What secrets was Gabriel hiding? What had gone on all those years ago? And why the hell did he get the feeling that behind the mask Sterling wore, he was actuallyterrified?
“I’m going to go see how Sterling wants to organize our shower time,” Adrian said. “I’m glad that you found someone who loves you that much,Gabriel.”
A tear slid down Gabriel’s cheek. He brushed it away with the back of his hand and nodded. “Yeah,metoo.”
It pained Adrian to leave Gabriel like this, but Sterling was waiting, and if Sterling knew anything about what was going on, Adrian wanted to know. He crossed the kitchen floor and looked over his shoulder to make sure Gabriel was okay, only to find that Gabriel had already moved on. He poked at the sausages with the end of his spatula, a small smile spread across his face that lifted the apples of hischeeks.
Love.
Adrian’s stomach twisted intoaknot.
His little brother was in love with a man who tripped Sterling’s warning bells. Adrian didn’t know what to think of it—not without a little more information on who Gabriel was seeing, and why Sterling had gone sosilent.
“See you soon, Gabriel,” Adrian said as he slipped through the door and started on his way to thebathroom.
“See you soon,” Gabriel parroted back. His voice barely reached Adrian as he headed down the hall for thebathroom.
He needed to find out what Sterling knew, and he needed to find itoutnow.
22
Sterling
Water ran.It gushed from the faucet, colliding with the bottom of the shower stall to circle the drain. Sterling watched the mist rise and dipped his fingers beneath the stream it sprang from to test the temperature. It was warming, but it wasn’t anywhere near warmenoughyet.
Above the noise of running water, the door clicked open, then closed. There were no footsteps. Adrian occupied a spot by the door, and as Sterling turned at the hip to look at him, he crossed his arms over his chest and stood as steadfast and defiant as he had on the first day he’d come to Sterling’spenthouse.
“Who thehellis Garrison Baylor?” Adriandemanded.
The question didn’t come as a surprise, but Sterling was no better equipped to answer it than he had been in the kitchen, reeling from the news. He turned around to face the water again, unwilling to watch the look on Adrian’s face when he revealed thetruth.
“Garrison Baylor is a criminal.” Sterling didn’t try to pad the truth. He ran his fingers beneath the stream again, then turned on the shower and stood. As water pattered onto the acrylic floor, Sterling undid his belt. “His name has been all over the news thislastyear.”
“Acriminal?” Adrian’s footsteps approached, and he set a hand on Sterling’s back. “What kind of criminal? Are we talking the robbing banks kind? Mafia kingpin? Serial killer? ‘Criminal’ leaves a lot to the imagination. You’re going to need to be morespecific.”
“No.” Sterling didn’t want to say, but he knew there was no point in hiding the truth. Adrian would either hear it from him, or he would search Baylor’s name on the internet and learn the truth from a third-party source. Sterling didn’t want that. “Garrison Baylor owned and operated an underground omega brothel. He seduced and abducted dozens of young men—some of them underage—and brought them to workforhim.”
Adrian’s hand parted from Sterling’s back. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of runningwater.
“Gabriel…” Adrian sounded at a loss for words. When he spoke, his voice was hollow. “Gabriel was always on his phone, right before he left us. He was always smiling and laughing to himself like… like he was talking to someone he liked. I just thought he had a crush onsomeone,but…”
“I’m sorry.” There was only one time in Sterling’s life when he recalled feeling as sick as he did in that moment, but at least that time he’d had closure. There was finality in the way his uncle had stood up from the couch and brushed off the back of his thighs, and compassion in the face of his aunt as she pitied him from where she sat, a three-year-old Clarissa glued to her chest as cartoons played on the television. Even at fifteen, Sterling understood that there was nothing he could have done—that the accident had been through no fault of his own, and couldn’t have been prevented inanyway.
Butthis?
To know that the young man in his kitchen had been taken and twisted until he believed that he was in love with a monster? To know that his abuse had started at such a young age, and that no one had knownbetter?
Sterling couldn’t shake the sickness rising in his throat, and he couldn’t imagine how the same disgust and regret must be hittingAdrian.
“He was sixteen when he left,” Adrian admitted hoarsely. “Just sixteen. He’d barely even had hisfirstheat.”
“He wasn’t the only one with a story like that.” Sterling turned. In his partial state of undress, he had to have looked ridiculous. Pants sagging, shirt allowed to billow without a belt to hold it in place, he knew that he wasn’t the well-composed figure of authority and stability that Adrian needed right now, but if he didn’t wash this off his skin, if he didn’t try to cleanse the ache in his heart, he didn’t know what he’d do. “There were others. A year and a half ago, there was a bust, and the whole place wasshutdown.”
“So why didn’t Gabriel come home?” Adrian demanded. Tears beaded in his eyes, and the bright bathroom lights made them shine. He clenched his fists and squared his shoulders, and for a moment, Sterling thought that Adrian might hit him. “If the place was shut down over a year ago, if the police stormed it, if the others were freed, then why didn’t Gabriel come home? Why wasn’t he returnedtous?”
“I’m not the police. Idon’tknow.”
“This is bullshit!” The rage in Adrian’s voice was fractured by anguish. “This is goddamn bullshit,Sterling!”
