“In order to survive, I played along. I had to rewire my mind todetachfrom that horror, you know? It was hard.” His eyes gleamed with tears, pain, and anger. “No child should have to endure that. I lost a part of my childhood to evil people.”
“What did he make you do with the bodies afterward?” I asked.
“Hawthorne had connections to several funeral homeswith cremation services. But sometimes he displayed them with bouquets of black roses.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I sat there, listening to him unload all the pain trapped inside him.
He told me about his friends, Godfrey, Hudson, and Timber, who had escaped with him. He’d used a map etched on his forearm to help him navigate a dangerous maze. Did Stori know this about her brother?
How could society let this happen? How could people kill one another to sell organs to the highest bidder? Did they have a conscience? How could someone run a business like this? Bitterness coated my throat.
The hopeful world I believed in took on new shades and textures today. The multiple grays and their sharp edges formed a strange composition in my vision. I’d been living a life that was half full, like a picture that was half drawn with the other half blurred with messy scribbles that could form into anything, even a monster. My rainbow-colored glasses consisted of owning a flower shop and finding a man who valued me as much as I valued him. Basically, I was cocooned in a safe world, not understanding or seeing the surrounding darkness.
But now I was aware, and something in me wanted to protect Kain. A desire to destroy people like Victor Hawthorne and his followers bloomed in me—like a compulsion from some powerful place deep within. How could I stand by and do nothing? My children would need to live in this world, and if I looked the other way, they would have to endure what I ignored.
I didn’t want to be that kind of person.
Kain probably wondered about the silence. “Are you okay?”
“Just trying to make sense of everything.” I sighed, feeling the heaviness around me.
How did he survive such horrors? The man staring at me with concern had somehow transformed his misfortune into indescribable strength, wisdom, and success.
“Can I see your tattoos?” I wanted to see how Hawthorne had branded him. I wanted to see the artwork he’d asked his acquaintance, Razor, to etch on him.
“It’s just art covering my body,” he replied, probably fearing something in his tattoos would trigger another panic from me.
“No, it’s not.” I cupped his face. “It’s more than that. It’s your history—your pain, your hope, your dreams, and all your secrets. I want to know them all.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kain
I hadn’t planned on sharing everything with Eva tonight. But I couldn’t resist her curiosity or the tenderness she showed me. Sharing my dark past had lifted so much weight off me. I had no idea how heavy my past was until now, when I could breathe easier.
Did my friends feel the weight too? We’d been carrying it for so long that we’d gotten used to it. Eva eased my burden without knowing it.
She unbuttoned my white shirt, taking her time before shoving it off me. Her facial features shifted when she saw a tattoo that mesmerized her. No woman had studied me so carefully. To them, tattoos were just lines on a body. But Eva was reading the tattoos as if she were reading a book about me.
She studied my forearm and examined the art with gentle fingertips, touching here and there. “The lines remind me of fantasy maps.”
“They are maps,” I said, loving that she saw them through the complex composition. “I used them to escape confinement. Hawthorne hid traps in various corridors in the complex. If you took the wrong turn, you could die. He made sure no one dared to go where they shouldn’t. It was his way of maintaining control, bombarding us with fear.”
She lifted my arms, dropping kisses onto both of them, as well as my shoulders. Her soft lips were like healing ointment to my wounds. Every touch sank through my skin, traveling to the darkest crevices and healing me. She had no idea how much her kind gesture soothed me. When her gaze moved across to my pecs and abdomen, her eyes blazed with interest. She traced comic book characters like Batman and Superman—heroes who had given me hope when I was a kid.
“Is this you and your mother?” Her eyes warmed as she tapped a small silhouette of a woman holding her son’s hand at a playground.
“Yeah. I was afraid I’d forget all my happy memories, so I etched them where I could see them.”
Sadness welled in her eyes. “Your body is a canvas of your life, Kain.”
Eva looked at my right bicep. “Is this Hawthorne’s brand?” She traced a finger around the cross made of two rose stems.
“Yes, but I added more designs around it, changing it up.”
“You took something old and remade it. There’s power in that.” She pressed two fingers on the tattoo, rubbing it as if she were trying to erase the suffering attached to every line, every curve, and every color that gave me pain.
“The guy at the hotel probably has the same tattoo as you,” she said. “From afar, I didn’t realize it was a cross made of roses. What’s his fascination with them?”
