“When it was only me enduring my father’s harsh version of training, I could take the punishment. I could take being beaten. I could take being verbally abused, starved, and physically worn out. However, when Khane turned five, and my father started in on him, everything changed. Seeing my little brother suffer, tore me apart more than anything my father could have ever done to me, and he knew it. He hated Khane because he was born out of an affair he’d had with his maid.”
That explained why their features were like night and day. And Arjen was right. This was the kind of information I would never find, no matter how much digging was done.
“My father was the one that took Khane’s eye.”
Shit!
“When I was fifteen, and he was thirteen, we had let a man we had captured for an execution, escape. One of my father’s men ended up getting killed in the recapture. As punishment for what we had allowed to happen, my father vowed to take something from us, since we had allowed a life to be taken on our watch. He stood us in front of the audience that was there to watch the man’s execution and asked for a volunteer from Khane and me. Of course, I volunteered, but my father’s hate had already made the decision.”
I wasn’t aware how tense I had become until Arjen brushed a tender caress along the side of my face.
“He made Khane pick an eye. I jumped in front of Khane to try to help, but our father promised me a month in what he called, the vault, for interfering. He had handed out countless harsh punishments to us throughout the years: brutal beatings, broken bones, burns, and extended periods in a soundless black hole in the ground, he called the vault. To us, of all the punishments, nothing was worse than being locked in that vault. It messed with your mind, and it took weeks, sometimes months, for you to retrain your mind once you came out of there.”
I strengthened the hold I had around his body, sensing through his tension that he had suffered a great deal at his father’s hands.
“I watched my brother, just a kid, begging to keep his eye, but that evil devil stabbed Khane in the eye in front of that audience. I made Khane a promise that day, while I placed my hand over his and watched blood running through our fingers, that I would find a way to punish our father. He wouldn’t even let Khane see a doctor afterward, so we never knew if his eye could have been saved.”
Damn!
All I had was an uncaring uncle to deal with, and Arjen and Khane were being trained to kill by the devil himself.
“I was set to take my punishment for intervening that day on my brother’s behalf. Instead of the vault, my father upped the ante. He sat Khane and me across the table from him once a month, with me sitting directly in front of him so I could stare into his devilish face. He would put a bullet in his revolver and give it a spin before he would slide it across the table to us. He made Khane place it to my head and pull the trigger. I was sure I would die every time. Every time he slid that gun across the table, he would look to Khane and tell him, “You’re the reason your brother is receiving this punishment. If he dies, it’s your fault, and his blood will be on your hands.” Like he hadn’t taken enough, he was still punishing Khane. He knew, that in punishing my brother it would hurt me worse.”
This shit had me acknowledging a part of my husband that he had kept hidden so deep, I wasn’t sure he had ever truly confronted it. His reputation was one of the deadliest I’d heard about, but tapping into the source of what built it, turned those whispers into something real.
“I think our father’s goal was to find a way to make us hate each other, but it never happened. Twelve months a year, over seven years, eighty-seven trigger pulls at my head. He promised that he wasn’t going to stop until the day the gun went off. Until this day, I don’t know how I went that long without dying. Let’s just say, despite how we were brought up, my brother and I know the bible from Genesis to Revelation, and I strongly believe in divine intervention.”
“I’m so sorry, Arjen. Your life was a fucking nightmare, written and directed by your evil ass father.”
I shook my head, attempting to shake off the image of those two young boys being trained and tortured from child to adulthood. He and Khane were put through hell on earth. No wonder their reputations were the scary shit people whispered about.
He had gone quiet, and the tension in his face let me know he was sorting through his thoughts. Despite his upbringing, Arjen could pass for normal, but laying in his tight embrace allowed me to feel the depth of the pain etched in his soul, and I knew that he was anything but normal. I could sense the underlying darkness within him that he worked hard to keep hidden.
However, his eyes had always revealed all I needed to know. The years of hell at his father’s hands, the nightmares bestowed on him, and the chaos he was capable of unleashing was written within the depths of his gaze. Normal, unaware people may not have seen it, but I knew what hell looked like, because I’m sure it sat within the depth of my gaze too.
“My father had designed much of his training to give us the best skills we’d need for survival in the job that he had chosen for us. He turned us into the most vicious kind of animals, and he siphoned the fear right out of us. The average life span of a security expert in the syndicate is ten years, fifteen for the lucky ones, and those that hit twenty or more, it was a blessing. Khane and I have been going strong for twenty-three and twenty-five years.
“While most boys were starting their training at eighteen, we had already been taking out targets for our father and the syndicate. My vow to my brother that I would find a way to punish our father became our motivation. After Khane lost his eye, we trained harder and soaked up every bit of knowledge offered to us. My father never saw us coming, because he was too busy showing off the deadly soldiers he’d taught us to be. We didn’t kill him. We set it up so that he was caught in Russia with cocaine and a bloody knife that had killed the son of a Russian mob boss. He is rotting away for the rest of his life in Petak Island Prison in White Lake, Russia.”
I lifted a brow. “I’ve heard about Petak and I’ve even watched a documentary on it. It’s like the Russian version of Alcatraz and depending on who you ask, a step up from hell.”
Arjen’s smile was laced with pride. “He’s been there for seven years now. We have recordings of some of his beatings, and my birthday gift to Khane one year, was a recording of him losing his left eye.”
He tucked me into his embrace, and I held on tight, returning the caress. I was learning my husband well enough to know that he was done talking. After a long while of us locked in a tight hug, he placed his lips to my forehead.
“Your turn, wife. I’m dying to know what foundation you were built from.”
His words made me go still. Was I ready to share the damaged pages of my chaotic life-script with Arjen?