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He told himself there was no need to hate it.
‘To be fair, our mother bore the brunt of his alcohol-induced temper when Daksh and I were growing up. But when she died, he found a new punchbag in Daksh.’
‘Did he...hit you both?’
‘Daksh protected me. He was twelve and I was ten. I guess he thought it was his duty as the big brother.’ Nikhil lifted his shoulders, forcing down that bubbling thing inside him that he feared was too much like emotion.
‘For four years, he took the beatings when the old man didn’t have enough money for his boozing—which went from near the end of the month, to halfway through the month, to every day by the end. Daksh was earning money by then—we both were, but he was bringing in the main money for the house—and our father took every penny of it he could get his hands on.’
‘For his drinking.’ Isla spoke quietly, her way of encouraging him on, he knew.
Nikhil tilted his head, the bitterness tasting acrid in his throat.
‘Then one day Daksh got offered a couple of months on a fishing vessel. It was a way out, and he took it.’
‘Leaving you behind to face your father alone?’
‘And the loss of the main source of income,’ he ground out. ‘He was furious. I was battered black and blue, hit with his leather belt—usually the buckle end—and knocked out more times than I can remember that first month. Then he realised I could take over my errant brother’s old job and bring in more money, so he laid off me for a while.’
‘The night I turned fifteen, I went out for a celebratory drink with some of the other fishermen—as far as they were concerned I was a working man not a kid, so they gave me little choice. It was just the one drink, and they bought it for me, but my father was in there, and to him I was spending his drinking money.’
‘He beat you, didn’t he?’
She tried not to react, but he heard it nonetheless, and it was oddly soothing, the fact that this beautiful, vivacious woman had had stepfather after stepfather and never once suffered anything like it.
It also said more for Isla’s mother than he cared to acknowledge. Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt him to have been a little less abrasive towards her.
‘The old man didn’t say anything in the pub, but that night he rolled in, barely able to stand he was so blind drunk, and the belt came off.’
‘Didn’t you stop him?’
‘No, I took it. It was easier to take it. It would be over quicker that way. But that night he didn’t stop.’ Nikhil blocked out the memory, forcing himself to just say the words, not to actually feel them. ‘The next thing I knew, he’d stumbled to the kitchen and grabbed a knife.’
Her hand moved to her throat and he heard the stifled sound. And what did it mean that a huge part of him wanted to cross that floor and comfort her?
‘Your scar...’ The anguish in her voice made him feel far too good. Not because of her pain, of course. More at the fact that she evidently cared.
When was the last time anyone had ever cared for him like that? Daksh, before he’d left all those years ago. His mother before that. But otherwise...there was no one.
‘He was standing there, waving it around, swaying,’ Nikhil remembered. ‘I thought he didn’t have the strength—or the ability to move in a straight line—to actually do anything about it.’
He let out a bark of laughter that didn’t hold a hint of humour in it.
‘Suddenly, he rushed me. I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, and the next thing I knew I was flying backwards and he had me pinned to the wall. Then he lifted the knife and drove it through my shoulder.’
He remembered that look on his father’s face. The hateful, smug look of triumph as he’d laughed at Nikhil, pinned to the wall with the knife, unable to move. The threat to leave him there whilst he went to pick up his belt. The fear that once his father started he wouldn’t stop, and Nikhil wouldn’t be able to move, or run. Not that he was about to tell Isla that. It was too brutal, and he didn’t want to subject her to it.
‘I grabbed the knife, I don’t know how, and I somehow yanked it out.’
He stopped as her expression changed. And he hated the way she looked at him in that moment. The horror, the anguish, but also, far worse than any of that, the flash of fear.
‘Nikhil...you said the last time you saw your brother was at your father’s funeral...when you were fifteen?’
‘You wanted to know what kind of a man I am.’ He threw his hands up. ‘Now you know. I’m not a man at all. I’m the monster people talk about, write about.’
‘Nikhil, what happened?’
‘You don’t need me to say the words, pyar.’ He laughed again, but this sound was even worse. He’d called her pyar. My love. Where had that come from? ‘You already know.’
