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“I tried. But no. You just decided I needed abducting.” She tossed her hands in the air. “I didn’t have a speech prepared that day. I do now, so you better be listening.”
“Look, I blame myself for not coming back Stateside sooner and making sure you were all right. It fucking eats at me that I was nearly eight thousand miles away, serving Uncle Sam, when Rowan died and you left home. I wish I could have saved her life and you years of misery, prostitution, and rape. I get that Bill was no peach, and these guys are probably better in some ways—”
“In every way,” she swore, eyes burning. “They love me in ways I never knew men could love.”
He reared back. “I don’t want to hear about your sex life.”
“That’s it! I have fucking had it with you.” She stomped her foot, fuming. “Forget about sex.”
“Hard to do when I’m looking at my pregnant sister.”
She stared upward, grasping for patience.
Beck and Seth were about to hear her vomit out her past. The sadist knew some of it. The PI might be aware, too… But privacy had ceased to matter. Only Hammer did.
“Do you want the truth or do you just want to stand there and judge me like a prick?”
“Oh, no.” River shook his head. “I want to hear this.”
“Good. Can I come in and tell you my story? Without you butting in or adding your two cents?”
“Not without us.” Seth set ground rules immediately.
She turned to her bodyguards for the day. “Of course not.”
When Raine turned back to make sure her brother understood, River stared warily between the other two men, then shrugged and opened the door wide. “All right. Come in.”
The cool, dark motel room was nothing fancy. The bottle-green carpet didn’t quite match the mustard walls. A black-and-white landscape hung above the massive bed. The kitchenette looked well used. A jug of whey protein sat on the counter, next to half a dozen discarded eggshells. Apparently, he’d just finished breakfast.
He gestured her to the desk chair near the door. There was a bistro table on the far side of the room, near the fridge. But when River offered up those seats, Beck and Seth refused to stray from her side.
With a raised brow, River sat on the edge of the bed that looked too rumpled for mere sleep. “I’m listening.”
Now that she had his attention, emotions pelted Raine, short-circuiting her thoughts before she could finish them.
“Start at the beginning,” River encouraged. “Bill sold you to Hammer as a minor and…”
“What?” Where the hell had he heard that? “Not even close. This all started because our dear daddy had a nasty temper.”
River nodded. “I know. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
“You’re not alone, though mine are purely emotional now. Hammer took me to a plastic surgeon back when…” She held up her hands and shook her head. She was getting off track. “My last couple of years under Bill’s roof, I slept with a knife under my pillow. I had just turned seventeen when the drunk busted down my door one night to take my virginity.”
“What?” River breathed. “Jesus…”
“I resisted. He beat me. I think he meant to kill me that night, too.”
River pressed his lips into a tight line. “I thought the violent bastard just hated me.”
“He hated everything, especially us. I managed to slash his cheek, grab a ‘go’ bag I had stashed just in case, and sneak out my window. It was three in the morning. I had eight dollars to my name and nowhere to go. He made damn sure I had very few friends.”
“Yeah, he was good at isolating everyone. Manipulating and making those around him feel small.”
So her brother had experienced that firsthand. Maybe convincing him that Macen was the best thing that had happened to her as a kid wouldn’t be a total uphill battle. “Exactly. After I left, I wandered around in a stupor for two days. Dehydrated and starving, I was in agony. Bruises, cuts, a cracked rib. I was ready to give up, throw myself in front of a car or something… I hid in the alley behind Shadows and cried.”
“Storm cloud…” He looked stricken.
“That’s where Hammer found me. He took me in. He…adopted me, for lack of a better description. He fed, clothed, healed, protected, educated, coddled, helped—all the things family should do. For that, the police are calling him a pervert, a child molester? They’re trying to charge him for crimes he never committed.”
“After what you survived with Bill, I don’t blame you for whatever choices you made. You were a kid. If you’d stayed with Bill, he would have killed you. So I’m damn glad you got out. But I blame Hammer. He took advantage of you. In exchange for his care, he forced you to give him sex.”
