"No, I was normal once, if that's what you mean. But that boy, he couldn't survive in this world. Something broke in him, and he came to hold everything together. His rage is always there, simmering underneath until it needs an outlet, and then I can be me again when it's sated." He sounded detached, as if he were talking about another person entirely, and a shiver of fear worked its way through me. "Carter should be broken too. Father didn't spare him the details either, but maybe that's why Carter is the golden boy… He didn't break where I did. No, he embraced the life, doing everything asked of him, while I rebelled, wanting out until it was made clear that would never happen."
The information was too much yet not enough, so I pushed my luck further, finally getting the answers I'd wanted for so long. "Wait, your mom and his parents were killed in front of both of you? By your dad?" If it were true, I was on a merry-go-round of insanity with no way off.
But he still acted like he wasn't hearing me. "Mother died in that room," he whispered.
"She died in that room? The room? Dirk, seriously, what the fuck? I thought your mom died in an accident?!" There was something very, very wrong with this man, with this entire family. Not that I didn't already know that, but to take me in there after everything...
"Shhh, darling, you're going to rile him up again, and I'm tired. He might be satisfied if I let a few of the guards tear up my holes, but I think we'd both rather sleep."
His threat shut me up, but I couldn't stop thinking about children watching their parents get killed. Or why one would grow up to torment women in the same room after something so horrendous. And then the tears came—for myself because I was resigned to the knowledge that I was never getting out of this family alive, for Dirk and Milo never being able to live their own lives, and most of all, for lost little boys that had become monsters to survive. The unfairness of all of it was too much to handle.
Through my torrent of tears, Dirk calmly stroked my hair, never complaining once about the mess I made on his chest as I cried myself to sleep.
That was the one time I truly felt we'd ever shared anything real.