Page 14 of Broken By Silence
“Because it wasn’t your pain to know,” Archer translates for him, “and he’s right. You didn’t deserve half the answers she gave you. Hell, Oscar doesn’t even know.”
Oscar’s eyes narrow, his fingers flying with a renewed urgency.
“I would’ve told you,” Lottie whispers, voice thin and raw from everything that’s happened. “Eventually.”
We watch her hold herself together as she and Oscar have a private conversation with just their hands. And I watch as Oscar’s heart breaks in silence, piece by piece, as he finally learns about everything she’s been through.
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” Lottie finally speaks out loud while still signing. “They cornered me, and all I could think about was that I could never go back there. Could never let him touch me again. I wanted to die, and I didn’t think anyone would care if I did.”
“You thought we wouldn’t care?” Roman asks, sounding almost broken.
“You didn’t care when I was alive,” she fires back with a shrug. “So why would I believe you’d care if I was gone?”
“You didn’t tell us,” Elijah sounds horrified. “You could have told us.”
Lottie laughs, bitter and sharp. “Told you? When? Before or after you all called me an attention-seeker for my silence? Or how about after you locked me in rooms, forcing me to replay that day over and over again. Or when you were his willing puppets?”
My throat burns.
“We didn’t know?—”
“You didn’t want to know!” She snaps.
I flinch. We all do.
The room’s silent for a beat, like none of us know what to say or how to fix what we’ve broken.
I swallow hard, but it’s like trying to breathe through wet cement.
“We cared,” I whisper, even though the words feel pathetic the second they hit the air. “I didn’t show it, and I’m sorry. But I cared, Lottie.”
She finally looks at me, and there’s no fury in her face. Hell, that would be easier. I could take her anger. Wedeserveher anger.
But there’s nothing in her eyes, only exhaustion.
“None of you cared enough to ask me why I was pulling away,” she says, her voice flat and emotionless, and I hate it. I hate us for making her go back to this. “You didn’t care enough to stop laughing when I flinched away from your touches. When I couldn’t look any of you in the eye because you reminded me of them, you might not have meant for it to happen, but I was made a pawn in a game I had no chance of winning because of other people’s choices. I’m done bleeding for people who wouldn’t do the same for me.”
Elijah opens his mouth to speak, but Lottie cuts him off. “Don’t. Don’t stand there and say you didn’t know,” she says, sharper now. “Don’t you dare. Itoldyou, in a hundred different ways, even if none of them were words. You all said you knew me…” she sighs. “But you didn’t know me well enough to see how much you were all killing me.”
Roman shifts in the bed. His face is pale. “If you had told us outright. We would have?—”
“Would you?” she snaps, cocking her head mockingly. “Would you have believed me over him? Over your father? Don’t lie to me, Roman, it won’t gain you any favours. At least have the decency to own your bullshit. You wore that name like a sword that you used to cut down anyone you didn’t deem good enough to be worthy of a Valen’s attention.”
He doesn’t answer. For once, Roman has been shocked silent, and that silence says more than any apology ever could.
My eyes sting. I can’t tell if it’s grief or guilt anymore, or some mutant blend of both that I can feel shredding me from the inside.
Archer pulls Lottie’s hand into his, like he knows she needs this comfort for whatever she’s about to say, and I know it’s going to tear us all apart.
“I didn’t want to die because of what he did,” she says quietly now, her voice almost breaking. “I wanted to die because of whatyoudidn’t do. I was alone after. I realized no one was coming, not even my own parents.”
She lifts her eyes and for the first time I see her—not the girl who vanished, or the girl we built myths around in our heads—but the girl we left behind.
“Archer came,” she adds. “Heis the one who found me. Who pulled me out of the waves and brought me back to life. He stayed. He never made me feel like a burden.”
A beat passes.
“I had no one. He was going to make me his wife, and I knew I’d rather be dead than ever feel their hands on me again…”
