The question he had avoided answering all this time loomed between them, a gulf he could either swim across or drown in. The familiar blackness swirled around his feet, welcoming and cold enough to numb the pain, but Hadley was the lighthouse beacon that drew him over and over again.
“They beat me within an inch of my life, and I think they would have killed me if my beast hadn’t been so strong. It gave the alpha the idea he could sell me to give the widow funds to care for herself and her children.”
“You were enslaved?”
“I was sold to a goblin who owned a coliseum where he hosted various fights between supernatural creatures. Nothing was taboo. There were no rules. Except one.” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “No matter how many went into the ring, only one came out.”
Hadley peered around the door at him, but he couldn’t bear to see her eyes swollen and red.
“I never lost.” He gritted his jaw. “The goblin kept me for decades, and I never lost. Not once.” He extended his arm. “I kept a tally, but I never counted them. It was enough to see the damage I had done written into my skin.”
More of her body appeared around the door. “You fought for your survival.”
“I killed for my survival.”
“How did you escape?”
“Lethe came for me. She was the only one left who thought I was alive after all that time. She waited until she was grown, until she was strong, and she came for me herself. We teamed up, fought our way through the guards.” A breath shuddered out of him. “She entered the ring, as an opponent. That’s how she got in. That’s how she found me.” He tasted bile. “I could have killed her. My own sister.”
“But you didn’t.”
“The fighting broke me.” He expected she would have heard the rumors. “The beast and the man split into two personalities. I was the beast in the ring, and the man in my cell at night.” He glanced up then. “That’s what caused the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome.”
“How does Natisha figure in?”
“Mom summoned her from Faerie to fix me. She didn’t realize it was Natisha’s pack we had stumbled across. I didn’t either, since they didn’t offer me a healer before selling me. Natisha told me later, after Mom bargained with her. She had known we were kin, in Faerie, and she never breathed a word.” He rubbed his knuckles. “No one would have stood against a healer of her renown. Her word could have saved Lethe and me both, but she let us suffer.”
“I wish you had told me before we struck a deal with her. Facing her again must have been painful for you.”
“There was no other choice. No one else can do what she does.”
“How can a healer be so cruel? That type of abuse ought to be anathema to her.”
“What she did, it didn’t heal me. It allowed me to recall those years through a filter. I didn’t have to feel what I had done. The grief, the rage, the anger. It all went away. For a while. It gave me time to adjust to being back here, to having a normal life.”
“Can I ask what made you dedicate yourself to teaching women self-defense?”
Hadley was too perceptive to let that detail slip, and he was here to tell her everything, to bare his soul as hers had been peeled back for him.
“Gwyllgi males are bred to care for females and those weaker than themselves, and I had a particularly chivalrous streak. Thanks to Lethe and Mom, I looked up to females as role models. It was part of the fabric of my personality.”
“And this goblin twisted it?”
“He pitted me against females of all species, but mostly my own. It guaranteed the bouts lasted longer, and it made them bloodier. My beast didn’t fight back until it had no choice, but it refused to lose. To die. It kept me locked out of its head while it fought, and then it left me to deal with the aftermath.”
Grief-filled screams as he thrashed on the floor of his cell in the throes of his nightmares, hating himself, hating the goblin, hating Faerie and everyone in it, had ruined his voice beyond repair. But no matter how loudly he yelled, no one heard him. No one came to help. No one until Lethe.
“You’ve been atoning. All this time.” She opened the door all the way, and the heartbreak on her face twisted his stomach until he worried he might get sick in her hall. “You’ve been paying for your survival.”
He didn’t dare move. “So have you.”
“I brought this on myself. I made the choices that brought me here.”
“So did I.”
“It’s not the same, Midas, and you know it.”
“I was young and foolish,” he said, “and I made a mistake that cost people their lives.”
Her mouth worked, but she fumbled her argument.
“Lethe believed in me, that I could get better, and I refused to let her down. That’s all that’s kept me going. I wanted my family to finally be happy. I wanted them to think I was okay. I didn’t realize how miserable I had become until I met you.”
“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment.”
“I pretended for so long, I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.” He glanced up then. “You’re the first real thing in my life since I came back. I don’t have to act when I’m with you.”
“I’ve been lying to you since the moment we met. How can I be your one real thing when I’m fake?”
A hesitant smile twitched on the edge of his mouth. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
“You’re breaking out the big guns.” Blushing, she wiped her face dry with the hem of her shirt. “Next thing I know, you’ll be quoting full-on poetry at me.”
“Go sleep.” He shoved off the frame, embarrassed he wanted to be romantic for her. “I’ll be here.”
The
