When she said nothing more, he jerked his gaze to her. “There were a few who knew that he beat me,” he said. “James, Kit, Ewan…Simon. That was why I’ve always been so protective, like tonight.”
She smiled softly. “Protective is not a bad trait in a man with so much power, you know. It is far better than the alternative.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded slowly. “But protective didn’t save me when I was eight and he broke my arm. Protective didn’t save me when he scarred my shoulder with a cigar when I was eleven.”
She winced. She’d seen those little scars on his skin and written them off as the typical bumps and knocks an active man would find for himself. Now they took on a sinister edge, marks that indicated the strength of him in character, not just in body. He had endured.
And Adelaide understood a bit of that, herself.
“Protective didn’t keep him from—” He broke off and bent his head, his shoulders slumping slightly. They began to shake.
“What did he do?” she asked.
He lifted his gaze once more, but he was looking past her now. Through her. Into a time and place she couldn’t see. Something she wasn’t sure shewantedto see. But she pushed anyway, because this was no longer about what she needed. It was about the man across from her.
“He…he murdered my mother.”
Chapter Eleven
Graham watched as horror and heartbreak played across Lydia’s delicate features. And there was empathy, too, a tiny understanding that he wasn’t certain most in his life would feel. This woman had endured something.Thatwas what he was supposed to find out about tonight.
Instead he stood before her, stripped half naked in body and fully naked in soul. And yet saying that horrible thing out loud somehow felt…better.
“Graham,” she whispered at last. He could see how much she wanted to rush to him. To touch him, to hold him. But she didn’t. For his sake. To allow him this moment without trying to crowd it out of him, and he appreciated that, too.
“She was lovely,” he said. “Quiet and kind, gentle to all around her. She used to tousle my hair when she didn’t thinkhewas looking. She called me Gig—I guess that’s what I used to call myself when I was learning to talk. My father hated that. He said she was making me soft and weak. He had to make me strong. He had a very specific way of doing that.”
Lydia swallowed hard. “With his fists.”
He nodded once, pain flooding every part of him. He could stop now. He could see that if he did she wouldn’t push him. She would let him back away from the past he never spoke of to anyone. And yet he couldn’t. Now that the ball had begun to roll down this long and dangerous hill, he couldn’t call it back. He had to let it crash as it would, at the bottom.
Perhaps it was better that way.
“I always knew he hit her. We were a pair, the two of us. She’d throw herself in front of me and eventually I started throwing myself in front of her. Protecting each other. Only there was no protection from that…monsterwho paraded around like he was a godly man. A good man. A decent man who was liked by those who thought they knew him.”
He shook his head and caught a glimpse of his bruised knuckles. Evidence that perhaps he was no better than that wolf who’d masqueraded as a sheep. He’d lost control, like he’d seen his father do so many times.
“What happened?” she pressed, drawing him back out of his musings. But to no better place.
His breathing rasped in the quiet around them. His battered hands shook. “I was seven years old. I’d broken something—a dish, perhaps. An accident. And he lost all control and reason. He came at me across a room like a bull in a paddock and I froze, utterly terrified. He was so fucking big, Lydia. He felt like he was ten feet tall, with a fist the size of a ham. He was screaming, almost incoherent with rage. And she stepped between us, trying to stop him, to calm him.”
He stopped because the room around him was fading, replaced by images of another room, another night. Replaced by the sounds of his mother screaming as his father’s fists rained down on her slight body. Of the screams stopping suddenly and heartbreakingly. Of his father turning on him, his hands bloody just like Graham’s had been earlier in the night.
He could still remember what he’d said next, “You will come to heel, boy. Or you’ll end up buried next to her.”
Lydia gasped and Graham blinked, back in this room. He realized he’d been speaking out loud, reciting what he saw in that state. Lydia’s hand was pressed so hard into her mouth that her knuckles were white, her eyes were wide as saucers. Tears streamed down over her cheeks and her fingers as she stared at him in voiceless and helpless pain.
“She died two days later. He told everyone that it was a sudden illness. And he sent me away to school soon after. Eventually I met Simon and James and the rest, and I hid with them as much as I could. One day I just got too big to push.”
She moved toward him now, her hand outstretched. How he wanted to let her touch him, to let her comfort him as he could see she would. To let her fold herself around him and fill the gaping emptiness that he had carried forever.
Only he knew there was some part of him that couldn’t be filled. And he backed away.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Not after tonight.”
“And what does tonight have to do with your mother’s death at the hands of a monster? Or what he did to you in the years before and after?” she said, her voice tight.
He shook his head as he looked at her. “You know what, Lydia. You saw me. You stopped me. Youknowwhat I was doing.”
