Kain turned his head to look at her in the soft light from the bedside lamps. Her eyes were open, but she seemed focused on the hand she kept stroking across his chest and stomach through his T-shirt.
He’d never really talked about her, or about what happened, with anyone besides Thomren. His memory of her was painful and bitter to both him and his brother, and his father could not take the mention of her. His father had once come across an old necklace of hers several years after her death, and had ripped apart several rooms in a fit of rage just from the sight of it.
But not a day went by that Kain didn’t think about her.
“She was beautiful. I remember her long black hair and caramel eyes. And she had very soft hands.
“She was in her mid-twenties when my father won her at the auction, and already married to a human man. Her daughter was about a year old. When I was born, she’d been with my father for four years, and not a day went by that she didn’t plead with him to let her return to her old life.
“She missed her husband and daughter desperately. My father thought that having me would help her accept a life by his side, but it didn’t. She had no interest in me, or my brother when he came along three years later. I remember her referring to us as devil spawn and the product of rape when my father asked her to take care of us.
“Sometimes, when we were very little, she would hold us. She’d cry while she did, but I still remember the feeling of her arms around me. I used to wish I was bigger so I could hold and soothe her instead.”
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was telling her this, but the words flowed without effort from the place he’d locked away the memories of his mother. The soft sensation of the girl in his arms and her soothing smell seemed to encourage those memories to rush to the surface, eager to be shared with someone who might understand how his mother had felt.
“How old were you when she died?” Selma asked. She moved closer to his body as if she knew how her nearness soothed him.
“I was nine.” He stroked her hair gently, pausing for a moment when the bitter pain of the time around his mother’s suicide resurfaced. “She’d been growing more and more desolate. Refused to have anything to do with my brother or I, threatened us while my father was in the room. Told us she would kill us in a heartbeat if it meant getting her real child back.
“I don’t know if she meant it, or if it was an attempt at making my father set her free, but he couldn’t ignore the threat. He had finally had enough of her refusal to accept that she was his mate, not the wife of her human husband, and he did the only thing he could think of to break through her resistance.
“He kept her in the ring’s thrall for weeks, only giving her breaks so she could eat and sleep. My brother and I… we heard her scream day and night while he mated her, and cry inconsolably the few hours he didn’t. We begged him to stop, because the sound of it… all of it… it was…
“But he said he couldn’t, that she was sick and needed help—that he had failed in his duty as her mate to make her content in her life with him, and that he had to rectify his mistakes to save her.
“So he took her until the ring finally broke her. I think something in her mind eventually snapped. She became docile, calm… and he thought she was saved. That she’d just need a little time to recover before she’d become the mate and mother she was supposed to be.
“The first day my father left her side to attend to his business, she slit her wrists and bled out before he returned to find her.”
“I’m so sorry,” Selma whispered into his shoulder. She pressed her lips against the fabric of his shirt, constricting her arm around his chest and easing the ache there. “For how you lost her, but also for the way you grew up. You should have been cared for by the woman who brought you into this world, despite the circumstances.”
He shrugged, fighting the pull of the chasm in his gut at the too-vibrant memory. “She couldn’t handle losing her first child, nor her husband. It might have been different, had she not had either when she was caught.”
“Did you ever meet her? Her older daughter?”
“My father killed them both the day after she died. He was wild with sorrow and fury and blamed them for taking her away. I never met either of them.”
But he’d thought about her—his human half-sister. He’d even wondered if they’d had anything at all in common, despite being of different races.
“Kain.”
The pity in her voice cut through his memories, and he looked down at her to see it reflected in her eyes as well.
“Maybe now you see why I can’t do to you what my instincts are screaming at me to do.” He searched her eyes for the dawning realization of what horrors he was saving her from, but all he saw there were empathy and sorrow.
Selma moved her hand from his chest to his cheek, cupping it gently. “I’m not like her. And you are not like your father.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but she pressed her lips over his before he could find the words.
Softly and gently she kissed him, and the tenderness of it made heat rush throughout his body, soothing the old pain in its wake.
“Let me prove it to you,” Selma mumbled without lifting her head from the kiss. “Give me this one night to prove to you that you are so much more than your past and your instincts.” Another kiss, so soft he could have imagined it. “Let me repay you just a little of everything you’ve done for me.”
27
Kain
He should have said no—should have refused her offer, because he knew he’d never get enough if he allowed himself another taste. But it wasn’t instinct that made him pull her up so she lay on his chest, nor his body’s desperate need that slowly answered her kiss.
