He closed his eyes, too ashamed to look at her when he made his humiliating, cowardly confession.
“God help me, I thought about it. I knelt there on my goddamn knees in that filthy fucking house and contemplated refusing just so he would shoot me and end my miserable existence. I wanted to die. I sawit as a way of finally escaping. Then he laughed at me and tossed his gun on the bed and to my everlasting shame, I panicked, because I’d taken too long. I hadn’t been man enough to just tell him to do it. So I begged him to kill me. I called him every name I’d ever heard my parents call me, trying to piss him off enough to shoot me in his rage. And the son of a bitch laughed, and he kept laughing the entire time he forced his cock down my throat. If I hadn’t been such a fucking coward I would have gotten the escape I had fantasized about every waking minute of every day,” he said bitterly.
“You arenota coward,” Hayley hissed fiercely, tears running openly down her face. “I will not sit here and have you think it or say it.”
Silas attempted a halfhearted smile at her staunch defense but failed miserably.
“After he came all over my face and forced me to lick him clean, my mother and father stumbled into the room, as usual high as kites and drunk off their asses. To this day I don’t know why but for one second I actually had hope that they’d help me. That they’d be pissed that this fucking stranger just sexually assaulted their child. It was a stupid thought because they’d never done a damn thing to help me before. But worse than the fact that they stood there laughing—they actually laughed!—was the sudden spark of excitement and... greed... in my old man’s eyes. I knew then that I had fucked up by not having made the man shoot me and that I’d regret that decision for the rest of my life. Because now my parents had a new source for the money they coveted but refused to get off their lazy asses for. They began prostituting me out to men who didn’t give a shit about the age or sex of the person sucking their cock.”
“I hate them!” Hayley said viciously, tears still running in never-ending streams down her beautiful face. “God, I wishIhad killed them. Theydeservedto die.”
She leaned forward again and wrapped her arms around him, holding him with all her strength as she laid her head on his shoulder, buthe was so numb and frozen and lost in the past that he didn’t feel her reassuring heat or the comfort she offered.
“For two years, I endured the worst. Forced to blow anyone who forked over enough cash. Then one night when I was eleven, my dear old mom and dad came home from a meeting with a prospective ‘client.’ They calmly informed me that I could make them more money by doing more than suck cock and that they had several clients interested in fucking a young boy. To this day I still don’t know what happened. Something inside me just broke loose and it was like I was no longer in my body but outside it, passively observing as, for the first time, I openly defied them. I told them to go to hell.
“My parents lost their shit. They beat me over and over with their hands, fists, belts, a pool cue, whatever they could grab on to, and the detached part of me accepted it, that I was finally going to die, and I embraced it. All I could think was that I would finally be free and at peace.
“But then I seemed to step back into my body and I couldn’t even feel the horrific pain that I’d felt just seconds before. I didn’t feel anything at all except overwhelming, horrible rage. I took them both apart with my bare hands. All the pent-up fury, pain and grief that I lived with ever since I could remember erupted, and I was utterly unstoppable.”
He stared down at his open hands, now so much larger than those that had ravaged two adults, and he could still see the bright red blood staining them. He curled them into fists, refusing to feel remorse for killing two soulless monsters.
“The cops showed up just seconds after I killed them. Found out later an elderly neighbor had watched the whole thing, since my dumb-fuck parents didn’t bother to close the door. He was disabled and couldn’t help me, but he did call the police. I can still see the look on those cops’ faces. They were horrified. Not by what I’d been through, but by what I’d done.”
His jaw clenched as he remembered one of the cops whispering to his partner.He has death in his eyes. Poor kid never had a chance. They’ve turned him into a monster and now it looks like what they ended up with is a savage killing machine.They weren’t wrong. Hewasa monster. There was no fighting genetics.
“They knew it was self-defense, without a doubt. That was obvious. But they’d seen what I was capable of, even at such a young age, so I was deemed a threat. Instead of being sent into the foster system, I was placed in a juvenile detention center to keep me out of trouble and to protect the public. They thought it would curb my ‘violent tendencies.’ They were wrong, but I did learn how to work the system. By the time I turned eighteen, I’d learned everything necessary to create and live the life I wanted.”
He shrugged indifferently, but on the inside his heart was hammering so hard he felt dizzy.
“So you see, Hayley, the man you gave your innocence to is a remorseless killer who gets sick to his stomach if a woman goes near his dick with her mouth. Quite a winner you chose.”
He continued to stare at the wall, not wanting to see the disgust that was surely on Hayley’s face.
She raised her head from his shoulder, and he waited for the inevitable judgment.
“Are you fuckingkiddingme?” she shouted.
Despite his determination not to, he glanced at her, taken aback by her vehemence.
There was no disgust, pity or condemnation on her face. Just pure, unadulterated... rage.Forhim, notathim.
For a moment he couldn’t breathe for the hope that welled unbidden from the depths of the soul he hadn’t thought he’d possessed anymore.
“What waswrongwith those people? What kind of an asshole sees ahorrifically abused child and puts him in juvenile detention instead of getting him the help he deserves? What thefuck, Silas?”
Bewildered by her adamant defense of him and not at all certain what to do with the woman who’d shed tears for him, had held and supported him while he confessed his sins and then damn near screamed her outrage loud enough for the people one floor down to hear, he brushed at her still-damp face with shaking fingers, clueless as to how to respond. This was the very last thing he’d expected.
“Baby, Iwasa danger to society,” he said in a low voice.
She snorted and then fixed him with a ferocious glare. “Danger to society, my ass. Quite frankly the world needs more people like you.” Her tone gentled as she wrapped her arms around him. “Protectors. People who care and who stand for what’s right when no one else will. You savedme, Silas. My own guardian angel.”
Silas held her tight and dragged her down to the bed, an unfamiliar burning at the edges of his eyes. What was he supposed to do with her? In no way did he deserve this precious woman who was so pissed over the cards he’d been dealt as a child. He’d never tell her this, but for the first time, he had no regret for his tormented past, because everything he’d endured, all the ugliness and violence, had led him to her so many years later. And any amount of torment was worth it if the end result was her in his arms right now.
He hugged her even more fiercely, overcome and humbled by her passionate defense. He buried his face in her hair because he didn’t trust himself to look at her without succumbing to the tears that burned like acid in his eyes.
26
Hayley spent a sleepless night nestled tightly in Silas’s arms. His grip around her had been fierce and he never once loosened his hold on her, almost as if he were afraid that he’d awake and she would be gone. It devastated her that he had looked at her with dull eyes, hopelessness etched like stone on his face as he’d bared his most horrifying secrets, just waiting, expecting her to condemn him and walk away.
