“I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He exhaled and rubbed his hand over the back of his head as he walked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. I could see the French doors and the small balcony right beyond them. The moon was full tonight, big and round, and glowing brightly as he stared up at it.
Finally, I licked my lips and said, “What were you dreaming about?” Whatever it was, it had to have been terrifying, suffocating him. It had such a tight grip on him he hadn’t even realized what he was doing to me.
I didn’t think he’d ever answer. But as he leaned his shoulder against the window, staring out at the grounds, I knew he was taking this moment for himself. I could see the wheels in his mind turning, even if he refused to meet my gaze.
I wrapped myself with the blanket and just waited, feeling the sheets move against my bare skin, hearing his soft breathing across the room.
“My father was a bastard,” he finally said. He stood there naked, the shadows of moonlight caressing his skin.
He looked like one of those Greek statues chiseled out of marble. All hard lines and severe planes. He was absolutely beautiful.
A fallen angel. The very devil himself.
“He started beating me when I was five years old.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, my gaze immediately going to his back. I couldn’t quite see the scars because of the thick shadows playing intimately around him, but I knew they were there.
“Hate and pain were my companions as a child.”
I could see his jaw work, feel the anger pour from him.
“I learned from an early age the only person I could trust or rely on was myself. But even I couldn’t stop myself from taking pain. It’s like I absorbed that shit, needed it to survive because it was the only thing I’d ever known in life.”
Hades ran a hand over his jaw, his bicep flexing. But still he didn’t stare at me. He looked out the window as if he were lost in his thoughts.
“It didn’t take long for Zachariah to beat me, too.”
For a moment, I couldn’t compute what he said.
My father used to beat him?
Out of all the things I’d imagined about why they hated each other, that hadn’t been one of them.
“So I covered each one of those scars with my own. Dark slashes, designs, and scenes of how I felt on the inside, now projected on the outside.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. I was shaking my head, even though he wasn’t looking at me. “I don’t believe my father would be a monster.” I denied it because how could that be true?
At my silence, he turned and looked at me, a sardonic smile curving his full lips.
“The man who was your father isn’t the man I knew. He wasn’t soft or gentle. He wasn’t a brother. Zachariah was cold, hard, and with the help of our father, they beat me until the only thing I knew was pain.” He gripped his neck, his biceps flexing. “I let them think I was nothing, that I could be nothing. But I harbored all that anger and hatred deep inside of me until I rose from the ashes.”
He faced me then, holding out his arms, the muscles flexing, all that unrestrained masculine power on display.
“You want to know the type of man your father and grandfather were? Let me tell you a story, Bunny.”
Chapter26
Hades
The fist came at me so hard and suddenly that my entire body was thrown back. I stumbled to stay upright, but a wave washed through my head, dizziness clouding everything around me.
I struggled to right myself as I crashed into the wall.
I gripped the brick, my fingers raw, bloody, and the skin torn. But I didn’t cry. At fifteen years old, I was bigger than all the men my father put me up against. All I did was eat, sleep, and train.
My tutoring was done by teachers of my father’s choosing. He wouldn’t even allow me to attend a normal school, not like Zachariah.
No, he’d be too ashamed to allow that shit, wanting to use me as a weapon to make him more money.