon. Kien. Manner. And Upchurch.” She let out a breath. “That Masquerade where we met. I can’t remember. Did you sacrifice someone?”
“My father,” I said.
She tilted her head. “Does it still bother you?”
It had broken me, but if I let him die from that disease, it would have been my fault too. He wanted a grand exit, and I gave him that.
“The only other person I cared about besides him was spoken for at the time. And I couldn’t have done it to that person anyway,” I said. I thought of the countless nights I had stared up at the bedroom window of Bruce’s mansion, as her shadow shimmered through the curtains. Those miserable, long fucking years.
But that didn’t matter anymore.
“I had to make his death mean something,” I added, looking away, bracing myself for her reaction. We were different in that way; she was willing to do anything to save her family, but when it came to me, I had chosen to sacrifice my own father to get what I wanted. Finally, I met her eyes again, and those amber gems sparkled back at me.
“I’m sure he understood,” she said.
Feet slapped against the tile, rushing around the corner. A fit of giggles cracked through the air. Larkin and Leon rushed into the kitchen like a wave on the beach.
