AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Anyway.” She let out a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the world. “The official reason they put down in my file for taking me away was severe neglect. Apparently, my mom left me home by myself when she went out of town with her boyfriend. Five days after she left, a neighbor heard me moving around in the apartment and called the police.”
Jesus Christ. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” It seemed like such a deeply inadequate thing to say, but he had no idea what would be better.
Craning her neck, she looked up into his eyes, her own filled with worry. “If you want me to stop, I will.”
Mason cupped her face with one hand, brushing his thumb along her cheekbone. “You’re not going to frighten me away. I’m here to listen to anything you want to tell me. Anything.”
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears as she settled her cheek back against his thigh. “The first foster home they put me in was...” She trailed off, taking several seconds to gather her thoughts before continuing. “It was fucking horrible.” Gasping, she turned again, panic in her eyes. “I’m sorry for swearing, Master.”
He had absolutely no idea why, but her fear in that moment broke his fucking heart. “It’s okay.” Hauling her onto his lap, he tucked her head up under his chin. “For the rest of this conversation, you can say whatever the fuck you want.”
Addison snuggled into his chest, fiddling with one of the buttons on his shirt for a bit before she kept going. “My first foster parents were Mr. and Mrs. Dabrowski, in a part of Santa Fe I’d never been to. I remember I was so fucking scared in the car on the way there. They explained what was happening to me, I’m sure, but I was fucking six. I didn’t understand.”
Mason kissed her hair, wishing he could somehow go back in time and protect her. So many kids went through this around the world, every goddamn day...
He fucking hated humanity sometimes.
“When we got there, I was actually kind of excited. There were five other foster kids there, with one room for the girls and one for the boys. I used to be alone all the time. Now there were lots of other kids around and lots of toys.” For a second, she actually smiled. “They even had bunk beds. I’d seen them on TV, but never in real life. What kid doesn’t love bunk beds, right?”
“Did you get top bunk?”
“No, I didn’t have seniority,” she said, continuing to twist his button in between her fingers. “It was still fucking cool.”
Mason understood how six-year-old Addison felt on a visceral level. He’d begged his parents to give him a bunk bed for Christmas the year he turned eight. He’d recently attended a sleepover with a friend who had one, and he still remembered so clearly the thrill of climbing up to the top bunk and feeling like he was on top of the world.
That Christmas wasn’t the first one to disappoint him.
It was absolutely the last one he allowed to break his heart.
“So at first, I think maybe everything is going to get better, right?” Disdain filled her voice, as if she resented her former self for believing that. “I missed my mom, cause as awful as I now know she was, she was the only thing I knew. Even so, this place seemed like paradise compared to what I was used to.”
“Seemed,” Mason repeated.
“Yeah, seemed.” She sighed. “I always took care of myself, you know? My mom left me home alone for hours at a time on the best days. And this wasn’t the first time she abandoned me for several days in a row. I knew how to make myself a bowl of cereal, how to put a frozen dinner in the microwave—that sort of thing. It was either that or go hungry. Now I was in this place that had so much fucking food. I’d never seen that much food outside of a store. God, I must’ve looked like those kids in Willy Wonka when they first see the room made out of candy.”
He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “Your foster parents didn’t want you getting food for yourself?”
“Mrs. Dabrowski completely lost her shit when she found me eating cereal without permission.” A hard shudder passed through her little body, and he held her even closer. “Fuck, I still can’t eat Cheerios. It’s been over thirty years, but even thinking about it makes my heart beat out of my fucking chest.”
Burying her face in his shirt, she took several deep breaths, and he held her as she trembled.
“My mom never screamed at me,” she said after a while, voice choked with tears. “Never punished me. She just ignored me most of the time. When Mrs. Dabrowski grabbed me and screamed all those awful things in my face and shook me...God, I was so terrified. I had no fucking clue what was happening.”
It was Mason’s turn to breathe deeply—to attempt to slow his heartrate. Nothing in this world disgusted and infuriated him more than people who abused children. The fact that child abusers existed at all was the main reason he stopped believing in God more than a decade ago. What the fuck kind of deity would let that happen to the most innocent?
“Then she put me in the hole.”
Every muscle in Mason’s body went rigid. “What?” Horror filled the word. “Do you mean an actual hole?” His imagination ran wild with images of a tiny, blond child trapped at the bottom of a deep, dark pit.
“I think they called it that because of prisons,” she said nervously, her eyes shifting up toward his face. “Like what they call solitary confinement?”
That calmed him down, but only by the absolute tiniest of margins. Dread filled his chest, making him feel almost sick. “I get the feeling this wasn’t simply a time out.”
She started to tremble again, so he cradled her against him with gentle arms, waiting patiently for her to be ready. “It was a little closet down in the basement,” she whispered. “With a lock on the outside and no lights. When the door was shut, you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
He’d put a blindfold on this woman. A fucking blindfold. If he’d known, if he had even a tiny little clue...
