Actually winked.
My heart almost stopped.
And I couldn’t stop staring at him.
In case he did it again…
“Aleks,” Vaughn said softly, and I forced myself to focus on his entire face rather than one rogue eye.
“You have a brother?” I asked, hoping to stall.
“I do,” was all he said, then he was grazing my cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You don’t remember what happened back there, but you know what caused it, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure what “it” was, but I did know what the cause was. Iwanted to deny it, but I couldn’t make myself tell the lie. Even if it hadn’t been against the rules, I didn’t want to lie to him.
I may not have trusted him, but God help me, I didn’t want to lie to him… I couldn’t.
And just like with everything else when it came to Vaughn, that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Chapter 7
Vaughn
I was relievedwhen he started talking, because I hadn’t expected him to. I was still tense about the blackout he’d had while right in front of me. It’d been almost identical to the one he’d had the day before when I’d tried to remove the zip-ties from his hands.
“My English, it was okay when they took me, but not great, and I often spoke to the people who took me in Portuguese. They’d get angry and tell me to speak English, but I was just too scared.”
Aleks began to shake violently and his breathing once again started to tick up. He was holding my hand with both of his and was squeezing so hard he was actually hurting me.
But I didn’t even think of asking him to loosen his fingers… If there was a way I could have takenallhis pain and felt it for myself, or better yet,takenit fromhim, I would have in a heartbeat.
“The first man who bought me… he… he pretended to be my friend and I was able to talk to him in English. He said things that I eventually started to believe. He just kept telling me the same things over and over,” Aleks said with a shake of his head.
“Like what?” I interjected as quietly as I could in the hopes my voice wouldn’t ratchet up his panic.
“That Mama and Papa didn’t want me back because I’d beenbad. That Dante would come if I was good.” Tears started to slip down Aleks’s face, but I doubted he noticed. “He never came, no matter how good I was. I… I believed the man at first… that Dante knew where I was but refused to come get me.” Aleks lifted his shoulders to wipe at his face, since he didn’t seem to want to let go of my hand. He’d managed to calm down a bit.
“Your brother wouldn’t have let anything or anyone stop him from coming to find you,” I said. “You know that, right?”
Aleks nodded. “I believed he would come for me for a really long time but after a while it got too hard. It made it hard to always be good…”
“What do you mean?”
Aleks hesitated and then wiped at his face again. He tried to pull his hands free, but I gently held on to one and intertwined our fingers and began rubbing the pad of my thumb over his skin.
“When the man would do things to me that really hurt or that I knew were wrong, I’d tell him Dante was going to punish him. I… I actually started dreaming of Dante showing up just as the man was about to hurt me again and stopping it, and when he didn’t…”
I used my free hand to wipe at his face.
“He would have if he could have, Aleks.”
Aleks nodded. Tears kept slipping down his face. I couldn’t help but lean across the console as I pulled him against me. I brushed my lips over his damp cheek, the shell of his ear, and his forehead and just whispered soft words to him, mostly about how I would have stopped the man from hurting him and that he was safe now.
But even as I said the words, bile crawled up the back of my throat. I’d had the chance to save Aleks so he wouldn’t be hurt anymore and I hadn’t done it… not quickly enough, anyway. And he most certainly wasn’t safe now.
Aleks held onto me for a while and when he began speaking to me again, he did it against my chest, which was just fine with me.
“The man didn’t like that my English wasn’t better, so he brought in a woman to teach me how to read and write it. But no other subjects. I didn’t understand why.”
