Chapter twenty-four
Lyla
Somethingwasdifferent.
Lyla didn’t know what it was, or why she even felt something was changed. But the moment she woke up and started to leave the bed, iron bands wrapped around her middle tightened, holding her close.
“Dainn?” Her voice was soft, raspy from the sleep and his arms flexed against her stomach. She put her hands on them, scoring the muscular forearm with her nails, gently soothing whatever it was that was bothering him.
“I was nine the first time they came for me.”
Her breath hitched. His past. He was thinking about his past, sharing it with her. Finally.
She began to turn but he held her in place, her back to his chest, his words moving over her head.
“By then,” he continued quietly, “I already knew I wasn’t like the other boys in the home. The Morning Star Home had so many of them, and I was like none of them.”
The words penetrated her sleepy mind, clearing the fog. She looked at the open window, early morning light peeking from under the drapes, still leaving the room majorly in the darkness, right where he found comfort.
“What were you like?” she asked, her voice equally as low so as to not break the moment.
“Off.” One word, a long pause. “I was off. I didn’t feel what they felt, I didn’t see things as they saw them, I didn’t perceive the world as others did. My worldview even at a young age was skewed. I was selfish and easily angered, and if someone provoked me, I didn’t feel any remorse in making them pay.”
God, the way he spoke about himself as a child sent a tremor through her body. She tried to remember what she’d been like at that age—scared, lost, confused. She used to cry all the time, so much that the handlers had stopped punishing her for it because it only made her cry more. She’d felt too much, and it was such a contrast to who he had been.
Who he still was.
They were just both better at hiding it from the world.
She waited in silence, letting him continue at his own pace, not pushing him beyond whatever he was comfortable sharing.
“They came for me, when I was nine,” he picked up from the previous thought. “Except they didn’t know the kind of child I was. My eyes were always like this, and they called me ‘demon child’, thinking it would hurt me. I just smiled.”
Damn. That made her hands falter for a second before they resumed stroking his forearms.
“I smiled as I ripped them away,” he went on. Raising his hands slightly so see could see the burn scars on the back. “I didn’t know how to play with fire back then and got these.”
She traced the scars, not too prominent but present enough, and he turned his wrist, capturing her fingers, interlinking theirs together. “What happened then?”
He gave her hands a possessive squeeze before letting her hands go free, letting her stroke and soothe him again.
“I became a demon child in the true sense of the word,” he proceeded, his words falling on her head. “I killed anyone who got near me without any remorse. The adults didn’t know how to handle me. So, they brought in someone who wasn’t like them.”
Her breathing got heavier as she waited him out.
“A girl, a year younger than I was.”
Fuck. Monsters. Every fucking one of them.
Her fingers tightened on his forearms but she remained silent, letting the rage infuse her body. She had lived enough in this world to know where this was going.
“She was a small thing, so helpless,” he recalled. “I couldn’t kill her. So they began using her as leverage to make me... do things.”
She squeezed his arms, her body shaking, imagining the powerful boy he had been even as a child being controlled by those monsters, doing things he didn’t want to because he didn’t want to kill a helpless girl.
“What happened then?” Her voice broke, the tremor in her body audible in her tone.
“They used me for two years,” he told her matter-of-factly, and she closed her eyes. Not him. Not him too. Yet, knowing he’d been through some of the same thing she had made her feel more seen, more connected to him. And knowing that, seeing how powerful he had become, it gave her hope for herself, that maybe she could break the shackles of her past and find power for herself too.