“Okay. Then good luck to you, Sia.”
Before he was tempted to say any of the lame things that were leaping to his tongue, he wheeled around and stalked out of the room without another word.
He got all the way to his quarters and had stormed inside the room when Sia’s voice sounded in the open doorway.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say to me?”
He stood in the center of the room, his glower trained on her as he turned to face her. “What do you expect me to say?”
Her answering laugh was brittle. “You’re right. This is exactly what I should expect. I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with my presence, Trygg.” She turned around, then seemed to reconsider almost as swiftly. “No. You know what? I’m not sorry I’m bothering you. I’m sorry that you weren’t like this before.”
“Before what, Sia?”
“Before I threw myself at you like a fool the other night. If you’d been this cold and detached all along, none of it would have happened.”
He wasn’t so certain of that, but he didn’t point it out. “Fortunately, once you’re gone we won’t have even more to regret.”
She flinched as if he’d just struck her. “What a cruel thing to say.”
“Is it?” He honestly didn’t know. A remorseful sigh gusted out of him. “I’m not good at this, Sia. I don’t know what things to say that won’t hurt you. All I really know how to do is to hunt, to kill. That’s who I am.”
“No. That’s what you were forced to be as a child.” She stepped farther inside the room. “Who you are now is up to you. The same way I now need to decide who I am going to be.”
“You do know, Sia. That bracelet tells me you’ve already made your choice.”
She touched the crystal orb, then glanced up at him with a plea in her eyes. “Then help me change my mind, Trygg.”
He stepped back, possibly the first time he’d ever retreated from anything in his life. “Don’t ask me to. I don’t have anything to offer you. Not while Santino is alive.”
She remained silent for a long moment, emotion playing over her lovely face. When she finally spoke, there was a quiet resignation to her voice. “Then offer me the truth before I go. Why is it so important to you that Roberto Santino is stopped?”
“You know why. I’ve told you, I’ve pledged my arm to the Order and this is a mission I intend to see through to the end.”
But Sia was too smart to let it go at that. She listened in silence, but her gaze was anything but satisfied with his rote answer. “Why are you pursuing Santino so single-mindedly, Trygg? Is it to put a stop to the pain he’s causing the Breed population with his dealing in Red Dragon, or is it because of how you described the way he’s using young boys?”
“Isn’t either one of those reasons enough for anyone to want the asshole dead?”
“Yes, it is,” she replied quietly. “But I’m asking about you.” She took another step toward him. “Can’t you at least let me in long enough to tell me what happened to you? Trygg, did Roberto Santino—”
“No. It wasn’t him.” His answer was sharp and quick, like the slice of a blade. Trygg rubbed the scar that ran the length of his cheek. He had no intention of taking this jaunt down memory lane, least of all with Sia.
But she was pushing him to give her his truth. Pushing him like she had the other night in her apartment. She had been pushing him out of the safety of his darkness and into her light all along.
“I was fourteen when my Hunter’s collar came off,” he told her, each word a whip as it left his mouth. “The lab where Dragos kept us was suddenly open, the locks undone. My cage and all the other boys’ were sprung open. We scattered. We all just…ran. I wandered New England for several months. It was snowing, bitter cold, when a human woman saw me walking barefoot on the side of the highway in Connecticut and pulled over to pick me up. Her name was Vicky. She had yellow hair and a smile that seemed to take up half her face. She offered me shelter and a bed. Her bed. But I didn’t know that when I got into her car.”
Sia winced as he spoke, tenderness in her eyes.
“She lived in a rundown apartment building in one of the bigger cities. There were always men coming and going, often dozens in a day. Sometimes she sold them drugs. Other times she sold them her body. After a while, she started selling mine. She pimped me out to women, men, multiples. Anyone who would pay.”
Sia made a sickened, strangled noise. “You were just a child.”
“At fourteen I was hardly a child,” he corrected tonelessly. “But I knew nothing about sex or addiction. I didn’t know enough about people to realize she was using me.”
“She did more than use you, Trygg. What she did was unconscionable.”
He shrugged, in no need of sympathy. He knew his gaze was sharp and cutting as he held hers now, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t allow himself to care what Sia thought of him or he might finally break like he never had before.
“I traded one form of enslavement for another. Dragos kept me prisoner with a UV collar. Vicky chained me with kind words, at least at first. I let her trade me because I thought she cared about me, even loved me. When I finally saw through her lies, I told her I was leaving. To make sure she understood I was serious, I shaved my head to get rid of the long black hair she insisted I keep. She was livid. She came at my face with a kitchen knife.”
